European Search Awards 2021 Book of the Night

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RELIVE THE EUROPEAN SEARCH PARTY The European Search Awards celebrate the very best in European SEO, PPC and Content Marketing, and recognise the individuals, companies and organizations that are transforming Europe’s search industry. As you know due to COVID-19 restrictions and concerns around travel, this year’s European Search Awards didn’t take place in Bucharest the way we had planned. It was not our usual Search Awards party, but we hope you enjoyed the virtual celebrations and coming together online as much as we did, for one different but equally fantastic European Search Awards. The entry quality was extremely high this year and we had a record-breaking number of entries, meaning if you made the shortlist, you are truly one of the best in the Search industry. Our thanks go out to our judges who had the unenviable task of shortlisting and deciding who went home with a prestigious trophy. We’d also like to take the opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and partners, who without their support, the European Search Awards would not be possible. We’ll see you hopefully in real life in Bucharest in 2022! Nicky Wake Founder of the Search Awards


BEST USE OF SEARCH – RETAIL/ECOMMERCE (SEO): SMALL CATEGORY SPONSOR

Re:signal & ASICS ASICS is one of the leading sports brands in the world, renowned for its leading-edge and forward-thinking approach to sport enhancing athletic gear. Their products inspire greatness, helping customers to become faster, improve their sporting performance and be mentally and physically stronger.

FINALISTS Centrumrowerowe.pl Elephate & Nutridome Elephate & wOkularach.pl GA Agency & Calzedonia Group

Re:signal and ASICS Europe have built a fantastic working relationship, which has grown from strength to strength as we work together to drive results. In 2020 (from January 2020 until December 2020), our focused and targeted approach allowed us to drive a YoY increase of 72% in organic traffic and 213% in revenue when compared to the same duration previous year, which is €12.02m more than the client’s annual revised forecast. Winning this award is a real credit to all the hard work that has been conducted by the team working together and being committed to driving meaningful results aligned with our client’s business goals.

Journey Further & 247 Blinds Markethinkers & Avansas NOVOS & Bloom & Wild Onely & TIM S.A. Re:signal & ASICS Vertify & Mobexpert

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges noted how It was great to see an international campaign, spanning across countries and embracing all elements which are important for SEO. They particularly liked the outlet strategy which was a great addition to this campaign.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – RETAIL/ECOMMERCE (SEO): LARGE CATEGORY SPONSOR

s360 & Swappie Swappie decided to renew its website structure, look, and feel to cater to its customer needs online. In practice, this meant changing the original swappie.com category and product pages. The original setup effectively listed each refurbished iPhone model individually. The significant difference was moving from product listings into product pages and enabling feature selection on the same page.

FINALISTS

Hallam & Protrade

The website architecture, UX, and element changes from old to new could result in a significant fall in organic search visibility, in case Google found it difficult - or less useful for users - to understand and index the content on swappie.com. To prevent this, Swappie partnered with s360 to ensure the new site performs on SEO from the get-go.

Impression & Queensmith

The results from this case speak for themselves:

Evolved Search & Drench

K2 Precise & Leroy Merlin Merkle NL & Leen Bakker Reflect Digital & Ace Sheds

• Organic Monthly traffic went from 266k to 376k in existing markets (IT/SE) • T otal traffic: In terms of total traffic we added 17% in total traffic and 71% lift up in the two key markets, Italy and Sweden • November/December the revenue is up 400% compared to the previous period. €9.5m vs. €1.8m

Reflect Digital & Hopes Grove Nurseries s360 & BAUHAUS

JUDGES’ COMMENTS

s360 & Swappie

This campaign showed a great level of cooperation between the SEO and developer functions, that paid off with outstanding results. The entry demonstrated an impressive example of multi-lingual SEO implementation on an e-commerce platform. A huge well done to you.

Zeo Agency & Decathlon Turkey


BEST USE OF SEARCH – RETAIL/ECOMMERCE (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Burstit Digital & Cura of Sweden Hide and Seek & Topjaloezieën Hide and Seek & Tuin Ltd Intren & Alinda iProspect Ireland & Le Creuset Journey Further & Majestic Wine Myprotein

Panogram & Lightup Last year we entered the Nordic Search Awards with no real expectations, and we were lucky enough to win first prize for “Best Advertising Campaign”! This really reassured us that we were doing something right, but we didn’t rest on our laurels just because we won an award. We got straight to work and found new ways to stay ahead of the competition. In 2021 we are entering with boosted confidence and are ready to one-up ourselves. Our YoY KPIs are objectively much better than last year’s winning case and we are grateful the judges also recognize the amazing results and appreciate the innovation. Last year we increased revenue by NOK 3.5 million from only NOK 100K increase in spend. That was enough to win. Wait until you see this year’s numbers!

Panogram & Lightup Pipar\Engine & Olís Stand Out Digital & Caviar Passion

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We judges felt this winning entry displayed a fantastic use of shopping to focus on profitable growth. It was extremely innovative and focused on aligning KPI’s with business goals. Doubling revenue in these testing times and smashing performance goals is a real testament to the work you delivered. Well done!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – RETAIL/ECOMMERCE (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Digital Ethos & Swift Direct Blinds Fusion Unlimited & Halfords Impression & Abigail Ahern Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop PromoTraffic & DIY supermarket chain Sempai & Tantis Traffic Builders & Woonboulevard Poortvliet XXL Traffic Today & Top1Toys

Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop 2020 was tough for many of our clients, which meant we felt very grateful and excited to work with Pool-ChlorShop, who actually saw an increase in business last year. Having completed our account restructure quickly, we could capitalise on all the unexpected demand that followed in the summer, thanks to our automated campaign creation approach. With both search trends and work situations changing at a moment’s notice, our team had to be quick on their feet to make the most out of the additional interest in pool supplies. As a result of our strategy and the trust of our client, the team surpassed all goals with flying colours. Even more astonishing: these revenue figures could have been even higher, had pools not been so popular that the entire industry faced a shortage of them spanning the whole of Europe as early as May. Winning this award is a confirmation for our team of how extraordinary our achievement was in 2020: in the face of a global pandemic, suddenly working 100% remotely and all the extra stressors COVID-19 brought, we produced excellent results for our client.

Wolfgang Digital & Intersport Elverys Wolfgang Digital & Littlewoods Ireland

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This particular entry was very comprehensive, highlighted specific objectives as well as challenges and delivered exceptional results that went above and beyond for the client. The strategy is next level, and also acknowledged visibility restrictions with cookie opt-in. We were all extremely impressed.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FINANCE (SEO): SMALL

FINALISTS Compare the Market & Sticky Elephate & EFL iProspect Ireland & AIG Pixel Nordic AB & Speqta Pufferr & New Bond Street Pawnbrokers Re:signal & WorldRemit Relevance & World Gold Council RVU Serpact & DSK Bank

Re:signal & WorldRemit WorldRemit makes a positive impact on people’s lives - the brand is proud of its efforts in helping people find a better way to send money to the countries to support their families, send money for birthdays, treatment or study. We are selective about our clients and make sure their objectives correlate with our corporate values and facilitate the things that matter for people. WorldRemit has been a Re:signal client for over 3 years and the consistent delivery of high-quality work resulting in great results means our relationship is stronger than ever. We are very much an extension of their internal marketing team and as such we have a collaborative approach to working, using consultancy time to work from their offices, allowing us to maintain and nurture key client relationships. From Jan 2020 - Dec 2020, our focused and targeted approach allowed us to increase organic sessions for Worldremit (excluding homepage & branded traffic) to 8,626,619 in 2020 from 5,051,730 organic sessions in 2019. This was a YoY increase of 70.77%.

WeltSparen

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges all recognised how brilliant this winning campaign is with some great examples of SEO done really well! The content approach was great and the scalable approach to target several countries like Nigeria, India and Philippines was impressive, as was the ROI. Congratulations!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FINANCE (SEO): LARGE

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media & Fast Loan UK Absolute Digital Media & Quid Market Evolved Search & thinkmoney ICS digital & IG – 16 iProspect Denmark & GF Forsikring

Wavemaker UK & Compare the Market Wavemaker are the SEO agency of Comparethemarket.com. The growth has been achieved over the past year is significant, stand out and worthy of recognition. Comparethemarket.com operate in the most competitive vertical of the financial price comparison service targeting extremely sought after and competitive keywords like car insurance. The strategy delivered focus on three core areas. Defend current organic search visibility, grow market share and innovate by using AI and data. This success is not just Wavemakers but is everyone in the Teams, across agency and client to get recognition from Europe’s best-known SEO awards.

ROAST & Experian SIDN Digital Thinking & Liberbank Wavemaker UK & Compare the Market Whites Agency & Nationale Nederlanden Polska

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning entrant delivered a brilliant campaign with solid results, in a challenging space. They have demonstrated some clever ideas to find content gaps and impressive SEO. A brilliant entry and definitely a worthy winner.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FINANCE (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Adobe & Sainsbury’s Bank iProspect Ireland & Bank of Ireland

iProspect Ireland & Bank of Ireland Having launched Paid Search activity for Bank of Ireland Insurance Services in April 2019, we found ourselves in one of the most competitive markets in the country. Bank of Ireland are well known for their product and service offering in the banking and financial sector, but let’s be honest – who would think of Bank of Ireland as their go-to provider for home or car insurance? We were going up against the major players in the insurance market, companies synonymous with insurance. Entering the insurance auction was like entering a battlefield, competing against over 20 advertisers at all times, even on our brand terms. We developed a creative solution to leverage Bank of Ireland’s first party data, crossselling Home Insurance to Mortgage customers and Car Insurance to Car Loan customers. We worked collaboratively with the channel planning team in BOI to incorporate a special offer into our insurance ad copy, offering existing customers a -25% discount, capitalising on their intent and anticipating the next stage of their journey. Winning this award is recognition for providing a unique and innovative solution – taking control of a sub-section of an established marketplace in order to reach the customers who matter most.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We thought this particular entry was a great, well executed campaign with a brilliant strategy! The use of existing customer data to help drive cross-sell opportunities for the client is fantastic. Very well done!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FINANCE (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media & Quid Market Adthena & Staysure Core & Liberty Insurance Happy Idiots & Finance Prospects Impression & Marmalade iProspect Denmark & GF Forsikring Reflect Digital & Opayo Semahead & EuroLege SIDN Digital Thinking & RCI Wolfgang Digital & Zurich Ireland

SIDN Digital Thinking & RCI SIDN is one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in Europe, according to the Financial Times, with a turnover of 11 million euros in 2020 in SEO services. Starting in 2002, we are pioneers in SEO services in Spain and now boast a team of 150 people. In the last 7 years, we have had an employee turnover of less than 2%, and 20% of our staff are professors in the best digital marketing schools in Europe. We have also been chosen among the Best Places to Work 2020 in Spain, awarded by Great Place to Work. We now have headquarters in Madrid, Granada, Barcelona and San Francisco (U.S.) In 2020, 98.7% of our clients renewed their services with us. We are the search marketing agency with the highest turnover in Spain in SEO and search marketing services, with success stories in Spain, Latin America and many global and international projects. In 2020, we received 12 nominations at the European Search Awards, which made us the second agency in Europe with the most nominations. In 2020, 2019 and 2018, we were nominated, among other things, for Best Large SEO Agency in Europe, Best PPC Agency in Europe and Best Large Integrated Agency. “Overall, 2020 has been a year of losses in which the entire sector has been heavily affected by the pandemic. Our sales forecast was undoubtedly not very optimistic but thanks to the experience and professionalism of the SIDN Agency, we have managed to reverse the situation and boost sales.” Silvana García Muñoz, Brand Manager at RCI Bank and Services.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We thought the winning entry in the large category included some really clever, out of the box thinking and leveraged smart data analysis and insights in order to build a very strong strategy and campaign! Considering the monumental challenges due to the pandemic, seeing the results achieved is immensely impressive. Well done!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – TRAVEL/LEISURE (SEO)

FINALISTS Dept & Aruba Tourism Authority Stickyeyes & Etihad Airways

Dept & Aruba Tourism Authority

iProspect Ireland & Aer Lingus

The COVID-19 pandemic escalated and countries closed their borders, which heavily impacted the entire travel industry. We had to scale down paid campaigns and focus more on SEO, since stimulating travel bookings was no longer a priority.

SIDN Digital Thinking & Barceló Hotels

We had to revise our targets to keep up with (and even stay ahead of) pandemic-related developments. We aimed to: 1. Minimize organic traffic decrease with a maximum decline of -36% YOY site wide - Organic traffic decreased with only 9.6% site wide (1 Mar – 31 Dec 2020) 2. Increase Top 10 Rankings site wide by 15% - The Number of Top 10 rankings increased by 27% (1Mar – 31 Dec 2020)

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We thought this winning entry was absolutely wonderful! This is the kind of entry that we love to judge, with extremely great detail and depth. It is clear that the work makes the best out of the COVID-19 situation. The content is solid, and the overall strategy is brilliant. Congratulations.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – TRAVEL/LEISURE (PPC)

FINALISTS Adobe & Cunard Basta digital & MiniFARMA Harbingers & Kopalnia Launch Online & Aria Resorts Mindshare Sweden & SAS Precis Digital & Novasol Semahead & Hydropool SIDN Digital Thinking & Ruralidays Starcom & ASICS

Harbingers & Kopalnia Every year the “Wieliczka” Salt Mine attracts millions of tourists. This unique underground world of salt architectural wonders is listed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Unfortunately, in 2020 its doors had to be closed twice, due to restrictions associated with the coronavirus SARSCoV-2 pandemic. Yet, the marketing objectives set for that period were ambitious. With the involvement of the entire team, and the flexible and creative approach to activities, not only we achieved the assumed results, but in most areas we were able to exceed our results from the previous year. How was that achieved? We focused our attention on customers’ needs. Those locked in their homes missed traveling and contacts with culture. We decided to help them in those difficult days. As the tourists could not visit the Mine, then the Mine visited them! Dedicated video series were created, also in the 360° technology, so you could experience an underground adventure at your own home. In the next step, we organized competitions encouraging interactions with the Mine. At the same time, we conducted dedicated campaigns for parents and teachers, who received learning materials for children.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The standard of entries in this category was particularly high but we thought this winning campaign was an excellent, stand out entry! The creativity used in defining the target audiences and the agile approach to the pandemic were brilliant. We loved the way the objectives were demonstrated. Well done Harbingers!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – GAMING

FINALISTS JBH The Digital PR Agency & Slotsup.com SEOsof & Casino Robots SIDN Digital Thinking & Sportium

JBH The Digital PR Agency & Slotsup.com With the OnlyFans Rich List campaign, the team at JBH were able to deliver a creative and relevant response to our client’s brief, which managed to ultimately exceed expectations, with linked, top-tier coverage all over the world. JBH generated three times the amount of linked coverage than our KPI - a massive success for both JBH and our client. By tapping into a topical trend, we were able to generate top-tier links, get the campaign picked up by celebrities on social media and featured on US TV, and drive referral traffic. Winning an award for this campaign reflects our hard work and dedication to building authoritative links for a gaming brand - a difficult niche and something that brands and agencies struggle with.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges really enjoyed this particular campaign. It was impressive to see the kind of links the campaign could attract to a fairly unknown gaming site. They demonstrated a creative use of social data in an SEO campaign and were extremely worthy of the win. Well done and congratulations.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – THIRD SECTOR/NOT FOR PROFIT

FINALISTS Core & Trócaire Crafted & Médecins Sans Frontières Hide and Seek & Kansfonds Holistic SEO & Digital & Wordly Innovation Visual & David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation Manaferra & University of the Potomac Morgan Online Marketing & Settled SIDN Digital Thinking & Banco de Alimentos

Innovation Visual & David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation Innovation Visual is a data-led performance digital marketing consultancy, specialising in commercial digital effectiveness. Recognised by Google as one of the top 30 digital agencies in the UK, we are award-winning Google, Microsoft, Drift and HubSpot Partners too. We work to achieve our clients’ commercial growth goals, using our specialist skills to develop and implement tailored strategies to meet those goals. We are proponents of the inbound methodology and champions of the absolute value of search marketing as part of that process. We use paid and organic campaigns to increase website visibility, engagement, lead generation, customer acquisition, customer satisfaction and develop competitive advantage. The recognition of our work in the category Best Use of Search Third Sector/Not for Profit, brings huge validation to the team who are the heart of everything we do and the reason we have grown consistently year on year in terms of our client base, turnover, profit and digital marketing expertise. As a group they committed personally to this project and delivered over and above to make it a success. Recognition of the achievement for this client also helps to further promote the charity, the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation and the incredible work they do.

They.pl

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We all felt the winning entry was a fantastic campaign. It was great to see the agency supporting the client with time, resources and training methods to help them grow. The results were impressive having leant into PPC, SEO and UX.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2B (SEO): SMALL

FINALISTS Elephate & EFL GraphCMS InboundCPH & Atea iProspect Ireland & Fineos Loud Mouth Media & Smartway2 Markethinkers & Avansas MediaVision & Instant Offices

Elephate & EFL EFL, the European Leasing Fund (Credit Agricole Group), are an established brand helping businesses around Poland fulfil their leasing needs. To increase awareness of their services and navigate more organic traffic to their website and corporate blog, EFL needed a carefully crafted content strategy, followed by an expert implementation. Assisting EFL with their SEO goals meant taking a user-oriented approach. We addressed the needs and questions of our client’s target audience with SEO-optimised content for their corporate blog. We opted for topics related to business, finance and leasing solutions. We surpassed all our objectives, with the results demonstrating that both the strategy and its execution were successful. The feat becomes even more impressive when taking into account the challenging B2B financial niche of our client. Winning the award is a deeply gratifying distinction of our efforts.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We thought this winning entry was a really great, detailed campaign with excellent use of a comprehensive blend of site content and PR. The way the results were summarised as they correlated to objectives was brilliant, and others should definitely do that more.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2B (SEO): LARGE

FINALISTS E.ON Energie Deutschland GmbH Fusion Unlimited & Esme Impression & Skills Training Group Merkle & Aptaclub ROAST & The Access Group Rocket Digital & Oficinas Montiel s360 & easytranslate Semetrical & LexisNexis SIDN Digital thinking & Iberdrola Wolfgang Digital & GSR

Semetrical & LexisNexis Ambition is everything at Semetrical and we had ambitious plans for 2020… Semetrical’s growth to ‘Large Agency’ status this year, follows a series of ‘Best Small Agency’ award wins as we built our international client portfolio and full-service support teams. Excited by our clients and enthused by our industry recognition, 2020 started brightly. However, as the global pandemic took hold, businesses faced a plethora of unexpected and rapidly changing political, legal, social, and economic threats on top of the everyday challenges. Despite being heavily impacted during the fallout from the pandemic, Semetrical stayed true to its brand values, remaining committed to our clients’ long-term success, and developing flexible, innovative solutions to their challenges. Semetrical’s ambition to help clients and communities realise their own digital ambitions has helped us grow and develop as an agency. Although growth presents new business challenges, our values enabled the quality, creativity and innovation that underpins our digital services to remain consistently high. LexisNexis remained committed to scaling-up organic performance in 2020, working with Semetrical to develop an innovative SEO strategy for their LexisPSL product and supporting a traffic uplift of +575% YOY. Winning a 2021 European Search Award with LexisNexis helps reaffirm that our creative solution for a complex challenge not only exceeded targets, but also represents an innovative execution of best-practice SEO.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This entrant really went into this campaign understanding who they were looking to bring to the site and what they needed to do to make it happen. The campaign demonstrates very detailed implementation and creativity, and some brilliant results. Congratulations on a successful campaign!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2B (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Docklin Digital & Office Depot iProspect Ireland & Workday Relevance & World Gold Council SEOgroup & Verizon Connect

iProspect Ireland & Workday Against the backdrop of the pandemic and its effect on businesses worldwide, delivering paid search excellence for a global B2B client proved a bigger challenge than ever before. With enterprise changing by the day, we treated this as an opportunity, positioning Workday’s enterprise platform as a solution to help businesses navigate their way through the crisis. In an extremely crowded B2B software space, we took a full funnel approach to how we engaged with users, thinking of the person with their hands on the keyboard, rather than focusing solely on what we could see. By adopting this approach, we were able to align our messaging directly with the user’s intent and drive them to bespoke landing pages suited to their journey phase. Adopting an innovative and unique hybrid bidding strategy, we were able to utilise the best aspects of Google Ads and the Adobe Bid Management tool in tandem to ensure we spent our budget in the right areas, at the right time. Winning this award would mean recognition for a tireless pursuit of best-in-class PPC performance, ensuring we were at the forefront of innovation to deliver results far surpassing client expectations.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges felt this was a super detailed entry, demonstrating clear objectives and impressive results. This agency developed a fantastic strategy and audience definition by mapping the entire customer journey into three phases, which really stood out for us, as well as the great creativity.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2B (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Bluebird Media & Funnel.io Core & Declaron Embryo & The Insurance Octopus Like Reply & WINDTRE BUSINESS PARTNER Peak Ace & TIMOCOM Precis Digital & Templafy Resolution Denmark & IF Commercial

Peak Ace & TIMOCOM We helped TIMOCOM, the leading procurement platform for transport contracts in Europe, to reinvent their paid search channel in the midst of a global health crisis that shook the transport industry. We ended up building campaigns in 24 languages that now run in a total of 28 countries. Given the economic situation in early 2020, TIMOCOM decided to significantly reduce their budget and focus on efficiency. We therefore had to balance cutting costs with achieving visibility amongst the users that mattered. We persevered and exceeded all our initial targets: we spent significantly less, acquired more leads and increased brand visibility. Winning an award for this campaign would mean a lot to us, because it truly put our international agency to the test. Successfully localising these languages across several teams formed the basis of this campaign – as the numbers suggest, this approach quickly paid off. We believe that this campaign is an outstanding submission due to both its holistic approach to strategy and undeniable results.

SIDN Digital Thinking & Billin Traffic Builders & Optimo Wolfgang Digital & Trend Micro

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges thought this was a really strong entry with super solid best practice. This winner took on a monumental task of restructuring everything during COVID, and the fact they did it in several languages too is remarkable. This fearlessness and willingness to take risks has delivered some fantastic results.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (SEO): SMALL

FINALISTS GA Agency & Calzedonia Group Klikkmánia & Profession.hu Vertify & Carturesti Vertify & Mobexpert WeltSparen

Vertify & Mobexpert The online furniture niche is one of the most competitive ones in Romania, with powerful brands dominating the search results and new retailers launching every year. Despite this, few businesses have dipped their toes into creating informational content for their users, thus providing a large opportunity for any brand to capitalize on. As such, our SEO approach for Mobexpert, one of the oldest known brands in Romanian furniture companies, involved creating a comprehensive blog strategy that would provide added value to the site’s audience, leading to significant gains in organic traffic and ROI. Besides successfully achieving our KPIs, this is a story about how we managed to promote locally made furniture to an audience who started to care more about products made in Romania, “at home”, for their home, during a time when this word would take a whole new meaning for the whole world.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign delivered impressive results on a very modest budget! It was great to see how the agency used both data insights and creative thinking to adapt the client’s business to the “new normal” and increase online traffic and sales.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (SEO): LARGE

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media & Fast Loan UK Bluerank & Orange Crafted & Go Construct

The SEO Works & House of Oak This award is a massive boost for our client and the team. They worked their socks off on this campaign, helping our client rise above large competitors and, in the process, turning them from a small family business to a multimillion pound company. The figures speak volumes, and love being able to toast a new European Search Awards trophy to help us really celebrate the success!

Evolved Search Impression & Gazeboshop K2 Precise & Leroy Merlin s360 & BAUHAUS s360 & Swappie SIDN Digital Thinking & Hello Auto The SEO Works help House of Oak

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign is an excellent example of a well-executed full-scale SEO project done by the book. The digital PR / link building piece is creative and showed great effect. Overall, the campaign showed really impressive development of traffic and revenue. Congratulations!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Burstit Digital & Randstad Sweden DemandMore & Harvey Jones Hide and Seek & CombiTools iProspect Ireland & BoConcept France Pipar\Engine & Lanullva Pipar\Engine & Olís Somebody Digital & Apria Direct

Hide and Seek & CombiTools CombiTools is a growing player in the professional tools market in the Netherlands. Their physical store is located in the city of Eindhoven, however, most sales come from their webshop. During the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, it became clear to CombiTools that their webshop would become an increasingly important part of their business. They decided to look for help to increase their online revenue, and joined forces with Hide and Seek in August 2020. Since the start of our collaboration, online sales have skyrocketed and even though the spend increased, the ROAS is consistently high. Because of our well-thought-out campaign strategy on the Google Ads platform (Google Search & Google Shopping), we are breaking sales records month after month. CombiTools is already gaining ground in the professional tools industry and we have only been working together for 5 months! This award is the cherry on top of the amazing results of the first months of our collaboration. Next to that, we are certain that we have not even scratched the surface of what has already proven to be a very promising collaboration.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges definitely thought that this campaign had nice, clear objectives and budget breakdown. They followed an excellent strategy and extremely nice implementation. There was also a fantastic evaluation connection to the main goals, which is always important, and the judges definitely appreciated that. Congratulations!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Bluerank & enel-med Crafted & Natural History Museum Digital Ethos & Swift Direct Blinds Impression & Topps Tiles Merkle NL & HEMA Netprofiler & New York Pizza

Impression & Topps Tiles Impression is a multi-award winning digital marketing agency in Nottingham and London. Our strategic-thinking team of digital marketing experts have a creative edge. We are opportunity explorers, always innovating and willing to go off the beaten track to discover and apply game-changing strategies. We show pride in doing things well and we’re dedicated to being the best at what we do, and to helping our clients do the same. In this campaign, we implement a strategy that achieves and exceeds the goals set by the client. Our creative approach was so successful that we’ve been encouraged to apply exactly the same strategy across all of the client’s product ranges. Bespoke reporting gave the client full visibility on the overall impact of the campaigns and we provided their team with training for support and clarity.

PromoTraffic & Europ24 Semahead & Memoria SIDN Digital Thinking & Campus Training Traffic Today & Top1Toys

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This particular campaign demonstrated a fantastic strategy and showcased a thorough implementation, with some great, solid ideas. The judges were also extremely impressed with the explanation around the target audience and the outcome which was amazing results.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – AUTOMOTIVE: SMALL

FINALISTS Digimetri & Otopratik Havas Media Ireland & Hyundai INTREN & AKH Performics & Toyota PR Agency One & Auto Trader VooDoo & Crossings Toyota

Havas Media Ireland & Hyundai Ireland’s adoption of electric vehicles continues to remain much lower compared to other European countries, however the rate of growth is becoming more significant year on year. In 2019, the Irish government announced that it plans to ban the sale of new petrol & diesel vehicles by 2030 as part of a major strategy to protect the environments. The aim is to ensure that all new cars on Irish roads are electric vehicles only. The auto industry faced clear challenges due to Covid-19, with Deloitte reporting new car sales in Ireland were down 96% in April, 72% in May and 28.4% in June when compared year on year with 2019. Despite this, Hyundai continued to increase their investment in paid search to maximise their visibility in Google for their All-New TUCSON Hybrid model and the thousands of electric and hybrid vehicle searches. According to a Gearshift study, Google search remains as the key starting point in the car purchase journey. It was thus essential that Hyundai had an effective defend & conquer paid search strategy that allowed them to grab the market and drive would-be EV drivers to hyundai.ie to find their local dealer, book a test drive and download the TUCSON brochure, while adapting to the challenges of national Covid-19 restrictions. Over the course of 2020, paid search was the top performing paid channel driving traffic & conversions and resulted in Hyundai TUCSON being the second highest selling car in 2020 and ultimately Ireland’s best-selling car in January 2021.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign in this category was a true example of the best use of search. They had clear goals and a clear link from the evaluation right the way through to the goals set, which was great to see. Well done and congratulations.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – AUTOMOTIVE: LARGE

FINALISTS Evolved Search iProspect, Autotrack, Danny van Schooten & Ray Wolf Merkle NL & Stern Performics & OnCrawl Promotraffic & Unitrailer DE s360 & Kia Semahead & Wadowscy Volvo SIDN Digital Thinking & BP

Evolved Search The campaign delivered for Select Car Leasing has consistently driven performance across key metrics, continuing to ensure that the brand sits in poll position versus their competitors, in a very competitive and often volatile market. Climbing to and maintaining position 1 rankings for a range of car leasing keywords is the fundamental objective of our work and it’s a box we consistently tick, keeping Select Car Leasing at the forefront of the industry. Evolved Search has worked with Select Car Leasing for a number of years, previously achieving phenomenal growth figures and winning a UK Search Award in 2016 for their outstanding work, the Best SEO Campaign. Since then, the challenge and objective has been to maintain outstanding results and drive quality leads for the brand, in an extremely competitive marketplace. Not only have we managed to achieve that, but our creative approach to content production and outreach has picked up hundreds upon hundreds of high-quality backlinks across target publications including Business Insider, New York Post, Fox News, The Express, Metro, DRIVETRIBE, The Sun, MSN, HuffPost, The Scotsman and iNews, to name a few. In the past year alone, our work with Select Car Leasing has helped them maintain their 1st position ranking for 20 leasing-related search terms, as well as a 166% increase in organic traffic, 244% increase in impressions, a 188% increase in conversions and a 160% lift in organic visibility. The brand’s position ahead of competitors continues to be untouchable. That’s what we call being in the driving seat!

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges were really impressed with this entry. It displayed really innovative content creation, which did brilliantly in terms of link building. The implementation and creativity were also impressive.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – HEALTH: SMALL

FINALISTS 56K Digital & Apohem Burstit Digital & Cura of Sweden Havas Media Ireland & UPMC Helping Hands Performics & OK Performics & Strepsils Herbal PHD Media & Bayer Result Media & Medicover

56K Digital & Apohem Apohem was founded in 2017 and has become one of the fastest emerging online pharmacy brands within Sweden. They have seen incredible growth throughout 2020 due to heavy investment into their overall marketing channels and backend logistics infrastructure. This helps Apohem appear at the right place and right time for their target customers and most importantly, keep up with the increased demand during the ongoing pandemic. Apohem started working with 56K on a retainer basis at the beginning of 2020 with the aim to grow their non-branded organic presence to compete within more established competitors / domains within their niche. Just getting shortlisted at the European search awards, amongst some huge agencies and brands, is an honour and winning is a fantastic way to demonstrate that getting the SEO basics right can lead to huge growth.

Somebody Digital & Apria Direct Tecmark & Simon Moyes

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The entire judging panel thought this entry was a clear winner within this category and demonstrated some brilliant work. The results achieved were impressive, and it’s great to see the original targets were blown out of the water. The implementation and creativity were brilliant this was all round an exceptional campaign. Congratulations!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – HEALTH: LARGE

FINALISTS Bluerank & enel-med Bluerank & Promedica24 Grupa TENSE & rehab.pl Harbingers & Diagnostyka Mediaworks & myGP Merkle & Aptaclub Peak Ace & Zava Promotraffic & Maczfit s360 & Profil Optik

Bluerank & Promedica24 “There’s a way to do it better - find it.” - this famous saying by Thomas Edison best illustrates the way in which we have been working together for several years - as Bluerank and Promedica24 - on the development of Google Ads campaigns aimed at recruiting carers for the elderly and which, due to their specificity, are a challenge when it comes to the PPC channel. In a difficult pandemic year that had a significant impact on the client’s business, this challenge was even greater. However, we jumped on the bandwagon- searching for new solutions for campaign development. We have developed a process to make our activities even more data-driven. It is unique that this data is generated during the verification of the originally obtained leads. Then, they are automatically transferred from the client’s CRM to our campaigns. This data affects all elements - from structure, through targeting, to advertising creations. Such activities would not be possible if it were not for the cooperation between the partner and the agency based on trust and mutual motivation for even greater involvement in the project. We are convinced that this proactive approach was what allowed us to obtain results as much as 36% better than our target.

SIDN Digital Thinking & Caser Seguros

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning submission was really smart and showcased some really creative thinking. The change of direction within a pandemic is incredible and it is clear that the approach to delivery was well thought out, and one that understood the client’s commercial model well, leading to some great results. Well done!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – REAL ESTATE & PROPERTY

FINALISTS five elements digital & Imobiliare.ro SIDN Digital Thinking & Grupo Torres Strata & connective3 Traffic Builders & Wereldhave Up&More & Ronson Development

Up&More & Ronson Development At Up&More we support our clients at every stage in their adventure with advertising campaigns – from copy and creative and web development, to effective advertising solutions. This is the only approach which gives us unlimited possibilities of “going beyond” campaign parameters. At Up&More, we are pursuing a three-pillar approach. #wedomore - through which we prepare an on-line strategy (not just campaign tactics), including the analysis of products, communication, creative, and technology. #wecaremore - t hrough which we provide “above-standard” services, i.e. automatic reporting processes, and the implementation of smart-bidding. #weknowmore - through which we develop our team, soft skills, and marketing knowledge, provide training, and communicate in public. For Ronson Development, we used the maximum opportunities for creating and optimising campaigns based on machine learning, we introduced the analysis of the full user path using the YouLead automation system, and we led the client through the Covid pandemic by jointly implementing solutions such as online live coverages from individual investments. As a result, the year turned out to be a record year for the client, and Ronson sold 918 units during 2020, which has never happened before in Ronson’s history.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS What can I say about this winning campaign? We all thought this was a nice, well rounded campaign. It is a great example of how digital media helps companies to adapt and grow the especially during the pandemic which really impressed the judges.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FMCG: SMALL

FINALISTS Basta digital & Popradské Journey Further & Farmison Co Up&More & Pizza Dominium

Up&More + Pizza Dominium We’re Up & More, an interactive agency. We do things better. As an agency that pays great attention to business relationships, we care about positive customer feedback. We have been cooperating with many brands for several years. A large portion of our business partners became friends for life. We also acquire numerous customers through recommendations. Together with our client, Pizza Dominium, we have won over 48K new app users and tripled the revenue from the app in a year. The key effort in the project was comprehensive approach to the app promotion and combining analytical data with the machine learning process. As a result, the activities were more effective and more easily scalable. What does this Award mean to us? First of all, it is a confirmation that we create measurable activities which drive our clients’ businesses forward! Another important factor is the appreciation of our work by both business representatives and the marketing industry. Nothing gives you more satisfaction than colleagues who say - well done! Appreciation by international experts from all over Europe? There’s nothing better than that. Winning is a fantastic distinction and confirmation of the effectiveness of actions in every aspect.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning submission, whilst not a traditional approach, for the budget they had and what they achieved was extremely impressive. The advertising done to get the app used and achieve high levels of engagement was very clever and unique. A very worthy winner indeed.


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FMCG: LARGE

FINALISTS Canopy & Dr Max Dept & Apetina Dept & Blue Band Greenhouse & Nespresso Semahead & Chocolissimo SIDN Digital Thinking & Ebro Food Threepipe & McCormick widoczni & alezwierzaki.pl Zenith & Nomad Foods

SIDN Digital Thinking & Ebro Food SIDN is one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in Europe, according to the Financial Times, with a turnover of 11 million euros in 2020 in SEO services. Starting in 2002, we are pioneers in SEO services in Spain and now boast a team of 150 people. In the last 7 years, we have had an employee turnover of less than 2%, and 20% of our staff are professors in the best digital marketing schools in Europe. We have also been chosen among the Best Places to Work 2020 in Spain, awarded by Great Place to Work. We now have headquarters in Madrid, Granada, Barcelona and San Francisco (U.S.) In 2020, 98.7% of our clients renewed their services with us. We are the search marketing agency with the highest turnover in Spain in SEO and search marketing services, with success stories in Spain, Latin America and many global and international projects. In 2020, we received 12 nominations at the European Search Awards, which made us the second agency in Europe with the most nominations. In 2020, 2019 and 2018, we were nominated, among other things, for Best Large SEO Agency in Europe, Best PPC Agency in Europe and Best Large Integrated Agency. “In 2019 we started to work on our content strategy with SIDN to boost our blog, as, despite having quality content, we were unable to effectively reach the public’s attention. Thanks to a correct strategy and the great dedication of the whole team, we have managed to boost the blog, turning it into one of our main communication channels. We know that this would not have been possible without SIDN’s experience and know-how”. Jesús Soto, Marketing Manager at Ebro Foods

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges felt that this campaign achieved very impressive increases, and it was a smart move to differentiate the product types and make their own content strategies for each. A very inspirational approach and submission. Congratulations!


BEST USE OF SEARCH – FASHION

FINALISTS Boosmart & Penti Fragile media & Gant Happy Idiots & Bos Men Shop Harbingers & Quiosque Pipar\Engine & Lanullva Precis Digital & Baum und Pferdgarten PromoTraffic & Puccini Semahead & Vitkac Sempai & DeeZee

Pipar\Engine & Lanullva Brit could no longer watch her husband come home wet and cold from work, day in and day out. Out of love for her Eilif, she took the best wool yarn she had, and developed a new and completely different knitting method where she managed to improve the wool’s ability to insulate and to let more moisture through. Rumours of a new knitting method and of a new invention went from farm to farm, and her knitting needles went hot. In the end, she mortgaged everything she owned, borrowed a million NOK, went to Germany - and bought a knitting machine! This is how the woollen goods factory and brand Lanullva saw the light of day, in 1994 in Norway. With a relatively small but loyal customer base, Lanullva was looking to expand in its home market; Norway. Pipar\Engine executed a strategy which successfully created more awareness, grew new customer acquisitions and ultimately built a bigger customer base. Winning this award affirms our approach and results in a complex competitive environment and serves as a great motivation moving forward. Of course, winning such an award is an honour and a privilege for Pipar\Engine as a growing and developing digital agency.

SIDN Digital Thinking & Camper

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The entire judging panel thought this entry was head and shoulders above the rest, and a clear winner! The campaign achieved great results with a small investment and the fact they sold so much that they ran out of stock, shows the great success the campaign had in real terms. Huge Congratulations and well done.


BEST LOCAL CAMPAIGN (SEO)

FINALISTS Adwise & Kees Smit Tuinmeubelen Dept & Pallas Kliniken Grupa TENSE & cukierniasowa.pl Ideo Force & OtoTatry PromoTraffic & Laurem Resolution Denmark & Specsavers Northern Europe Serpact & DSK Bank SIDN Digital Thinking & Maslife

Vertify & Veranda Mall It’s no surprise 2020 has been a tough year for most businesses, but even more so for brands who rely exclusively on getting offline traffic. Such is the case with most shopping malls across the world, and the ones in Romania were no exception to this new reality. How does a business remain top of mind for its audience through the COVID pandemic in order to maximize its success once it reopens? That’s where our agency came in. Together with Veranda Mall, a local Bucharest shopping mall and our client since the beginning of 2019, we’ve created and implemented an SEO strategy that would keep users coming into and returning to the site during the lockdown period, maintaining and even growing the brand’s awareness. The situation was so unique that we had no way to approach it but to innovate. This is an atypical SEO story about a fresh and innovative way to market a local shopping mall by creating meaningful points of difference, fulfilling audience needs and using SEO as a gateway for consumers to remain in touch, when the business needed it the most.

Vertify & Veranda Mall

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign was a really good example of an offline business helping online businesses survive the pandemic. The PR coverage was really impressive making this campaign a standout winner for the judging panel.


BEST LOCAL CAMPAIGN (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Basta digital & MiniFARMA iProspect Ireland & BoConcept France iProspect Ireland & Apache Pipar\Engine & Lanullva Pipar\Engine & Olís WebDigital & Semplus

iProspect Ireland & BoConcept France BoConcept is a luxury furniture retailer. Driving users into BoConcept’s physical stores is key to securing sales as their pieces sell at high-end price points. We found the inherited account did not have a clear strategy for driving store visits. In addition, as the campaigns focused on broad keywords, the ads were frequently served to users who were not shopping for designer furniture. As a result, there was high ad spend with little return. A new approach was needed to reach users within BoConcept’s target market. In January 2020, we developed a strategy to drive store visits and improve efficiency at every stage of the purchase funnel. This included an overhaul of the keyword structure, an advanced audience strategy, updates to bidding, and new local campaigns. Despite challenges faced with lockdowns, we drove an additional +6,350 store visits YoY in the second half of 2020 with no additional budget. CPA dropped by -€9.37 YoY. While e-commerce was growing in power, we successfully tapped into a market who still have a demand for shopping in-store. We are proud of how we adapted our strategy to suit the client and their niche consumer base during times of uncertainty and evolving consumer behaviour.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning submission had the challenge of having to overcome in-store goals during a global pandemic and a year of lockdown but delivered some exceptional and very impressive results which is remarkable! The utilisation of data to understand the customer journey and performance, and how this informed decisions on the strategy is brilliant.


BEST LOCAL CAMPAIGN (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Bluerank & Promedica24 Fingerspitz & Kwalitaria Happy Idiots & Shimano Memoria & Semahead Resolution Denmark & Godt Smil SIDN Digital Thinking & BP Strata & connective3 Traffic Builders & Wereldhave Traffic Builders & Woonboulevard Poortvliet XXL

Bluerank & Promedica24 “There’s a way to do it better - find it.” - this famous saying by Thomas Edison best illustrates the way in which we have been working together for several years - as Bluerank and Promedica24 - on the development of Google Ads campaigns aimed at recruiting carers for the elderly and which, due to their specificity, are a challenge when it comes to the PPC channel. In a difficult pandemic year that had a significant impact on the client’s business, this challenge was even greater. However, we jumped on the bandwagon- searching for new solutions for campaign development. We have developed a process to make our activities even more data-driven. It is unique that this data is generated during the verification of the originally obtained leads. Then, they are automatically transferred from the client’s CRM to our campaigns. This data affects all elements - from structure, through targeting, to advertising creations. Such activities would not be possible if it were not for the cooperation between the partner and the agency based on trust and mutual motivation for even greater involvement in the project. We are convinced that this proactive approach was what allowed us to obtain results as much as 36% better than our target.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges thought this was a super solid, well executed and data-driven campaign. Data was clearly used to inform the strategy and it was great to read how they reacted to all the changes due to COVID. The campaign definitely reached some exceptional results and showed the in-depth expertise in this field.


BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN (SEO): SMALL

FINALISTS Digimetri & Lansinoh First Internet & Fire Shield Systems Morgan Online Marketing & Settled RVU – Kingdom of Jewels RVU – Renewable Universities Venture Stream & Direct 4 Baby Vertify & Intersport Vertify & Mobexpert

Vertify & Intersport Site migrations are a fact of life - sooner or later, most websites do eventually go through this process. Whether big or small, migrations tend to give SEOs plenty of work to ensure it’s not just users that are properly transferred over to a new site, but ranking signals as well. With Intersport Romania, one of the main large retailers in the sportswear niche, the migration to a new platform was supposed to bring it inline with new technologies and a better user experience. Unfortunately, the process didn’t take SEO into account from the beginning, which, coupled with a complete change of URL structure for the site, led to a massive drop in rankings, traffic and non-branded revenue. With thousands of pages to redirect, limited budget and very little available data, we’ve decided to forgo doing everything manually and instead bring one of Google’s very own tools into the mix: the BERT machine learning model for language processing!

Visibility & Lexika WeltSparen

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign is a really interesting use of Google Collab. The project was extremely challenging, and the agency did a great job at understanding the issues and the obstacles and faced them head on. The budget was extremely low, but the team turned that into an advantage, letting it fuel their creativity.


BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN (SEO): LARGE

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media & Total Fishing Tackle Adwise & Vandentop Tuinhout Boosmart & TurkNet Cube Group & Orkla Care DWF & Fetal Care EACTIVE #wiemyjak & Pool Design GrupaTENSE & cukierniasowa.pl

GrupaTENSE & cukierniasowa.pl Cukiernia Sowa is one of the most popular brands in Poland, present in 62 cities and towns. Why then was it struggling with such low visibility online? Our goal was clear: double the website traffic in six months. In just two months we generated over 30,000 visits from Google search results for branded keywords and over 4000 for the non-branded ones. We increased the number of sessions originating from organic results by 214,000. In ten years we have changed from a sole proprietorship to a company with 150 specialists and one of the best SEO agencies in Poland. Winning the competition confirms the effort of the entire team that works every day to improve the visibility of our customers online. Grupa TENSE. You can see more from the top.

Kompan.pl & Weterynaryjny.pl PromoTraffic & i-Sprzęt SIDN Digital Thinking & Hello Auto

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This campaign showcased excellent work, taking problem sites and fixing them to help during the pandemic. They have demonstrated well-crafted SEO strategy and tactics. The results also prove they executed the right plan and are a well deserving winner in this category.


BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS AdPeak & Olsen Intren & Alinda Klikkmánia Ltd & Webshop Global Ltd Pipar\Engine & VFS Up&More & Poster Polytechnic Up&More + Pizza Dominium Visibility & Svet Stromčekov WebDigital & Dwyn WebDigital & E-Acumulatori

Visibility & Svet Stromčekov Visibility ranks among the TOP3 digital agencies in Slovakia. Our mission is to educate the market, share our knowledge, and help our clients strive. We have started as an SEO company 10 years ago but we gradually became known for quality content marketing, performance, social media, and online creative campaigns. We take pride in our blog, vlog, podcasts and events which are a big part of our company culture. One of our clients is Svet Stromčekov (World of Trees), a Slovakia-based Christmas tree e-shop with an international, CEE scope. The trees sold are realistic, premium quality, safe and ecological. The e-shop has also opened its branches in Czechia and Hungary. From September to December 2020, we have been working with our client primarily on super-efficient PPC campaigns, which are the main source of traffic and revenue for the client. We have also worked on supporting the PPC campaigns with SEO which also drove huge growth for the client Year over Year. Winning this award means an international acknowledgment that is rare in Slovakia. As we focus on performance marketing strategies, these are rarely acknowledged in the local advertising awards given their character. In short, we treasure this award greatly.

WebDigital & Semplus

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We especially thought this submission was a really well written entry, with the objectives tying nicely back to the end results which as judges we hugely appreciate! The implementation is clear and uses a number of different channels and techniques to land the strategy - it was particularly great to see a YouTube campaign and the mention of organic. A fantastic campaign.


BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS EACTIVE #wiemyjak & Wozimysie.pl Kompan.pl & Tchibo Like Reply & Maldarizzi Automotive PromoTraffic & TopSanit Semahead & Apteco.pl SEO Works & Pharmacy Online SIDN Digital thinking & Hammam Al Ándalus Traffic Builders & Optimo Traffic Builders & Wereldhave

Like Reply & Maldarizzi Automotive Like Reply is a data-driven digital marketing company that manages one of the most advanced digital dealer program in Europe. By understanding marketing and business requirements and being a data inspired company, we are able to support brands in the challenge of smart data analysis and best of breed activations. We combine highly automated processes – build in-house - with a wide range of professional skills that allows us to support in the best way our clients, independently by their budget amount. Our team is involved in the entire digital environment of our dealers, from the delivery of the advertising campaigns to the car sold in their showrooms. 2020 was a tough year for the automotive sector, heavily affected by forced showroom’s closures. Thanks to our direct relationship with dealers we collected our needs and prepared dedicated strategies to sustain their businesses. Winning this award rewards a team that never gave up in helping dealers affected by lockdowns and our clients that showed trust in our good work.

Traffic Today & Top1Toys

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We were really wowed by this particular entry, which demonstrated an excellent combination of best practices and more modern campaign structuring. The use of technology alongside the tracking across online/offline was great and we loved that it all tied back to the number of sold cars. Well done!


BEST INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN: SMALL

CATEGORY SPONSOR

FINALISTS Anicca Digital & NHS Leicester City CCG First Internet & Kandy King Hide and Seek & Nxt Museum Loud Mouth Media & BES Mavericks & Elefant Pipar\Engine & Olís Stand Out Digital & Caviar Passion

Hide and Seek & Nxt Museum Nxt Museum is the first museum in the Netherlands dedicated to New Media Art. The museum opened its doors in August 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. This bold move fits Nxt perfectly as it aims to be the ultimate nextgeneration museum, moving away from traditional art set-ups and speaking to an audience visiting nightclubs more often than art galleries. As tickets are exclusively sold online, Nxt Museum decided to team up with Hide and Seek due to our experience in the cultural industry. In the first 3 months after opening, campaign results outshine our objectives by far: • Ticket sale revenue: +174% above target • Return on ad spend: +193% above target • Online campaign share total ticket sales: +62.5% above target Unfortunately, government Covid-19 regulations are now throwing a spanner in the works after all. 12 weeks after the big opening they had to close down, to hopefully reopen on March 3rd. In the meantime, winning an award for our phenomenal results in the first months is an amazing way to celebrate our successful collaboration on the opening of Nxt Museum during the pandemic, which is proving to be a testing time for museums and other cultural institutions.

Visibility & NaMaximum

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We all felt that this was brilliant and definitely deserving of the win in the small category. It was great to see the budget and fee ration, from a well-planned and delivered campaign with a unique brief. The results achieved above what the client expected which is always a bonus! Congratulations.


BEST INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN: LARGE

CATEGORY SPONSOR

FINALISTS Clicky Media & Raleigh Crafted & Médecins Sans Frontières Digital Ethos & Swift Direct Blinds Hallam & Orgvue Happy Idiots & Shimano iProspect Denmark & GF Forsikring

Hallam & Orgvue Hallam is a full-service digital agency based in Nottingham, UK. Originally established in 1999 as an SEO consultancy, our team of 55 digital experts are now trusted by companies across the UK such as Boots Hearingcare, Travis Perkins, Ready Steady Store and Castle Rock Brewery alongside international organisations such as Speedo, The United Nations, Esso and Suzuki. Concentra Analytics is a fast-growth SaaS company with an award-winning, enterprise software solution, orgvue, that supports businesses to make fearless data-driven decisions about their workforce so they are empowered to design organisations of the future. Hallam’s team of strategic thinkers and technical experts each play key roles in delivering a unified service for our clients. To fit into the complex future of digital marketing and remain relevant in a saturated agency landscape, we recognise that our team needs to evolve from hands-on optimisers to strategic consultants. We’re focused on breaking down traditional silos between teams and diversifying skills within the agency to help demonstrate real value to our clients. Concentra Analytics came to Hallam in December 2019 with the objective of driving a sustainable marketing pipeline and revenue growth through digital channels for their flagship product, specifically through organic and paid search.

Merkle & Benefit Cosmetics Traffic Builders & Wereldhave

JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Wolfgang Digital & Littlewoods Ireland

This winning submission was a very well put together entry and outstanding campaign. The year-on-year objectives were really clear, with good context and actual value. There was a good use of both SEM channels and it delivered excellent results for the client.

Wolfgang Digital & Woodie’s


ADVERT


MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Burstit Digital & Randstad Sweden iProspect Ireland & Bank of Ireland Panogram & Lightup Somebody Digital & Apria Direct

Panogram & Lightup Last year we entered the Nordic Search Awards with no real expectations, and we were lucky enough to win first prize for “Best Advertising Campaign”! This really reassured us that we were doing something right, but we didn’t rest on our laurels just because we won an award. We got straight to work and found new ways to stay ahead of the competition. In 2021 we are entering with boosted confidence and are ready to one-up ourselves. Our YoY KPIs are objectively much better than last year’s winning case and we are grateful the judges also recognize the amazing results and appreciate the innovation. Last year we increased revenue by NOK 3.5 million from only NOK 100K increase in spend. That was enough to win. Wait until you see this year’s numbers!

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judging panel really appreciated that this campaign showed a shift to POAS which made complete sense. They had clear solid objectives and budget, and the campaign delivered great results, from a well written and well documented submission.


MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Bluebird Media & KitchenTime Dept & Rituals Happy Idiots & Shimano Harbingers & KPR Merkle & NOW TV Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop Sempai & Tantis SIDN Digital Thinking & Barceló Hotels Stickyeyes & Science in Sport

Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop 2020 was tough for many of our clients, which meant we felt very grateful and excited to work with Pool-ChlorShop, who actually saw an increase in business last year. Having completed our account restructure quickly, we could capitalise on all the unexpected demand that followed in the summer, thanks to our automated campaign creation approach. With both search trends and work situations changing at a moment’s notice, our team had to be quick on their feet to make the most out of the additional interest in pool supplies. As a result of our strategy and the trust of our client, the team surpassed all goals with flying colours. Even more astonishing: these revenue figures could have been even higher, had pools not been so popular that the entire industry faced a shortage of them spanning the whole of Europe as early as May. Winning this award is a confirmation for our team of how extraordinary our achievement was in 2020: in the face of a global pandemic, suddenly working 100% remotely and all the extra stressors COVID-19 brought, we produced excellent results for our client.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning campaign had beautiful objectives and a clear breakdown of budget, which was fantastic to see. The implementation was impressive, and the campaign delivered clear and excellent results for a very happy client. Congratulations Peak Ace.


MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (SEO): SMALL

CATEGORY SPONSOR

Vertify & Veranda Mall It’s no surprise 2020 has been a tough year for most businesses, but even more so for brands who rely exclusively on getting offline traffic. Such is the case with most shopping malls across the world, and the ones in Romania were no exception to this new reality.

FINALISTS GraphCMS Serpact & DSK Bank Vertify & Intersport Vertify & Veranda Mall

How does a business remain top of mind for its audience through the COVID pandemic in order to maximize its success once it reopens? That’s where our agency came in. Together with Veranda Mall, a local Bucharest shopping mall and our client since the beginning of 2019, we’ve created and implemented an SEO strategy that would keep users coming into and returning to the site during the lockdown period, maintaining and even growing the brand’s awareness. The situation was so unique that we had no way to approach it but to innovate. This is an atypical SEO story about a fresh and innovative way to market a local shopping mall by creating meaningful points of difference, fulfilling audience needs and using SEO as a gateway for consumers to remain in touch, when the business needed it the most.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges noted that this was a really lovely campaign - showing the power of good content and solid PR at a very difficult time for businesses and malls especially. The judges loved the clear use of data to show growth and were impressed with the extremely good results during covid times especially in mall branch. Overall, this was a really positive campaign. Congratulations.


MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (SEO): LARGE

CATEGORY SPONSOR

Semetrical & LexisNexis Ambition is everything at Semetrical and we had ambitious plans for 2020… Semetrical’s growth to ‘Large Agency’ status this year, follows a series of ‘Best Small Agency’ award wins as we built our international client portfolio and full-service support teams. Excited by our clients and enthused by our industry recognition, 2020 started brightly.

FINALISTS Dept & Dayrize Fingerspitz & Bruynzeel Keukens iProspect Denmark & GF Forsikring Kompan.pl & Akord OrangeValley & Hunkemöller s360 & Swappie

However, as the global pandemic took hold, businesses faced a plethora of unexpected and rapidly changing political, legal, social, and economic threats on top of the everyday challenges. Despite being heavily impacted during the fallout from the pandemic, Semetrical stayed true to its brand values, remaining committed to our clients’ long-term success, and developing flexible, innovative solutions to their challenges. Semetrical’s ambition to help clients and communities realise their own digital ambitions has helped us grow and develop as an agency. Although growth presents new business challenges, our values enabled the quality, creativity and innovation that underpins our digital services to remain consistently high. LexisNexis remained committed to scaling-up organic performance in 2020, working with Semetrical to develop an innovative SEO strategy for their LexisPSL product and supporting a traffic uplift of +575% YOY. Winning a 2021 European Search Award with LexisNexis helps reaffirm that our creative solution for a complex challenge not only exceeded targets, but also represents an innovative execution of best-practice SEO.

Semetrical & LexisNexis

JUDGES’ COMMENTS

SIDN Digital Thinking & Sportium

This was an extremely impressive campaign. It detailed very clear objectives, results, strategy, and deliverables. It also contained some particularly strong results. The submission displayed Impressive traffic and conversion uplifts and overall is definitely a great entry and campaign which is worthy of the win.

Traffic Today & Raamdecoratie.com


BEST SEO CAMPAIGN: SMALL

FINALISTS Centrumrowerowe.pl GraphCMS InboundCPH & Atea iProspect Ireland & AIG iProspect Ireland & Workplace MediaVision & Share to Buy Re:signal & ASICS Re:signal & WorldRemit Serpact & DSK Bank

Re:signal & ASICS ASICS is one of the leading sports brands in the world, renowned for its leading-edge and forward-thinking approach to sport enhancing athletic gear. Their products inspire greatness, helping customers to become faster, improve their sporting performance and be mentally and physically stronger. Re:signal and ASICS Europe have built a fantastic working relationship, which has grown from strength to strength as we work together to drive results. In 2020 (from January 2020 until December 2020), our focused and targeted approach allowed us to drive a YoY increase of 72% in organic traffic and 213% in revenue when compared to the same duration previous year, which is €12.02m more than the client’s annual revised forecast. Winning this award is a real credit to all the hard work that has been conducted by the team working together and being committed to driving meaningful results aligned with our client’s business goals.

Vertify & Veranda Mall

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning submission has delivered an amazing campaign. It demonstrated a deep understanding of the people who buy the clients products which is impressive and the fact they agreed to a certain percentage refund if the goals were not hit is an incredibly bold, and commendable approach for such an unpredictable channel.


BEST SEO CAMPAIGN: LARGE

FINALISTS connective3 & thortful DWF & Vivre Evolved Search & Drench Fingerspitz & Bruynzeel Keukens Impression & Topps s360 & BAUHAUS s360 & Swappie Semetrical & LexisNexis Wolfgang Digital & Clario Wolfgang Digital & Zurich Ireland

s360 & Swappie Swappie decided to renew its website structure, look, and feel to cater to its customer needs online. In practice, this meant changing the original swappie.com category and product pages. The original setup effectively listed each refurbished iPhone model individually. The significant difference was moving from product listings into product pages and enabling feature selection on the same page. The website architecture, UX, and element changes from old to new could result in a significant fall in organic search visibility, in case Google found it difficult - or less useful for users - to understand and index the content on swappie.com. To prevent this, Swappie partnered with s360 to ensure the new site performs on SEO from the get-go. The results from this case speak for themselves: • Organic Monthly traffic went from 266k to 376k in existing markets (IT/SE) • T otal traffic: In terms of total traffic we added 17% in total traffic and 71% lift up in the two key markets, Italy and Sweden • November/December the revenue is up 400% compared to the previous period. €9.5m vs. €1.8m

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We thought this was a brilliant campaign, with impressive turnaround and absolutely fantastic results! The way the budget was broken down in the entry was great and extremely well received by all of the judging panel. Conrats s360!


BEST PPC CAMPAIGN: SMALL

FINALISTS Burstit Digital & Randstad Sweden DemandMore & Harvey Jones Hide and Seek & CombiTools Hide and Seek & Topjaloezieën iProspect Ireland & Le Creuset Launch Online & Aria Resorts Panogram & Lightup Pipar\Engine & Lanullva WebDigital & DualStore WebDigital & ForIT

Launch Online & Aria Resorts In a year that was challenging to say the least, Launch Online not only weathered the storm, we thrived. Established in 2012 and based in Exeter, we’re a Google Premier Partner Biddable Media agency with 60 clients and 12 employees. Despite the pandemic and the fact that 19 clients stopped activity because of it, our YoY revenue grew +28% in 2020, no staff were furloughed, and annual pay increases continued. We’re well on our way to meeting a £1m a year turnover objective ahead of schedule, at which point we’ll launch an Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) scheme, enabling employees to own shares in the company. Our main objective is to give our SME clients a voice amongst the major players in their competitive set. Our strategy doesn’t involve throwing loads of money into campaigns and outbidding brands at every turn. It’s about delivering cost-effective, mould-breaking, results-driven solutions that enable smaller brands to outperform the big guns. But don’t just take our word for it, in 2020 we were named PPC Agency of the Year at the European Agency Awards and our work with Aria Resorts won Best Use of Search - Travel and Tourism at the UK Search Awards.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS It was super nice to see how this winning submission managed to change their work and objective when covid hit. The entry displayed good examples of cross channel success and beautiful creatives! Congratulations!


BEST PPC CAMPAIGN: LARGE

FINALISTS Bluebird Media & KitchenTime Digital Ethos & Swift Direct Blinds Evolved Search & Mattress Online Merkle NL & HEMA Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop Peak Ace & TIMOCOM PromoTraffic & SneakerStudio SIDN Digital Thinking & Campus Training

Peak Ace & Pool-Chor-Shop 2020 was tough for many of our clients, which meant we felt very grateful and excited to work with Pool-ChlorShop, who actually saw an increase in business last year. Having completed our account restructure quickly, we could capitalise on all the unexpected demand that followed in the summer, thanks to our automated campaign creation approach. With both search trends and work situations changing at a moment’s notice, our team had to be quick on their feet to make the most out of the additional interest in pool supplies. As a result of our strategy and the trust of our client, the team surpassed all goals with flying colours. Even more astonishing: these revenue figures could have been even higher, had pools not been so popular that the entire industry faced a shortage of them spanning the whole of Europe as early as May. Winning this award is a confirmation for our team of how extraordinary our achievement was in 2020: in the face of a global pandemic, suddenly working 100% remotely and all the extra stressors COVID-19 brought, we produced excellent results for our client.

Wolfgang Digital & Intersport Elverys Wolfgang Digital & Littlewoods Ireland

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judging panel thought that this campaign was truly excellent and showed the importance of cleaning up accounts and utilising the data already harvested. The measurement against the industry as well as all the other information really helped us see why this was a winning campaign.


BEST PAN EUROPEAN CAMPAIGN

FINALISTS iProspect Ireland & Le Creuset iProspect Ireland & Workday iProspect Ireland & Workplace JBH The Digital PR Agency & Money.co.uk Peak Ace & TIMOCOM Re:signal & ASICS Sempai & DeeZee SIDN Digital Thinking & Sendiroo

Peak Ace & TIMOCOM We helped TIMOCOM, the leading procurement platform for transport contracts in Europe, to reinvent their paid search channel in the midst of a global health crisis that shook the transport industry. We ended up building campaigns in 24 languages that now run in a total of 28 countries. Given the economic situation in early 2020, TIMOCOM decided to significantly reduce their budget and focus on efficiency. We therefore had to balance cutting costs with achieving visibility amongst the users that mattered. We persevered and exceeded all our initial targets: we spent significantly less, acquired more leads and increased brand visibility. Winning an award for this campaign means a lot to us, because it truly put our international agency to the test. Successfully localising these languages across several teams formed the basis of this campaign – as the numbers suggest, this approach quickly paid off. We believe that this campaign is an outstanding submission due to both its holistic approach to strategy and undeniable results.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This submission was particularly impressive especially how the agency managed to rebuild the accounts with the SKAG structure. They achieved admirable results which shows they did extensive research and analysis for the account. It’s not often that you see an agency that’s both creative and thorough enough to run a complex campaign and they showed both of these qualities.


BEST USE OF CONTENT MARKETING: SMALL

FINALISTS Compare the Market & Sticky Elephate & Nutridome Elephate & VOX Good Brothers & broadbandchoices Havas Media Ireland & AXA

Elephate & Nutridome Nutridome is a Polish e-commerce retailer in the organic cosmetics niche. The campaign was challenging because of the ambitious objectives, requiring a lot of creativity and consistency in the execution. Winning an award would be the most fulfilling validation of our efforts throughout the campaign. By increasing the SEO visibility and organic traffic of our client’s blog, and the entire site overall, we made a real impact on the conversions and transactions, which ultimately resulted in an increase in revenue. All in all this is what clients expect from any content marketing investment.

iProspect Ireland & Allianz Care iProspect Ireland & Workplace Performics & Uni baby PR Agency One & Auto Trader Vertify & Carturesti

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The entire judging panel thought this was a brilliant, award winning campaign, that delivered solid results and an impressive increase in revenue. In a competitive industry where it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd, this campaign did just that!


BEST USE OF CONTENT MARKETING: LARGE

FINALISTS Blue Array & GoCardless Bluerank & Orange connective3 & thortful Harbingers & JOICO Impression & AskTraders Peak Ace & Zava Sempai & innogy SEMTR & L’oreal Turkey / Cildimveben Stickyeyes & Etihad Airways Wolfgang Digital & Clario

Bluerank & Orange When ascending the throne, a king must be ready to fight more than one battle. That however demands coming up with the ingenious strategy that will ensure the success. As content has still been referred to as the “king”, it also needs establishing long-term strategy, especially in large content-based projects. Outperforming competition and reaching a leading position in Google rankings is like fighting digital battle which requires implementing best practices and unconventional measures. That’s what Bluerank has done in SEO/ Content project for Orange. Our strategic plan was based on 4 pillars: involving cross-functional team (SYNERGY), data-driven approach (ANALYSIS), optimizing existing articles (CONTENT LIFECYCLE) and using specific in-house tools, e.g. reWrite (TECHNOLOGY). Objectives: Create valuable content (200 texts on smartphones and new technologies) and optimize the existing onsite texts to satisfy both users and Google robots. Results: Increased visibility of Orange via How-To Guide (by 15%), better positions in SERPs, increased number (8 times!) of organic sessions, good ROAS and all that achieved without any paid promotion! Winning an ESA is a great honour and the “jewel in crown” of several years’ work on the Orange content section. We have proved that well-thought, data-based content brings tangible business benefits organically.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS What can we say about this campaign we simply thought this was a great, well presented submission with some well-deserved results! The campaign included very good use of the micro-moments concept, and it was great to see how internal linking was not only thought of in terms of better SEO, but also and especially with a business vision in mind. Well done and congratulations!


BEST USE OF PR IN A SEARCH CAMPAIGN: SMALL

FINALISTS Elephate & VOX

PR Agency One & Auto Trader

Good Brothers & broadbandchoices

Auto Trader is the UK’s largest and most engaged digital marketplace for new and used cars.

HomeToGo Inbound Marketing Team

With massive untapped growth potential in the new car market Auto Trader appointed PR Agency One to turbocharge press coverage, search engine visibility for new car keywords and to drive new visitors to Auto Trader’s 30,000+ new car listings online.

PR Agency One & Auto Trader Sweet Spot PR & DER Tour Vertify & Veranda Mall WeltSparen

Auto Trader doesn’t generate revenue from selling cars, it generates revenue from retailers advertising their stock on its platform. Organic search is a key audience driver for Auto Trader – and with new cars being such a big priority - improving search visibility has significant benefits for Auto Trader’s consumer audience and paying new car retailers. To boost the number of visitors to Auto Trader’s new car listings PR Agency One devised and implemented a provocative digital PR/Search campaign centred on Eau de New Car - a new, exclusive, limited edition haute parfum.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This particular submission was a funny, quirky and really clever campaign that demonstrated excellent execution and alignment with the brand messaging. The objectives were clearly set out and the creativity implemented was fantastic.


BEST USE OF PR IN A SEARCH CAMPAIGN: SMALL

FINALISTS connective3 & Canine Cottages Impression & We Are Marmalade Peak Ace & Zava Propellernet & Pour Moi SIDN Digital Thinking & Smoking Paper

Peak Ace & Zava We worked with Zava, a European e-heath provider, to create a data-driven content strategy that positioned it as an expert and innovator within the medical field. Rigorous research, elevated by a partnership with a reputable marketing research institute, produced data on medical topics still largely ignored within the media and society. We packaged this data to easily form the basis of content pieces, on subjects ranging from how childless women can face social exclusion (whether they are voluntarily childless or not), to topics of digitalisation of the medical field and more. While tackling taboo subjects, our outreach strategy also embraced the scrutiny that the COVID-19 pandemic placed on healthcare systems and medicine worldwide. Our results dramatically improved Zava’s profile, greatly increasing its authority score with a huge rise in media mentions. Winning this award acknowledges an enormously successful campaign that raised the profile of not only a heretofore obscure field of medicine, but also work that brought attention to social issues still somehow not talked about in 2021.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges thought that this was a well-structured and well-planned campaign and entry. There were very clear objectives defined, a clear audience and original ideas around targeting content topics that hadn’t been widely covered previously. To get such fantastic results for a brand that is not well known in major publications was a fantastic achievement.


BEST USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN A SEARCH CAMPAIGN

FINALISTS Anicca Digital & NHS Leicester City CCG Harbingers & Arskom Sport Brokers Pipar\Engine & Lanullva Pipar\Engine & Olís Promotraffic & Moda Size Plus Sempai & DeeZee SIDN Digital Thinking & Grupo MASMOVIL Traffic Builders & Woonboulevard Poortvliet XXL

YouTube Marketing Agency 5PM & GAMMA 5PM is a full-service YouTube marketing agency, providing data-driven consultancy to the smart brands of tomorrow. GAMMA, the biggest DIY store in the Netherlands, was looking for new ways to claim relevant domains within the home DIY market on YouTube and thereby making home DIY projects more accessible and fun, for everyone. GAMMA teamed up with 5PM to develop a YouTube strategy with a series of how-to videos that would answer the most-searched questions regarding home DIY projects in the Netherlands. 5PM’s strategy was straightforward; conduct data-driven research to know exactly which videos had to be produced. These videos would then give the right answers people were looking for. This resulted into a series of how-to videos that helped the customer every step of the way. 5PM proved that the combination of data-driven research, YouTube and video SEO, content production and smart distribution is the golden formula to dominate the search results in YouTube and Google. Winning this award therefore confirms the thing that we so firmly believe in; the enormous power YouTube can have for your brand.

Wolfgang Digital & Elverys YouTube Marketing Agency 5PM & GAMMA

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges thought this was an innovative campaign with a really thoughtful approach using data to target audiences with discovery ads in You Tube and impressive research into the previously successful videos. This submission was definitely a clear winner for us.


BEST USE OF DATA (PPC): SMALL

FINALISTS Basta digital & MiniFARMA Burstit Digital & Randstad Sweden iProspect Ireland & Bank of Ireland iProspect Ireland & Workday iProspect Ireland & Apache Somebody Digital & Apria Direct

iProspect Ireland & Bank of Ireland Having launched Paid Search activity for Bank of Ireland Insurance Services in April 2019, we found ourselves in one of the most competitive markets in the country. Bank of Ireland are well known for their product and service offering in the banking and financial sector, but let’s be honest – who would think of Bank of Ireland as their go-to provider for home or car insurance? We were going up against the major players in the insurance market, companies synonymous with insurance. Entering the insurance auction was like entering a battlefield, competing against over 20 advertisers at all times, even on our brand terms. We developed a creative solution to leverage Bank of Ireland’s first party data, crossselling Home Insurance to Mortgage customers and Car Insurance to Car Loan customers. We worked collaboratively with the channel planning team in BOI to incorporate a special offer into our insurance ad copy, offering existing customers a -25% discount, capitalising on their intent and anticipating the next stage of their journey. Winning this award means recognition for providing a unique and innovative solution – taking control of a sub-section of an established marketplace in order to reach the customers who matter most.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS All of the judges thought this was a strong, well-executed campaign. The strategy was successfully applied and the clever use of existing customer data to help drive cross-sell opportunities for the client was brilliant. Definitely a worthy winner.


BEST USE OF DATA (PPC): LARGE

FINALISTS Adthena & Staysure Bluebird Media & KitchenTime Incubeta & Laithwaite’s Wine iProspect Denmark & Elgiganten Mediaworks & Viovet Merkle NL & HEMA Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop Precis Digital & Zizzi Sempai & Tantis

Peak Ace & Pool-Chlor-Shop 2020 was tough for many of our clients, which meant we felt very grateful and excited to work with Pool-ChlorShop, who actually saw an increase in business last year. Having completed our account restructure quickly, we could capitalise on all the unexpected demand that followed in the summer, thanks to our automated campaign creation approach. With both search trends and work situations changing at a moment’s notice, our team had to be quick on their feet to make the most out of the additional interest in pool supplies. As a result of our strategy and the trust of our client, the team surpassed all goals with flying colours. Even more astonishing: these revenue figures could have been even higher, had pools not been so popular that the entire industry faced a shortage of them spanning the whole of Europe as early as May. Winning this award is a confirmation for our team of how extraordinary our achievement was in 2020: in the face of a global pandemic, suddenly working 100% remotely and all the extra stressors COVID-19 brought, we produced excellent results for our client.

Traffic Builders

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This submission presented a very well executed campaign with clear objectives and strategy. It was great to see how, after the takeover, going back to basics and building from there was key to this success. This is clearly a campaign that has achieved impressive results in the face of a pandemic.


BEST USE OF DATA (SEO): SMALL

FINALISTS five elements digital & Imobiliare.ro JBH The Digital PR Agency & Money.co.uk Serpact & DSK Bank Vertify & Intersport

Vertify & Intersport Site migrations are a fact of life - sooner or later, most websites do eventually go through this process. Whether big or small, migrations tend to give SEOs plenty of work to ensure it’s not just users that are properly transferred over to a new site, but ranking signals as well. With Intersport Romania, one of the main large retailers in the sportswear niche, the migration to a new platform was supposed to bring it inline with new technologies and a better user experience. Unfortunately, the process didn’t take SEO into account from the beginning, which, coupled with a complete change of URL structure for the site, led to a massive drop in rankings, traffic and non-branded revenue. With thousands of pages to redirect, limited budget and very little available data, we’ve decided to forgo doing everything manually and instead bring one of Google’s very own tools into the mix: the BERT machine learning model for language processing!

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This submission was a clear winner. A thoroughly fleshed out submission, detailing solid recovery against some challenging hurdles from what I can only describe as an “SEO’s worst nightmare!” Really good to see the results of using the data the way it did - reducing time by 75%, staying within budget, and also delivering in just one month. This entry demonstrated great creativity and kept costs down by using scripts and sheets.


BEST USE OF DATA (SEO): LARGE

FINALISTS Bluerank & Orange EACTIVE #wiemyjak & Czas zegarków Fingerspitz & Bruynzeel Keukens Mediaworks & Where The Trade Buys OrangeValley & Hunkemöller Propellernet & PureGym s360 & BAUHAUS Semetrical & LexisNexis SIDN Digital Thinking & Yext & Palladium Wavemaker UK & Compare the Market

s360 & BAUHAUS While running multiple different content strategies, a focus on commercial pages of the website, as well as running a track on building an inspirational and guide environment. Utilizing a Topic Clusterings strategy in a highly competitive market. BAUHAUS has seen increased visitors by 4m, increasing their yearly turnover by €1.6m. With a primary focus on building the inspirational and guide environment, an additional focus was to include the commercial pages as cluster-content to ensure the traffic from inspirational content would also lead to transactions. Prioritizing when to produce the content in the best way possible, led to a Python Script being produced to retrieve Google Trend data. In that way we made it possible for BAUHAUS to know when different content would peak in trends and we made sure that the content was produced at least two months before the peak, to make sure we have had time to get a good ranking before the peak month. In the inspirational and guide environment, BAUHAUS went from 400 daily visitors to over 12.000. Despite being affected by the pandemic, BAUHAUS still sees a very high number of visitors, between 5-8.000 daily visitors. Comparing YoY, we have seen an increase of 702% of visitors. With a focus on quality content in Topic Clusters rather than mass-production, BAUHAUS now owns multiple subject areas in the market.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning entry showcased an excellent demonstration of what happens when content is done well, it performs and delivers. It was impressive to see a cost breakdown too for production vs other crucial areas. The judges particularly liked the use of python and trends to get the data too. We also liked the diligent approach to fresh content trends and acting on it well in advance. Amazing work.


BEST SOFTWARE INNOVATION (UP TO 25 STAFF)

FINALISTS Basta digital & Tatra banka InLinks JetOctopus Link Affinity PPC Ad Editor PPC Samurai SearchPilot Squared.io TrueClicks

TrueClicks With TrueClicks, we’re building the PPC tool we wish we had during our agency years. First, we want to make sure our users never miss an issue or opportunity again in their Google Ads campaigns. We want to do this by going beyond regular analysis and optimization. Not just showing you what you could do, but revealing what you should do, and in what order. We believe this is a more useful and more ambitious approach to creating software. Second, we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for our users to improve their accounts. For each of our recommendations, there’s a one-click deep link to the right place in Google Ads and the option to turn it into a task. And for a growing number of recommendations, we also offer a ‘fix’ wizard that lets you fix issues in a couple of clicks, directly from TrueClicks. Finally, we believe the industry needs an independent third party that grades PPC accounts. Agencies shouldn’t grade themselves or each other, and Google… well, they’ll be Google. Winning a European Search Award is a fantastic endorsement and honour for this promising piece of European search software... if we may say so :-)

JUDGES’ COMMENTS We felt this submission was a very strong product that is truly innovative, delivers great usability and shows transparent development costs. It really does solve an important problem which is great to see.


BEST SOFTWARE INNOVATION (26 STAFF OR OVER)

FINALISTS Adchieve Conductor

Increasingly & Scandiborn

Increasingly & Scandiborn

Every 60 seconds, 4,400,000 Google searches are performed and Google Shopping Ads alone now make up 76.4 percent of retail search ad spend. Today, marketing goes hand in hand with Artificial Intelligence.

iQuanti Inc

AI technologies are now empowering brands to engineer better consumer experiences.

Like Reply

This is how AI combined with human expertise was used to deliver phenomenal uplifts in Google Shopping campaigns for kids clothing and furniture retailer Scandiborn.

rankingCoach Senuto Surfer Yext

Scandiborn, like many brands, suffered from selling single item purchases. This significantly diminished their return on ad spend, so they tasked Increasingly, an AI technology company to boost Google Shopping revenue. A pioneering product, AI Collections, was created. Using customer and product data, in combination with AI to inject hyper-relevant product bundles straight into Google Shopping search results. Encouraging customers to buy the whole project, not just the product. It was totally automated, stand-alone in the site-experience and drove significant uplifts in revenue for Scandiborn. AI Collections, an entirely separate Google Shopping campaign is driving 12% incremental revenue, ROAS is 18% higher than the set target. In the first 4 months we have driven over £100,000 in incremental revenue and over the next 12 months we project this will increase to near £500,000.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The entire panel of judges reviewing this entry thought that the effectiveness and performance of the product is really impressive. It is truly innovative and a tool that does something extremely cool.


BEST SEO SOFTWARE SUITE

FINALISTS Conductor iQuanti Inc OnCrawl Pi Datametrics Senuto Siteimprove

Conductor Conductor is the world’s leading organic marketing platform, helping businesses accelerate search traffic, digital growth and revenue. Conductor’s technology helps marketers create powerful marketing content to drive high quality traffic to their site and track their organic performance. In today’s new world with Covid-19, websites are more valuable than ever and getting found online is a #1 enterprise priority. Conductor was named a Leader in the Forrester Wave for SEO platforms and is rated #1 on TrustRadius and G2 by enterprise marketers. Their forward-thinking customers include global and emerging enterprise brands such as Citibank, Visa, and Casper. This award is special for Conductor as it provides another credential of trust in the organic marketing tech space and helps the company in its further expansion in European markets. Additionally, it is a great honour for Conductor’s R&D team, who consistently invest in innovating new product functionality.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The winner in this category have developed a tool that certainly has the rights to become a leading one. They offer a little bit of everything, and the inclusion of locations to help target the correct audience is brilliant.


BEST PPC MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SUITE

FINALISTS Adchieve Kenshoo Marin Software Optmyzr PPC Management Suite PPC Samurai Sempai Squared.io TrueClicks

TrueClicks With TrueClicks, we’re building the PPC tool we wish we had during our agency years. First, we want to make sure our users never miss an issue or opportunity again in their Google Ads campaigns. We want to do this by going beyond regular analysis and optimization. Not just showing you what you could do, but revealing what you should do, and in what order. We believe this is a more useful and more ambitious approach to creating software. Second, we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for our users to improve their accounts. For each of our recommendations, there’s a one-click deep link to the right place in Google Ads and the option to turn it into a task. And for a growing number of recommendations, we also offer a ‘fix’ wizard that lets you fix issues in a couple of clicks, directly from TrueClicks. Finally, we believe the industry needs an independent third party that grades PPC accounts. Agencies shouldn’t grade themselves or each other, and Google… well, they’ll be Google. Winning a European Search Award is a fantastic endorsement and honour for this promising piece of European search software... if we may say so :-).

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This submission was a well-structured, impressive entry. We really liked the weighted approach to the optimalizations as well as the way they assessed the multiple audit techniques to help solve the challenge of PPC marketers.


BEST SEARCH SOFTWARE TOOL (UP TO 25 STAFF)

FINALISTS Basta digital & Tatra banka Inlinks PPC Ad Editor PPC Samurai Sitebulb Squared.io Swydo TrueClicks

TrueClicks With TrueClicks, we’re building the PPC tool we wish we had during our agency years. First, we want to make sure our users never miss an issue or opportunity again in their Google Ads campaigns. We want to do this by going beyond regular analysis and optimization. Not just showing you what you could do, but revealing what you should do, and in what order. We believe this is a more useful and more ambitious approach to creating software. Second, we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for our users to improve their accounts. For each of our recommendations, there’s a one-click deep link to the right place in Google Ads and the option to turn it into a task. And for a growing number of recommendations, we also offer a ‘fix’ wizard that lets you fix issues in a couple of clicks, directly from TrueClicks. Finally, we believe the industry needs an independent third party that grades PPC accounts. Agencies shouldn’t grade themselves or each other, and Google… well, they’ll be Google. Winning a European Search Award is a fantastic endorsement and honour for this promising piece of European search software... if we may say so :-).

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This winning submission was a fantastic presentation of a very valuable tool, with clear impact and great usability. We liked the idea of the “fix it” button that takes you right into the account. It’s also great to see real client testimonials, brilliant work.


BEST SEARCH SOFTWARE TOOL (26 STAFF OR OVER)

FINALISTS OnCrawl Sempai Senuto SEOWORK

OnCrawl OnCrawl is a technical SEO platform powered by data science to help you make smarter SEO decisions. We help e-commerce websites, classifieds and online publishers to improve their organic traffic, rankings, and online revenues by opening Google’s black box. Driven by a strong tech spirit, OnCrawl gives search marketers easy access to the data they need by providing actionable dashboards and reports to support the entire search engine optimization process. Winning this award is a huge achievement for our teams. It highlights our dedication to make data science and AI a key asset for technical SEO and to show that it is not just another buzzword from the search industry.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges loved the real time indexing of this tool, as well as the SEO text generate which works really well. It was also brilliant to see that the anomaly report is streamlined. Overall, an outstanding product with a fair price point and easy data exports.


BEST IN-HOUSE TEAM

FINALISTS Compare the Market Harbingers Heycar HomeToGo Milrab Myprotein Red Ventures UK WATT24

WATT24 Marketing Team The WATT24 marketing team has been completely restructured as of 01.02.2020. New structure, new employees and a new long-term goal: “We want to become the digital market leader in the professional lighting sector.” Scaling an eCommerce shop in the B2B sector with the target group of electricians is a big challenge. The new WATT24 marketing team consists of 5 employees. Within a year, we implemented a CRM system along with marketing automation. We changed the entire brand image of WATT24: New logo, new approach and a completely new design. In 2020, we also moved the shop from OXID to Shopware 6, taking it to a new technical level. We added over 4,000 new products to the store and ran numerous marketing campaigns. All in all, five of us did the work of 20 people. The team more than earned an InHouse Team of the Year award. With all the structural changes described, online sales doubled compared to 2019. Why did we deserve the award? Because in a short time, with a completely new team and a completely new infrastructure and brand, we were able to get a bit closer to our long-term goal.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This agency has delivered some really impressive results through smart and structured work. To build a full team in a pandemic is a bold thing to do and a huge testament to the agency and its dedication. Congratulations!


BEST SMALL PPC AGENCY

FINALISTS Burstit Digital DemandMore Docklin Digital Hide and Seek Launch Online WebDigital

Docklin Digital Docklin had a fantastic 2019, resulting in three best agency awards in 2020. However, as the developments within automation, privacy and measurability is fundamentally changing the playbook of digital marketing and SEM, we pivoted our approach during 2020 with the vision of ‘Delivering Next Generation Performance Marketing’. During the last 18 months we’ve focused on four areas key to reaching that vision - aligning marketing strategy with business goals, redesigning our approach to optimization, solving measurement in a cookieless world and acting as an integrated partner in order to maximize our impact as an agency. Our approach includes multiple technical solutions, builds on our data science framework and redefines what a client/agency collaboration looks like. This has - beyond continuous excellent results - increased our business impact, client footprint and MRR and made our clients digital marketing more future proof. Docklin does Performance Marketing, Measurement and Data Science, powered by Technology. We are 20 consultants (+8) working across three performance teams managing digital marketing and one tech team working with measurement, data engineering and data science. Docklin had a turnover of £ 1.6m in 2020 (+30%), working with 35 clients. Since 2015 we’ve had 100% employee retention and 97% client retention.

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This category was extremely tough, but the judges felt that this particular winning agency are stand out leaders. It was great to see that the objectives are focused on improving data, optimisation and performance in a cookieless world. They also have really impressive members of staff and client retention. Congratulations!


BEST LARGE PPC AGENCY

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media Bluebird Media Boosmart Marketing Intelligence Agency Crafted Impression Peak Ace AG Precis Digital Semetrical

Peak Ace AG Established in 2007, Peak Ace AG is an integrated performance marketing agency based in Berlin, Germany – a one-stop shop for flexible, data-driven solutions for performance marketing channels, including paid advertising, organic search (SEO), content marketing and marketing technologies (CRO & digital analytics). The award for Large PPC Agency of the Year would be an honour treasured, earned and shared by every one of our Peak Acers. It’s the people that make Peak Ace great. We live by the philosophy that fostering a culture of mutual respect and inclusion makes for the best work for our clients. In 2020, we have shown how investing in your employees garners incredible results, company-wide – for brand recognition, client acquisitions and growth. Anyone can start an agency with the goal to turn a profit. But we believe that making sure your employees are the fabric of your company culture, empowered to drive the business forward and, most importantly, passionate about the work they do – that’s how you build a successful and sustainable agency.

SIDN Digital Thinking Wolfgang Digital

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This agency is a standout winner for this award! They have delivered a solid, well detailed entry that ticks all the boxes. The focus on staff achievements and people, as much as clients and financials was brilliant, and really says a lot about them as an agency. Some great company growth and a clear winner. Huge congratulations, keep up the great work.


BEST SMALL SEO AGENCY

CATEGORY SPONSOR

FINALISTS Altitude Internet Digital Marketing Services BoostROAS five elements digital JBH – The Digital PR Agency

Re:signal Re:signal is a specialist SEO and content marketing agency, driving organic growth for ambitious brands. We have re-defined our vision with a streamlined team and business strategy in order to become the SEO and content marketing agency for brands anticipating the future. Our agency continues to grow from strength to strength, with significant client retention and new wins (including ASICS, World Remit, FatFace and Gillette). Having capped 2020 with strong recognition (Best Small SEO Agency at the UK Search Awards) we’ve recently been recognised for the Best SEO campaign and Best use of search in finance at UK Search Awards 2020. Being featured in European Search Awards is a great opportunity for us to show how proud we are of our team, culture and the work we do for our clients and SEO community. As an agency, we know that trust is an essential part of our client relationships. By producing award-winning work that is recognised by our peers in the industry, we’re showing our clients that we put everything into getting the best results for their business using industry-leading strategies.

Manaferra Pixel Nordic AB Re:signal Thunderbolt Digital

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges felt this entry are clearly specialists in what they do. They have achieved some great client wins, and it’s fantastic to see the success in the context of the challenges that the team has had to face. They have delivered a brilliant entry and they are an extremely worthy winner. Keep up the great work Re:signal! Congratulations!


BEST LARGE SEO AGENCY

CATEGORY SPONSOR

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media Blue Array Evolved Search Impression

Peak Ace AG Established in 2007, Peak Ace AG is an integrated performance marketing agency based in Berlin, Germany – a one-stop shop for flexible, data-driven solutions for performance marketing channels, including paid advertising, organic search (SEO), content marketing and marketing technologies (CRO & digital analytics). The award for Large SEO Agency of the Year would be an honour treasured, earned and shared by every one of our Peak Acers. It’s the people that make Peak Ace great. We live by the philosophy that fostering a culture of mutual respect and inclusion makes for the best work for our clients. In 2020, we have shown how investing in your employees garners incredible results, company-wide – for brand recognition, client acquisitions and growth. Anyone can start an agency with the goal to turn a profit. But we believe that making sure your employees are the fabric of your company culture, empowered to drive the business forward and, most importantly, passionate about the work they do – that’s how you build a successful and sustainable agency.

Merkle UK SEO Team Peak Ace AG Reddico Semetrical SIDN Digital Thinking Wolfgang Digital

JUDGES’ COMMENTS The judges all felt this was a very impressive entry. The company philosophy and how this has been really invested in is great. This winner continues to go from strength-to-strength year on year.


BEST SMALL INTEGRATED SEARCH AGENCY

CATEGORY SPONSOR

Aqueous Digital Aqueous Digital is a family-run Digital Marketing Agency based in Cheshire, UK. We specialise in organic and paid internet search, website content strategy and reputation management.

FINALISTS Aqueous Digital GA Agency Loud Mouth Media MediaVision The Good Marketer

Founded in 2011, we set out with a clear vision to provide a different type of digital marketing service: a service based entirely on honesty, trust, loyalty, and collaboration (TLC), but this does not just apply to our customers, we carry this through to how we treat our employees too. Staff happiness and personal development and have been at the forefront of our growth, especially during the pandemic. We have invested heavily in our training, mental and physical wellbeing, and staff benefits. Many businesses struggled during covid-19 lockdown, but we used it as an opportunity to work with people and adapt their digital marketing plans, playing our part in helping them to survive the most difficult trading conditions. We hit our financial targets to take us over a £1million turnover business and now have new targets to take us to £3million by 2023. Winning this award would mean the world to us. It would ultimately provide high-profile industry recognition for all the hard work our amazing team have put into building the business. We have developed a new campaign, refined our brand and have ambitious plan to take us to the next level. We are treading our own path to get there, because at Aqueous Digital, Search Never Sleeps!

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This agency has a commendable ethic and employee focus spirit which is impressive. They are truly transparent and reading through their entry felt like a breath of fresh air! Huge congratulations.


BEST LARGE INTEGRATED SEARCH AGENCY

CATEGORY SPONSOR

FINALISTS Absolute Digital Media Bluerank Core Crafted Fusion Unlimited

Peak Ace AG Established in 2007, Peak Ace AG is an integrated performance marketing agency based in Berlin, Germany – a one-stop shop for flexible, data-driven solutions for performance marketing channels, including paid advertising, organic search (SEO), content marketing and marketing technologies (CRO & digital analytics). The award for Large Integrated Search Agency of the Year would be an honour treasured, earned and shared by every one of our Peak Acers. It’s the people that make Peak Ace great. We live by the philosophy that fostering a culture of mutual respect and inclusion makes for the best work for our clients. In 2020, we have shown how investing in your employees garners incredible results, company-wide – for brand recognition, client acquisitions and growth. Anyone can start an agency with the goal to turn a profit. But we believe that making sure your employees are the fabric of your company culture, empowered to drive the business forward and, most importantly, passionate about the work they do – that’s how you build a successful and sustainable agency.

Hallam Impression Peak Ace AG Stickyeyes Group The Media Image

JUDGES’ COMMENTS This agency displays all the right numbers and all the right arguments. The have showcased a great pivot for 2020 both from a business angle and an employee happiness perspective.


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