It’s time to look back together at another year at Peak Ace and what we’ve accomplished! 2023 was a big year for us. We achieved lots of goals, we signed new clients, we raised more money for charity and invested in ourselves, and kept you updated the whole way.
Ready to dive in? Great! Read on to discover everything that we got up to in 2023 and get excited with us for 2024.
Contents
- Company updates
- Industry Awards
- Events
- Publications
- Responsibility and wellbeing
- How we kept you updated
- Looking to the future
Company updates
In March 2023, we had a makeover. Up to that point, we were mainly known for international performance marketing, but we underwent a comprehensive rebranding and shifted our focus away from “Delivering Performance” and towards “Delivering Digital Experiences”. We extended our service portfolio, updated our Vision and Mission, revised our corporate values and relaunched our website, saying goodbye to the blue and yellow look and welcoming a modernised corporate identity.
Here is what our Head of Creative, Lutz Brüggemann, had to say about the change to our visual identity in our press release:
“The new branding is visually charged by combining large-scale imagery with a specially developed mesh gradient. This provides drama and variety as a visual highlight and skillfully sets the scene for the diverse content without taking away the lightness of the website.”
Why did we do this? To enable us to leverage our cross-channel competencies even more effectively for our clients. Our focus shifted to the targeted combination of organic and paid channels and the introduction of intelligent automation solutions for our clients to improve long-term efficiency. We were keen to do move with the speedy introduction of AI to the industry and to utilise this as much as possible for our clients. That’s why we introduced our AI Solutions Service alongside our Digital Strategy Service. While the AI Solutions Service focuses on how work can be automated for our clients through the introduction of artificial intelligence, the Digital Strategy Service seamlessly combines organic and paid marketing channels to strengthen our clients’ standing.
This was a huge change for us and the product of a lot of hard work, and it paid off. Our new positioning has seen us successfully through the rest of the year.
In other news
There were plenty of other big changes for us in 2023. We opened our small business unit straßenwerber, we became a HSMA partner, and our Director of Organic Search Dominique Harris joined the SMX Advanced Advisory Board.
Internally, we have also shaken things up this year by starting the AI Ninjas – an internal taskforce dedicated to finding and testing AI solutions at Peak Ace. So far, this has helped us uncover so many useful tools to implement in our daily work. We can’t wait to see what we can uncover in the new year!
Speaking of AI, we even released our own AI merch. Did you get your hands on one of our t-shirts this year?
Industry awards
As always, it was an amazing year for marketing awards! At Peak Ace, we took home 40 awards in 2023, including a Kununu Top Company award, European eCommerce Large Agency of the Year and Multi-Territory Agency of the Year. We were also delighted to attend ceremonies in person around Europe, including The European Search Awards in Lisbon and The ? Awards in Paris.
A look at our winning campaigns
Peak Ace & faireparterie & kartenmacherei – A match made in heaven
faireparterie and kartenmacherei partnered with us with three main objectives. Firstly, to strengthen their backlink profile, secondly, to increase top-of-mind brand awareness, and thirdly, to maintain and improve their rankings. Our strategy used a robust, trust-building content strategy based on our outreach experience and takeaways from previous campaigns to produce a broad data-driven campaign for both markets. We achieved our goals, outperforming the competition in both markets to drive traffic and boost rankings, averaging at least >1 million monthly visits to our media mentions and maintaining the #1 ranking spot in the German market.
Most importantly, the client was happy:
Peak Ace & AutoScout24 – Against all odds: Crisis-proven content
AutoScout24 has been helping customers find the right car for them since 1999. With more than 30 million monthly users, AS24 is Europe’s biggest used car marketplace. We aimed to increase relevant traffic to AutoScout24.de and gain more relevance on the model pages, to shirt away relevance from listing pages with user generated content to high-quality model pages, and to prevent canniablisation of both page types to enable higher rankings in the SERPs. All of our editorial managers took part in this project, researching, writing, completing quality assurance and publishing 1,110 content pieces in six and a half months. We also added more helpful content, creating 180 comprehensive guidebook pages to gain more informational rankings. Our hard work paid off and we delivered on all of our objectives, seeing through an uplift on model pages, and a significant uplift on relevant keywords.
The client has great things to say too:
Peak Ace & Concardis – Tracking the way to higher card acceptance in Germany
Nets, a payment solution provider, requested our help to increase sales volume from non-brand search campaigns. The goals were to increase sales in 2022 and to keep the cost per sale low. The initial average monthly budget for non-brand campaigns was also significantly cut at the end of Q3, so we had a challenge on our hands. We achieved GDPR-compliant tracking independent of 3rd party cookies, used AI fed with CRM-based signals guided by human supervisors to achieve outstanding results, and worked collaboratively and tactically to implement our strategy. These creative solutions had great results. We overachieved our sales goal and our average cost per sale goal was only just below target. Even though category interest in Q3 was at its lowest since 2019, we managed to make June, July and August our three most successful months for sales volume.
The client was also very pleased:
Peak Ace & SharkNinja Spain – Cleaning the path to growth
SharkNinja, a vacuum and cleaning supplies retailer, wanted to expand its operations into Spain. Encouraged by their great progress in Germany, the client challenged us to up their revenue in 2022 and increase ROAS. The result was a hugely profitable campaign. We outperformed our client’s targets, achieving over 100% of the 2022 revenue target and over 100% of the 2022 ROAS target. We leveraged automation opportunities by using creative ad customizer discount adaptions via self-built KNIME workflows. The whole approach was extremely efficient. There was no additional cost for the client and/or agency due to the usage of open-source software, and the client was delighted.
SharkNinja said:
European Search Awards in Lisbon…
We love that we were able to attend the biggest event in the search marketing industry award calendar yet again! 2023’s ceremony was held in gorgeous Lisbon and we delighted in exploring the city before attending the amazing Don’t Panic Events pre-event and the awards ceremony itself. Of course, getting called up to the stage x times for our wins has to be the highlight for us!
Here are the team celebrating in Lisbon:
Events
When we weren’t at awards ceremonies, there were plenty of other events to keep us busy in 2023.
Here’s a timeline of everything we attended:
March 15th – SMX Munich
March 28th – DME Conference
April 27th – SEA Camp Jena
May 9th – OMR Festival
June 6th – SaaStock webinar
June 14th – SaaStock local (Munich)
June 21st – SaaStock local (Berlin)
June 29th – Turing Fest
June 30th – SEO Camp’us Paris
July 4th – TOA Berlin Stellite event
August 30th – Peak Ace Digital Marketing Meetup #1
September 7th – HSMA Day Frankfurt
September 13th – SMX Advanced Europe
September 13th-15th – Brightonseo
October 5th – SEO Vibes
October 13th – OMT 2023
October 17th – SaaStock Dublin
October 19th – PPC Camp
November 2nd – SEODAY 2023
November 3rd – ESSEC Business School
November 13th – Barcelona International Search Summit
November 24th – SEOkomm
November 30th – Peak Ace Digital Marketing Meetup #2
SMX Munich in focus
One of the highlights of the events calendar for us was SMX Munich in March.
Our CEO Bastian Grimm kicked off the Wednesday talks on the 15th March with his session “The Rise of AI: Beyond the Theory – Tools, Use-Cases & More” before joining the “The AI-Powered New Bing & Google’s Bard: Join Us for a Look Into the Crystal Ball” panel talk alongside Dan Petrovic, Philipp Kloeckner and Sam T.
Meanwhile, Peak Acers Dominique Harris, Alexander Schorsch, Mats Kühl, Steffen Bath and Sara Schaarschmidt manned our Peak Ace booth, giving our out Peak Ace AI t-shirts and spreading the word about our services!
One particularly exciting part of SMX Munich for us, though, was our exclusive pre-SMX Munich networking dinner. We gathered a great group of Peak Acers, friends and industry colleagues at Little London in Munich and enjoyed a fabulous evening of insightful conversation, delicious food, and more. Bastian even gave a short interactive talk on AI which sparked more insights and chats. It was a very successful evening!
Our brand-new Digital Marketing Meetups
Two event highlights we can’t forget to mention were our first ever Peak Ace Digital Marketing Meetups, which took place in our office on August 31st and November 30th of 2023. These were a triumphant return for us to hosting meetups for the Berlin marketing community!
The first meetup took place at the end of a long hot Berlin summer. We welcomed over 100 industry colleagues into our office for a wonderful evening of knowledge sharing, networking and insights into AI and marketing with free snacks and drinks. Bastian gave his talk “The Rise of AI: AI is everywhere – but now what?” and then we held a panel talk with Bastian and guest speakers Nicole Galindo Sánchez and Sughanthan Sekar. The event was a great success!
Our second meetup was held at the end of November with our friends at OMT – this time in German and with pizza. Again, despite the cold temperatures, over 100 people filled our Berlin office to network and gain exciting insights into the latest developments in the industry. This time we had three talks, one from Bastian, one from Nadine Schmal and one from Mario Jung, covering the topics of AI, email marketing and LinkedIn!
Our next Digital Marketing Meetup
Want to attend a Peak Ace Digital Marketing Meetup for the first, second or third time? Join us in our Berlin office on the 8th February for another great evening! Just save your spot for free now.
Publications
There was plenty of Peak Ace content to keep you up to date this year! A few external publication highlights include being featured in the DALL Leadership Lounge, in OnCrawl’s “ultimate guide to understanding and implementing a successful strategy”, and in Zeo’s “2023 Guide for Digital Marketers”. However, our teams were also busy publishing content for you, including our AI whitepapers.
The State of AI: Is it just art, or can it do more?
Our first AI whitepaper defined artificial intelligence and examined where we already use AI. It looked into global spendings on AI, how AI “thinks” and “feels” (as well as its morality), and why we have to be a kind of guardian for it. It’s the perfect introduction to the concept of AI in the 21st century! You can download it for free!
The Online Marketer’s AI Playbook
Our second AI whitepaper covered where AI can be used in your marketing, how to up your text creation game with AI, how to create art with AI, how to write good prompts, and how search engines use AI. You can download it for free now!
Becoming tomorrow’s AI’s High Performer
Our latest AI whitepaper covered AI in marketing and sales, how to find the right AI tool for your task (with some great case studies) and looking to the future of AI without fearing the change too much. It’s a great comprehensive overview of AI in 2023 (and the future). You can download it for free now!
Responsibility and wellbeing
At Peak Ace, we take our corporate social responsibility very seriously – it’s part of our corporate values to take ownership and act responsibly! In 2023, we focused on this with our Social Action Days and by raising money for charity.
Additionally, we focused on supporting our Peak Acers in their health and wellbeing. We held our second ever Mind & Body Awareness Day, ran our first ever step challenge, and kept up our partnership with the Fürstenberg Institut to ensure that our Peak Acers mental health was properly supported.
How we stayed in touch
Keeping you all up-to-date with what we’re up to is one of our favourite things. This year we kept up our coverage on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram with news about events, resources, publications, and when we were hiring! We also kicked off coverage on two new social media platforms: Threads and TikTok. This means that there are now even more places to connect with us than ever!
Of course, we also kept you up-to-date with Peak Ace news via our external newsletter. After relaunching it in 2021, we proudly continued to keep you updated throughout 2022 and 2023. If you haven’t read it before, it’s a great read, jam-packed with newsbites from the online marketing world, a long-form piece on a relevant topic, and upcoming industry events.
Keep an eye out and don’t forget to follow us for more interesting news in 2024!
Looking forward to 2024
What a year! We’re so proud of our work and achievements from the past 12 months and grateful to everyone who followed us every step of the way!
Wherever and whenever you might be reading this blog post, thank you for your support in 2023. We really appreciate it. Now, we wish you a restful holiday season and can’t wait to bring in a new year of Peak Ace with you in 2024!
