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Rachel is an account manager at Vovia with a background in the exciting world of websites and digital project management. When she's not analyzing reports, strategizing with clients or crunching numbers, you can find her enjoying hanging out with her family and friends, exercising, creating a new salad mix for lunch or travelling.

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Vovia Wins 2019 Ember Award for Search Excellence

It’s not a secret that Alberta is filled with seriously good talent, especially in the marketing world. We have the privilege of working with this talent every day within not only our own team but also working with our clients on their exciting projects.

Alberta-focused award shows also help showcase this talent and cast a spotlight on the serious breadth of awesome work that people in the marketing and digital creative industry are doing in our province. The Ember Awards, put on by Digital Alberta, is the perfect example of such an award show. This year Vovia won big at the 2019 Ember Awards, taking home the prize for Paid Search Excellence for our work with Swoop Airlines.

Before we dive into the awards and the win for Vovia, here’s a bit more on Digital Alberta. The organization’s mandate is to develop and support a digital community in Alberta, while helping the industry grow as a contributor to the province’s GDP, and supporting and showcasing the world-class work done in our province. Members and participants in Digital Alberta include both professionals working in the province and students in the midst of their education in a digital-related field, which is a cool component of the organization. This is reflected in the Ember Awards, which includes categories specific to student entries, meaning students can be highlighted for their work alongside seasoned pros at the awards and network at the event.

Aside from the variety of participants in Digital Alberta, the Ember Awards cover a broad breadth of disciplines across digital creative, website, applications, digital marketing and campaigns, technology, education and more. We also found it really interesting that there were categories this year for automation and innovation. This reflects the growing trend in the marketing and technology industries to focus on automation and data innovation to find new and efficient ways of doing things. All submissions to the Embers are judged from a panel of peers from outside of Alberta across Canada and the US. This helps enforce Digital Alberta’s focus on amplifying Alberta’s work on a bigger stage outside of our province. The submissions were also judged based on specific criteria, meaning not all categories had a winner awarded. This makes the win that much sweeter!

The 2019 awards were held in Calgary for the first time, which added an exciting element for our Calgary team. This year we submitted three case studies in the Paid Search, Social Media, and Cross-Platform Campaign categories. We took home the Paid Search Excellence award for Swoop Airlines, a campaign we are very proud of.

As an ultra-low cost carrier, Swoop faces steep competition from aggregate travel sites and competitors. Through the paid search campaign, we were able to surpass the client’s return on ad spend (ROAS) goal, with a 71% increase in ROAS within the first 7 weeks of the campaign while also increasing the overall order value.

This campaign was also a winner earlier this fall at the Google Premier Partner Awards in New York City, where we were recognized as a North American Finalist in the Paid Search Excellence category. You can read more about this campaign and the 2019 Premier Partner Awards here.

This win at the 2019 Ember Awards following our recognition for it at the Google Premier Partner Awards earlier in October is a great example of how work in Alberta is world-class. This is one of the reasons why we’re a supporter of the Ember Awards, and look forward to participating in them next year!