Last night, the European Search Awards hosted a thrilling live and in-person awards ceremony in Lisbon! Attendees flooded into Pàtio da Galé, where they sat surrounded by the gorgeous Portuguese architecture to await the judges’ verdict for the 2023 European Search Awards. We were delighted to get our party clothes on and attend the event – though of course even more pleased to be able to take home 6 prizes! We have to make even more room in our suitcases than last year!
After being shortlisted for 24 awards, here are the prizes we’ll be flying back to Berlin:
- BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (SEO): LARGE
Peak Ace & AutoScout24
Against all odds – Crisis-proven content
- BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2B (PPC): LARGE
Peak Ace & Concardis
Tracking the way to higher card acceptance in Germany
- MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (SEO): LARGE
Peak Ace & faireparterie & kartenmacherei
A match made in heaven
- MOST INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN (PPC): LARGE
Peak Ace & SharkNinja Spain
Cleaning Spanish houses since 2020
- BEST USE OF SEARCH – B2C (PPC): LARGE
Peak Ace & SharkNinja Spain
Cleaning Spanish houses since 2020
- BEST USE OF CONTENT MARKETING: LARGE
Peak Ace & faireparterie & kartemacherei
A match made in heaven
Bastian Grimm, CEO of Peak Ace, said of the wins:
“We couldn’t be more pleased with the results of last night’s ceremony. Our hardworking teams have, as always, outdone themselves on our campaigns, and are a credit to the amazing clients who put their trust in us. To win Best Use of Search (B2B) and Most Innovative Campaign for our work in both SEO and PPC projects is huge praise for the work we’re doing – and for every one of our Peak Acers. Thank you Don’t Panic Events, and congratulations to all our fellow winners!”
Search Sundowners: the pre-event
Before the ceremony could get started on Thursday night, we had to celebrate and prepare at the pre-party! On Wednesday night, Bastian and Dominique attended the Search Sundowners event at Montes Claros – a gorgeous catering and events venue with awe-inspiring views of Lisbon.
Guests arrived from 6:30pm and readied themselves for a night of brilliant talks, including “Your Essential Briefing on SEO” by Nick Wilsdon and an expert “Industry Insights” Panel, which Bastian took part in alongside over experts Aleyda Solis, Aoife McIlraith and Chester Yang. They talked about the latest search practices and innovations and, of course, touched on AI.
The event ended with a networking and sundowners hour, which they enjoyed while looking out over the Lisbon landscape! It was the ideal kick-off to what was set to be an excellent awards event.
The main event
As the biggest event in the search marketing industry awards calendar, the European Search Awards never disappoints when putting on a ceremony. This year was no different. After a delightful drinks reception and some stirring welcome speeches between 6pm and 8pm, we were treated to a delicious dinner at 7:30pm. The dishes were as delicious as they were beautiful – so you can imagine based on the pictures how good the food tasted!
As we finished our chocolate, vanilla and caramel bombs, we began to feel the anticipation rise around us. Dressed, as the dress code requested, “to impress”, the guests chatted excitedly and waited with bated breath for the awards winners to be announced at 9:30pm.
Luckily, we weren’t kept in suspense for long. After dinner, the awards ceremony soon began. Since we were nominated for 24 prizes, our hopes were high that we would take at least a few home. In the end, we were thrilled to be invited on stage to accept 6 awards! As always, it was a delight to be recognised by the search community and to have our work celebrated in front of experts in our field. What a result!
After the ceremony was over (and we had finished getting up and down from our seats to collect our wins), attendees took to the dance floor at the official after-party. It was, yet again, a night that we won’t forget.
Our award-winning campaigns
Here’s a quick look at the campaigns we submitted this year.
Peak Ace x 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.
To see this through, our content marketing and SEO teams worked together and created detailed analyses of data that allowed us to prioritise certain product categories and create newsworthy, tailored content to rank for keywords related to link building alongside a creative email outreach strategy.
Our outreach tactics even ensured success before our go-live date. 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.
Thanks to the amazing work of our teams, and our outstanding teamwork with our client, we met our goals and more than satisfied our client.
Most importantly, the client was happy:
“Our cooperation with Peak Ace has thrived over more than six years and with their help we have consistently created goals that further our vision as a company. Peak Ace had our backs throughout our efforts in strengthening our SEO and content marketing, helping us to meet and even exceed our targets. The agency is an ideal sparring partner, providing a high level of expertise and technical knowledge with a hands-on approach. Many thanks to Bastian, Dominique and their teams for their continued support and hard work!”
#EUSearchAwards… And the Award for Best Use of Content Marketing (Large) goes to… wait for it … @peakaceag & Faireparterie & Kartenmacherei 🏅 🏆 Congratulations! 👏👏 pic.twitter.com/onx9UeB40Y
— We Are Search (@we_are_search) May 25, 2023
Peak Ace & SharkNinja: Cleaning Spanish houses since 2020
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.
We targeted search and shopping. Having experienced major success in Germany, we chose a similar search structure with clean divisions between brand and generic, as well as category and non-category keywords. Meanwhile, shopping was our main conversion driver. We decided to continue running a standard shopping campaign with a category split on the ad group level until July 2022. With Google sunsetting ETAs we switched exclusively to RSAs and introduced headlines which contained different USP, as well as ad customizers. From August, we also decided to migrate to PMax. Our creative solutions led to great results.
The result was a hugely profitable campaign. We outperformed our client’s targets, achieving 126% of the 2022 revenue target and 125% 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:
“Peak Ace has been instrumental in driving our business forward. The team’s strategic approach to pay-per-click marketing has been a game-changer for us, and we are thrilled with the results. Peak Ace has demonstrated a deep understanding of our industry, a commitment to excellence, and an unwavering dedication to achieving our goals. Thank you for your exceptional service and for being a true partner in our success.”
Taking to the stage and accepting applause at the #EUSearchAwards are the prestigious @peakaceag & SharkNinja Spain – The winners of Most Innovative Campaign (#PPC) (Large) 🎉🎉🎉 pic.twitter.com/mYqFs23ar8
— We Are Search (@we_are_search) May 25, 2023
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. Their range includes new and classic cars, motorcycles, quads, trucks and commercial vehicles.
AutoScout24 came to us with three objects. Firstly, to increase relevant traffic to AutoScout24.de and gain more relevance on the model pages. Secondly, to shirt away relevance from listing pages with user generated content to high-quality model pages. Thirdly, to prevent canniablisation of both page types to enable higher rankings in the SERPs.
To achieve these goals we chose 930 relevant model pages, prioritised them by traffic potential (search volume), and updated them with new, relevant copy tailored to the target group and user intent. 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 on a range of relevant topics to gain more informational rankings.
Our hard work paid off and we delivered on all of our objectives, seeing through a 32% uplift on model pages, and a significant uplift on relevant keywords.
The client has great things to say too:
“Peak Ace believes in client success, using the necessary tools and expertise to make that happen. The content marketing team of AutoScout24 was excited to see how professionally and fast Peak Ace approaches content projects. The communication with the team was responsive, flexile and forward-thinking. The outstanding content quality and the excellent project management of Peak Ace made the challenging high-scoped content project of AutoScout24 possible. With Peak Ace we not only have a reliable partner – they are an extended arm that improves our content marketing efforts and increases the overall content performance.”
Best Use of Search B2C (#SEO) (Large) prize, title and accolade is landing in the hands of @peakaceag & AutoScout 24 🚀 🤩 #EUSearchAwards pic.twitter.com/W2fPPNZqvX
— We Are Search (@we_are_search) May 25, 2023
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.
To reach our target audience frequently and generate leads efficiently, we based our digital strategy on two media channels: paid social (Meta) and paid search (Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising). Programmatic display retargeting played a supporting role. Most excitingly, 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 by +31% and our average cost per sale goal was only –36% 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 has been our preferred digital media partner for more than 5 years from the first test leads starting from zero to delivering 5-digit B2B leads yearly across 6 markets, and still increasing. Peak Ace is considered an intrinsic part of our marketing team, delivering invaluable assistance on both tactical, strategical and technical challenges. They have adapted as our company has grown and changed, always with the focus on how to support us the best. I have a strong feeling that even better things are to come in the future.”
Tracking their way to Best Use of Search – B2B (#PPC) (Large) the award title goes @pearkaceag & Concardis #EUSearchAwards 🏅 🏆 👑 pic.twitter.com/Z19S8moMrL
— We Are Search (@we_are_search) May 25, 2023
About the European Search Awards
The European Search Awards reward and celebrate the very best companies and people working in PPC, SEO, and Content Marketing across a variety of business sectors, in a shifting digital landscape which inspires innovation, creativity and connectivity.
Attracting hundreds of entries from leading search and digital agencies and professionals from across Europe, the European Search Awards is brought to you by We Are Search, who deliver respected, ethical awards around the world.