Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 22.09.2026 
Level Agency is on the US Search Awards 2026 shortlist twice this year: Best PPC Campaign for our work with Ancora Education, and Best Use of Search, Finance (SEO) for our work with IRA Financial. Paid search for a national career education network on one side, an SEO domain consolidation for a self-directed retirement account provider on the other, and the same bet underneath both: a harder plan would protect the client better than a safe one.
Here’s the work behind each nomination.
Best PPC Campaign: Engineering Enrollment Efficiency, with Ancora Education
Ancora Education runs a network of vocational school brands spanning skilled trades, allied health, and automotive programs, with campuses in local markets across the country. Paid search carries enrollment for every brand, and every campus reports against hard monthly enrollment goals, so a bidding change anywhere is a bidding change everywhere.
The insight that shaped the entry: the cheapest lead and the lead who enrolls are often different people. Paid search algorithms deliver whatever they’re told to value, and “lowest cost per lead” tends to surface the curious rather than the ready. Ancora’s real objective was enrollments.
We built a value-based bidding model across every Ancora brand that fed enrollment-quality signals back into the algorithm, applied one bidding and structure framework across the portfolio, and kept local targeting flexibility for individual campuses. The cost was a deliberate two-week dip while the model relearned what a good lead looked like. Ancora held with us through it.
Comparing the June through August peak window against the Q1 baseline, blended cost per enrollment improved by 18% across all Ancora brands. At the Miller Motte College campus in Fayetteville, cost per enrollment dropped by more than 86% between February and July on comparable spend.
Best Use of Search, Finance (SEO): One Brand, One Domain, with IRA Financial
IRA Financial helps people open and manage self-directed retirement accounts, which puts every page it publishes in the category Google calls Your Money or Your Life and holds to its highest standard for demonstrated expertise. Over years of growth, the company had built three separate domains. It made a strategic decision to unify them into one brand home, and the destination domain started the project with the fewest page-one keywords of the three.
The conventional consolidation is defensive: redirect everything and measure success as breaking even. Redirects move URLs. They don’t move trust. If the destination site was going to hold the authority of three domains, it had to be rebuilt to deserve it.
We built the consolidation around three moves: site architecture rebuilt around searcher intent, optimized copy on the bottom-of-funnel pages that drive account openings, and a staged blog migration so rankings had somewhere to land before the legacy domains went offline. Every page cleared review from IRA Financial’s founder, a tax attorney, which doubled as the clearest expertise signal Google could ask for.
IRA Financial now runs on one domain, with every page built for the searcher’s stage and every claim cleared by someone qualified to give the advice. In a category where Google trusts almost nothing by default, that’s how a migration earns the authority of three sites on one.
What both entries have in common
“The innovation on both of these accounts wasn’t a new tool or a clever trick,” said Nicole Jennings, EVP of Delivery at Level. “It was refusing to accept the standard tradeoff, that a portfolio-wide bidding change has to be slow and painful, or that a domain migration has to mean losing ground before you gain it. Ancora and IRA Financial were both willing to challenge that thinking with us, and that’s the partnership behind results like these.”
We’ve written up both entries in more detail on our site. Congratulations to every agency and brand on this year’s shortlist.
About Level
Level is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA. Enterprise capability, mid-market focus. Level exists to give marketers a single, connected growth system, combining performance media, AI SEO, creative, CRM, and data science with the Level Intelligence Suite, the agency’s AI system for understanding, reaching, and converting customers. Level works across financial services, education, B2B, home services, healthcare, and consumer health and CPG.
