The winners of the first Friends of Search Awards were announced today during the Friends of Search congress, organised by trade associations IAB Netherlands and DDMA. Slimster.nl wins the award for best work in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Leen Bakker gets rewarded with the Search Engine Advertising (SEA) award.
The SEO jury about Slimster.nl
In the finals of the SEO price, Slimster.nl beated Europcar and SKODA. The jury about Slimster.nl: “It’’s a well executed migration with not just retaining the current traffic, but also increasing it by a large percentage. Migrations like this don’t happen that often in the Netherlands. They gave lots of examples and data in the case. The automated image tagging and redirecting is well executed. Nice that they made it possible to talk to Slimster using Google Assistant.”
The SEA jury about Leen Bakker
The SEA jury chose Leen Bakker above bol.com and A-Z Barbecue & Gourmet Party Service. “Leen Bakker used a wide variety of Google Ads capabilities to replicate the experience a person would have in their store in their online ads. The best ideas are often the simplest ones to understand but they may not be obvious to conceive of. They did a great job translating how their customers’ in-store behavior could be translated into the digital world, before they even visit the site by creating custom audiences, custom feed data, and using these to create a variety of super-targeted shopping campaigns.”
Independent, international jury
In assessing the entries, the jury looked at how the cases distinguish themselves in clear strategic thinking, innovation, effectiveness, tangible results, clarity and privacy-friendly and responsible data use. The independent jury consists of international and Dutch search experts: Barry Adams (Founder – Polemic Digital), Brad Geddes (Co founder – AdAlysis), Marcus Tober (Chief Innovation Officer – Searchmetrics), Kate Adams (Head of Media & Measurement Specialists NL – Google), Linda Hogenes (Owner technical SEO – Coolblue), Areej Abuali (SEO Manager – Zoopla), Frederick Vallaeys (CEO – Optmyzr) en Denise Scheel (Sr. EMEA Partner Marketing Lead – Microsoft).