Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 27.07.2026 
Adverge has been shortlisted for the Global Search Awards 2026, in the category Best Use of Search – B2C (PPC): Small, for a Google Ads rebuild we did with Blue Sky Pest Control.
It’s the first award we’ve ever entered as a company, and most of the other agencies on this shortlist are many times our size. So we are definitely thrilled to be one of the finalists!
Who we are
We’re a 10-person lead generation marketing agency built around one idea: get paid for pipeline (the leads and sales we help generate), not activity. Our fee is tied to what a campaign produces, one senior specialist runs an account from start to finish with no handoffs to an account manager in between, and clients can leave with a month’s notice because we’d rather earn the work every month than lock people in. We don’t just run channels like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn and Meta: we own the full funnel (every step from that first ad click to the final sale).
Blue Sky Pest Control is a US pest control business serving homeowners and commercial clients across multiple states. They are one of our lead generation B2C accounts.
Spaghetti campaigns, runaway click costs
Blue Sky’s Google Ads account had performed well for years, which was exactly the problem. Years of adding campaigns without ever consolidating them had left dozens of tiny campaigns, many generating only 2 or 3 leads a month. That’s too little activity for Smart Bidding (Google’s system for automatically setting bids based on what’s likely to convert) to learn from properly.
On top of that, Performance Max, one of Google’s automated ad types, was competing with the account’s own, better-performing search ads for the same customers. On the most competitive search terms, a single click could cost more than $200. And the budget was still weighted toward the flagship pest control campaign mostly out of habit, even though the termite campaign was converting better.
The account was generating results despite its structure, not because of it. So instead of adding budget or more automation, we went back to the foundations.
5 contrarian moves
- Automation off: paused Performance Max, since it was stealing traffic from the account’s own, better-performing search ads.
- Capped the cost per click: put a hard ceiling on how much any single click could cost, so one expensive search couldn’t drain a day’s budget.
- Consolidated: merged dozens of tiny campaigns into a handful of larger ones, giving Google’s bidding system enough data per campaign to learn what worked.
- Reallocated: shifted budget toward the termite campaign once the numbers showed it was consistently outperforming the flagship pest control campaign.
- Controlled expansion: tested showing ads for a wider range of related searches on the pest control campaign, to reach more people without pushing costs back up.
None of this was a new tool or a clever trick. It was choosing to challenge a structure that had become accepted purely because it used to work. It’s really just another example of a rule we build every account around: the most important Google Ads decisions aren’t made inside the platform. They’re made in the structural calls around it, like what to consolidate, what to pause, what to trust over precedent.
From chaos to control
Since the restructure, three numbers moved in a way that normally doesn’t happen all at once. Conversions (people actually booking a service call) are up 114%. ROAS (return on ad spend: how much revenue comes back for every dollar spent on ads) is up 32%. And CPA (the cost of winning each customer) is down 47%.
Normally there’s a trade-off: scale a campaign up and the cost of winning each customer creeps back up too, as the easy wins run out. Here it went the other way. More customers came in at a lower cost. Not despite the bigger, consolidated campaigns, but because Google’s bidding system finally had enough data per campaign to work with.
The hardest parts of the restructure weren’t even technical. Convincing a client whose account had worked for years that it still needed rebuilding took a full audit laying out exactly where performance was being left on the table. Recommending that Performance Max be paused meant going against Google’s own tooling and account guidance. And moving the budget away from the campaign the client had always prioritised only worked because we put the termite and pest control numbers side by side and let the data make the call instead of precedent.
What being shortlisted means to us
This is the first case we’ve ever submitted for an industry award. We went in with no expectations, just a result the team was super proud of. Finding out we’re a finalist, standing alongside some of the strongest search agencies in the world, is the kind of moment that makes the daily grind of account work feel even more worth it.
For a small agency, it’s also further proof. It tells prospective clients that the senior, hands-on account work we talk about in pitches holds up on a global stage, not just in our own case studies.
“I am so proud of the team. Every single day, they are the ones who go and make results like this happen.”
Dominique Roelofs, CEO, Adverge
Winners are announced on 23 September. Whatever happens on the night, this case already proved the point we set out to make: discipline and expertise beat blind automation.
Search is only going to get more automated. We don’t think that makes structural judgment less important, it makes it more important: someone still has to decide what to consolidate, what to pause, when to trust the platform less rather than more. That’s the bet behind every account we run, not just this one.
What’s next
This won’t be the last case we put in front of a panel. We’ve got a stack of proof building up account by account, and putting more of it in front of people outside our own network, not just our own clients, is our next step.
Connect with Adverge
Website: adverge.com / LinkedIn / linkedin.com/company/advergeagency / Dominique Roelofs (CEO of Adverge) https://www.linkedin.
