Toucan shortlisted for Best Digital Agency, and we’ve done it on our own terms

Little more than a year ago, Toucan didn’t exist as its own agency. Now within our first full year, we’ve secured our first awards nomination in a crucial industry, not only for us but for many SEO/Digital PR agencies.

Naturally, we’re in a category against agencies who’ve been established a lot longer. But securing this shortlist, along with the results and client testimonials we’ve pulled together for the awards entry, validates why Toucan began and only reinforces our philosophy and gap in the agency space.

We started Toucan because we kept hearing from clients: “we’ve been burned by too many agencies that don’t deliver KPIs” and “none of the agencies we’ve worked with can sustain Digital PR long-term”.

Now we hear: “we’ve never worked with anyone who has achieved these results so quickly” and “you’ve made us believe that SEO and Digital PR can actually work for us”.

This approach also goes towards the reason we wanted to enter awards that go beyond the Digital Marketing space, awards that are selected and voted for by the industry experts who can accurately measure the real-world value; not vanity metrics. Another of Toucan’s core principles.

The wins behind the nomination

The shortlist came out of a year of work for a small group of retained iGaming and sports affiliate clients. Small is deliberate. We cap ourselves at a limited number of clients so the people doing the strategy are the people you actually deal with,the senior team continues throughout with no unnecessary layers of hierarchy.

A few of the campaigns that went into the entry:

Tipman Tips started as an SEO and Digital PR retainer and became a full digital transformation. Rankings were non-existent, and the site wasn’t built to convert traffic they were getting, so we helped rebuild product structure, pricing and UX alongside shaping organic search optimisation across all levers we could pull. Organic users grew 324% year on year, and the user key event rate went from under 0.01% to 6%.

Footy Accumulators is one we point to often. We built on previous Digital PR work to amplify the brand’s No Tippy Tappy Football podcast into a Digital PR engine, pundit commentary becoming reactive outreach, 333 pieces of coverage, 242 links to commercial pages, position 1 rankings up 284%. Proof that an owned media asset can do far more work than most brands expect of it.

FlashPicks and Pickswise were our two US sports campaigns, and where AI search presented a significant opportunity. Between them: over 2,200 links and placements on USA Today, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Fox and Yahoo. On Pickswise, we hit the 12-month link KPI in month four.

Across the three Checkd Group brands Footy Accumulators, FlashPicks and The Winner’s Enclosure, the work helped drive 67% more FTDs and a 12% revenue increase year on year. That last number is the one that matters most to us. Rankings and links are the route; revenue is the point.

One of our standout moments of 2025 is harder to put in a single stat. While running FlashPicks and Pickswise campaigns, we started tracking AI search citations, when these brands appeared in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and others, before it was a standard line on anyone’s reporting.

We noticed Reddit was doing a lot of the heavy lifting inside LLM answers, so we analysed NFL team subreddits and built activity designed to earn citations there.

It worked, and it confirmed something we now build strategies around: Digital PR no longer just moves Google rankings, it shapes what AI tells people. That early call is now one of our core service lines, and it’s why you’ll find us speaking on AI search at industry events, most recently at iGB Barcelona.