Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 07.10.2026 
By Richie O’Sullivan, Founder, Ignition Digital
Six cent.
That’s what we paid, on average, every time someone clicked an ad for Double In Darts during their key sales period. Three competitors with significantly bigger budgets were bidding on the exact same name. We held 91% of the impressions anyway.
You can’t buy a penny sweet for six cent anymore. But it turns out you can win a Global Search Award with it.
Ignition Digital has just picked up Best Low Budget Campaign (PPC) at the Global Search Awards 2026 for our work with Double In Darts, an independent Irish darts retailer. Total media spend for the whole campaign was €1,109. Revenue it brought back: €26,857. That’s €24 back for every euro in, during the most cut-throat weeks of the retail year, against competitors with budgets between 3-1000x the size of ours.
So how do you take on Amazon with the price of a decent weekend away? The short answer is, a metric that is too often ignored.
Quality Score isn’t really dead. It’s still a useful guide.
Every few months someone on LinkedIn announces that Quality Score is dead. Automation runs the auctions now, the argument goes, so stop staring at a number that’s been around since flip phones.
Here’s the thing. Google is right that the 1-10 Quality Score you see in the interface is a diagnostic, not a number plugged directly into the auction, as it once was. But that doesn’t make the disciplines behind it obsolete. Google still evaluates expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing-page experience at auction time. In other words, the score isn’t setting your CPC, but the same things we spent years improving to raise Quality Score still influence how efficiently you compete.
That’s why we still pay attention to it. Not as a KPI, and definitely not as a formula that tells us exactly what a click should cost, but as a barometer. If a keyword is sitting at 4/10 with below-average ad relevance or landing-page experience, that’s a useful warning that something in the chain can probably be tightened. If it’s 9/10 or 10/10, it’s a good indication that the fundamentals Google cares about are in strong shape.
The important distinction is that you can’t take a 10/10 today and say it gives you a fixed percentage discount on CPC. Google Ads doesn’t work that neatly. What you can say is that the playbook that historically improved Quality Score – tighter relevance, stronger expected CTR and better landing-page alignment – still improves the quality signals Google evaluates when each auction happens.
If you’re spending six figures a month, small inefficiencies can sometimes hide inside the scale. If you’re spending €1,100 for the entire Christmas period, they can’t. Every wasted click matters. That’s why, on a small budget in particular, we still find Quality Score useful as a directional metric: not something to optimise blindly, but something that can point you towards the same relevance problems that ultimately make an account more expensive and less competitive.
Meet the underdog
Double In Darts sells darts, boards and accessories to players right across Ireland. Pub league legends, competitive players, people kitting out their first home setup, and a frankly heroic number of last-minute Christmas gift buyers. Lovely people who know their stuff inside out.
Their competition? Amazon, Darts Corner, Dartshopper.eu, Winmau and Elverys. Trying to beat them on budget would be like turning up to the World Championship with a plastic dart from a Christmas cracker.
The brief was to hit at least 10:1 ROAS, make the most of December, and keep cost per sale low enough to stay profitable at small volumes. The budget was €600, topped up by a €500 Google promotional credit. No room for a long learning phase, no room for mistakes. We couldn’t outspend anyone, so we had to out-think them.
Aiming for treble twenty
Step one: stop the data lying to us
Before touching a single bid, we audited the tracking and found it wasn’t telling the whole truth. We rebuilt purchase tracking with accurate revenue values, added GA4 enhancements, Enhanced Conversions and server-side tracking, and switched on data-driven attribution. Smart bidding is only as smart as what you feed it. The whole fix and account restructure was done in under three weeks, landing just before the December rush.
Step two: old-school relevance, applied obsessively
Tightly themed ad groups with minimal keyword overlap. Ad copy that mirrored what people were typing. Every theme matched to the most relevant landing page. And because 93% of traffic came from mobile, every headline, asset and feed title was written for someone scrolling with their thumb. Then we checked Quality Score daily using a bespoke script.
The scores gave us a useful read on whether that old-school relevance work was landing:
“darts shop dublin”: 10/10.
“darts accessories”: 9/10.
“dartboard” and “darts set”: 8/10, on two of the most competitive generic terms in the category.
With most of the account sitting at 8 or above, the diagnostic was telling us what we wanted to see, that the account structure was highly relevant. That didn’t guarantee cheap clicks, but it gave us confidence that we weren’t wasting a tiny budget through avoidable weaknesses in ad relevance, expected CTR or landing-page experience.
Then there was brand. We isolated “Double In Darts” into its own campaign and excluded it everywhere else. The keyword sat at 10/10 Quality Score, while the campaign held 91% impression share at just €0.06 a click despite three competitors trying to muscle in. The score itself didn’t create that €0.06 CPC. But the same relevance work that produced the score helped put us in a very strong position to compete efficiently. Sometimes the old tricks are still the best ones.
Step three: let the machines do what they’re good at
We’re not anti-automation. We’re anti automation-as-an-excuse. Shopping ran on value-focused smart bidding with an optimised product feed, and Performance Max handled remarketing to cart abandoners and product viewers, powered by strong creative, audience signals and first-party data. Where PMax picked up YouTube and Discover inventory, we treated it purely as upper-funnel awareness, not a sales channel.
Performance Max was historically the single biggest source of wasted spend in the account. Once we fed it genuinely good creative and text assets, its average CPC dropped from €0.20 to €0.02. That’s a 90% drop inside Google’s most automated campaign type. The lesson wasn’t that a visible Quality Score was controlling PMax – it doesn’t have one. It was that automation hadn’t made relevance, creative quality and good inputs irrelevant. The interface and auction mechanics have evolved, but the fundamentals haven’t.
Game, shot and the match
Revenue went from €8,000 the month before to €26,857, up +237%. Purchases jumped from 119 to 349. ROAS hit 24:1, up from 16:1 and more than double the target. Cost per acquisition landed at €3.18, and conversion rate went from 0.9% to 5%. All from €1,109.
Don’t just take our word for it
“The team at Ignition Digital jumped in and made an immediate impact on our accounts. They fixed our tagging & tracking issues and restructured our ad accounts in time for our most important sales month of the year, delivering a +193% increase in sales. I would highly recommend working with them!”
Aaron Bell, Founder, Double In Darts
“People assume a small budget gets small effort. It’s the complete opposite. When a business trusts you with €1,100 in the biggest month of their year, every cent feels personal. There was no magic button. We did the basics brilliantly, used automation where it actually helped, and rolled back the years a little to use Quality Score as a guide to success”
Richie O’Sullivan, Founder, Ignition Digital
“The clients we love most are the ones on the way up. You’re talking straight to the founder, decisions happen in a day, and when the numbers move you can see it in the business almost immediately. Double In Darts is exactly the kind of partnership we want more of.”
Garvan Lawler, Head of Operations and Business Development, Ignition Digital
Why we’ll always back the underdog
Working with a growing business gives a unique level of satisfaction. When a campaign lands, you see it in real life. More parcels going out the door, a busier December, a business walking into January stronger than it left the year before.
Small budgets also keep you honest. You can’t hide behind spend, you can’t wait three months for an algorithm to “learn”, and you can’t chase every shiny feature just because Google launched it on a Tuesday. So, we mix traditional techniques that still work, new Google Ads strategies when they genuinely add something, and AI where it’s suitable to use it. No hype, no junior handoffs, just senior people who treat your budget like it’s their own.
Big budgets are lovely. But give us a growing business, a tight budget and a Quality Score report, and we’ll show you what’s possible.
About Ignition Digital
Ignition Digital is a Dublin-based performance marketing agency specialising in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Meta Ads management. We’re a Google Partner agency working with clients across multiple countries, with every account managed hands-on by senior specialists. The agency was founded by Richie O’Sullivan, former Head of PPC at dentsu.
Growing business, tight budget, big ambitions? Visit ignitiondigital.io and let’s talk.
Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/110744471
