Context can help you better compare your campaign or coverage performance against others. This pronouncement sounds like a tongue twister, but stick with us!
Looking at your own performance without exploring benchmarks and averages makes it harder to answer ‘is that good or not?’
Earlier in the year, we launched the CoverageBook Benchmarks Report 2025, which explores the nearly six million items uploaded to CoverageBook during 2024 to provide you with context around:
- Average Domain Authority
- Average social shares
- Typical estimated coverage views
We did this at both a macro level and took a deeper dive at outlet level, focusing on a list of key US / UK media outlets. You can access this information here (macro level analysis) and here (publication deep dive).
Our customer base is broad, international and operates across many industries. We work directly with brands and also with agencies, from multinational organisations to start-ups. It means that you supplied us with links to hundreds of thousands of different types of media outlets during 2024. We thought it would be interesting to share what we see at an industry level.
So, we selected a sample of top performing media outlets per industry which either generated a lot of attention for our customers (volume), which prompt significant audience engagement (social shares), or which are influential in an industry (such as Vogue for fashion).
In this post, we’ll focus on a cross section of fashion related titles – both consumer facing and trade outlets, to give you an idea of what good looks like for the apparel sector.
The media outlets in focus for this analysis were:
Consumer:
| Vogue | GQ | Daily Front Row | CR Fashion Book |
| Cosmopolitan | Grazia | Prima | The Curvy Fashionista |
| Elle | Teen Vogue | Red Carpet Fashion Awards | Wardrobe Trends Fashion |
| Harper’s Bazaar | Fashionista | Fashion Magazine | Fashion Snap |
| Marie Claire | Fashionbeans | Your Daily Fashion News | Fashion Trend |
Trade:
| Women’s Wear Daily | Drapers | Fashion Dive | CWB: |
| Fashion Network | The Industry.Fashion | Fashion Week Online | FashionMagazine.it |
| Fashion United | Just Style | L’Officiel | Footwear Magazine |
| The Business of Fashion | Fibre2Fashion | Moda ES | The Fashion Law |
| Vogue Business | Textil Wirtschaft | California Apparel News | The Interline |
Representing outlets from a range of geographies including Europe, North America and Asia, and contributing nearly 21k URLs combined across our customer base.
We amalgamated information for some of the larger outlets above such as Vogue, meaning that the results include all the international and language variations of Vogue content received, from Vogue Korea, Vogue Singapore, Vogue Italy, Vogue France and beyond.
Initial observations showed us that:
- Average DA for consumer and trade outlets was similar
- Average views and engagements were higher for consumer outlets
Because some of the trade titles rank well on Domain Authority (trade outlet Women’s Wear Daily has the same DA score as consumer focused title Cosmopolitan: 86), there is not too much difference between average DA scores at either B2B or B2C level (77 vs 79).
Among our consumer focused titles chosen, there was huge variation in DA score – from Teen Vogue (DA:88) to Your Daily Fashion News (DA:12), as was also seen in trade titles from WWD (DA:86), Vogue Business (DA: 75) through to CWB: (DA:37) and Footwear Magazine (its DA of 2 rose to 4 later in 2024).
There was also broad variation at outlet level in terms of potential article reach:
Among consumer focused fashion titles, Elle and Cosmopolitan were most likely to prompt the strongest average estimated coverage views per article (>50k). Japanese outlet Fashion Snap broadly performed better than the various international editions of Vogue Magazine in terms of average estimated coverage views.
We amalgamated international editions of Vogue together to arrive at an average ECV of ~18k – however there was significant range and variation in performance just from Vogue. This piece is estimated to have reached >120k people, aided by nearly ~73k social shares. Some articles from the US, Indian, Mexican, Adria (Herzegovina), Poland and Taiwan editions of Vogue performed better than the average shown on the chart above in terms of ECVs.
In Elle, the Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Taiwanese, Dutch, Japanese, British and US editions performed better than average on ECVs, as did just one piece supplied from the Turkish edition.
In Cosmopolitan, the Japanese, Spanish, British, American, Italian and Dutch editions performed better than average in terms of ECVs.
In GQ Magazine, the Taiwanese, Italian, US, Japanese, Korean and German editions performed better than average on this reach metric.
Focusing on trade titles, it is notable that some outlets such as Women’s Wear Daily and Fashion Dive can achieve a similar average article level reach as consumer titles such as Grazia or Prima.
- One in four consumer focused fashion articles receives no social shares
- In fashion trade outlets 43% of coverage uploaded didn’t receive any social shares
Here’s how your average social shares compare with our benchmark data for B2C outlets:
And what the typical volume of social shares are in our sample of B2B fashion outlets:
On engagement metrics, our data shows that 25% of coverage submitted from consumer focused fashion titles received no social shares in 2024, in trade outlets the percentage receiving no social engagement was almost double (43%)
- Consumer titles are using ‘evergreen’ URLs which likely perform well in terms of organic search; they refresh content on these pages over time and adjust the ‘published date’ accordingly to trick the algorithm
We also identified the practice of ‘evergreen URLs’ when exploring average social shares for B2C fashion outlets – where a URL created years ago continues to be updated with fresh content, such as this piece from Haarper’s Bazaar. This ‘best skincare brands’ feature likely ranks well for organic search traffic, so the publisher has ‘tricked the algorithm’ and updated the date stamp and content within. Using the Wayback Machine internet archive tool, we can see how the beauty products listed on that URL have changed over time.
If your consumer focused fashion coverage receives more than 300 social shares, this means it is prompting better than average audience engagement, in trade titles this occurs if your coverage receives >20 social shares.
You can find more information here in part two of our 2025 CoverageBook Benchmarks report, we’ll be adding industries to this document in the coming weeks.
So what have we learned as we explored 2024 coverage benchmarks in the fashion / apparel sector?
- Expectedly, consumer titles on average reach more people than trade titles, and are more likely to generate higher levels of social engagement.
- If your Estimated coverage views from consumer fashion outlets are higher than 25k, your coverage is performing better than average on reach.
- However, some trade outlets can reach bigger audiences than consumer coverage, so should alway be considered and included in a media outreach campaign.
- If your Estimated coverage views from trade fashion outlets are higher than 3.7k, your coverage is performing better than average on reach.
- Some trade outlets also perform as well as consumer titles in terms of Domain Authority.
- Outlets refresh content and ‘published dates’ on high performing URLs – we call these ‘evergreen URLs’. These URLs will be outliers in terms of average social shares and views when exporting to CSV from your CoverageBook account so should be easy to spot. Given they perform well for popular organic search terms, these articles may be worth targeting specifically.
We are also exploring these trends across other industries, from health to tech to sport, so keep an eye out for further updates.
