Adverge Shortlisted at the US Search Awards 2026: Winning by Doing the Exact Opposite

Our Blue Sky Pest Control case has landed on another shortlist!

After becoming a finalist at the Global Search Awards on 3 July 2026, we were excited to see this case also recognised by the US Search Awards 2026 in the category Best Use of Search – B2C (PPC).

Since Blue Sky Pest Control is a US company, submitting the case for the US Search Awards was an easy choice. We believed this case was strong, so getting a second nod for it felt rewarding.

Most of the other participating agencies are many times our size, which makes this achievement even more thrilling!

Who we are

We’re a 10-person lead generation marketing agency built around one idea: get paid for pipeline, not activity. Our fee is tied to what a campaign produces, and one senior specialist runs an account from start to finish, without handoffs in between.

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 clients.

Spaghetti campaigns, runaway click costs

Blue Sky’s Google Ads account had performed well for years, but over time the setup had become messy.

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 clever trick or a shiny new tool. It was choosing to challenge a structure that had become accepted purely because it used to work, and trusting better judgement over precedent. That is also how we look at Google Ads decisions in general: the biggest gains often come from the choices outside the account, not just from what happens inside the platform.

From chaos to control

Since the restructure, three numbers moved in a way that normally doesn’t happen all at once. Conversions (people booking a service call) went up, ROAS (return on ad spend: how much revenue comes back for every dollar spent on ads) went up, CPA (the cost of winning each customer) went down.

Usually, when an account grows, the cost per customer starts creeping up too. Here, it went the other way. More customers came in at a lower cost, because the bigger campaigns finally gave Google’s bidding system enough data to work with.

The hardest part of the restructure was not 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 massively lacking. 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 second time this year that this case has been shortlisted for a Search Award. For a team of 10 people, that means a lot. Most agencies on lists like this are much bigger, so this is a proud moment for us, and a nice bit of proof that careful, hands-on account work still stands out.

“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

The winners of the US Search Awards will be announced on 7 October 2026. Win or not, this case already made the point we were aiming for: successful account work is built on discipline and judgement, not on trusting automation to figure it out alone.

What’s next

This case has now been recognised twice, and that gives us even more confidence to keep sharing the work we are proud of. We have more awesome cases building up across accounts, so putting more of them in front of people outside our own network, not just our own clients, is our next step.