Our Vori search work won a 2026 Search Engine Land Award

Pearmill won Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative, PPC at the 2026 Search Engine Land Awards for our Google Ads work with Vori. Winners were announced on October 26, 2026.

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Search Engine Land is the trade publication most of the search industry reads daily, and its awards have run since 2015. Entries are judged by Search Engine Land's editorial team alongside outside practitioners from companies including Microsoft, DEPT, Tinuiti and Adalysis. This year's finalists spanned 18 categories.

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The account was buying clicks, not customers

Vori builds point-of-sale and back-office software for independent grocers. It's a market with a few thousand realistic buyers in the US and a sales cycle measured in months, so one won customer is worth far more than a form fill.

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When we took over, every campaign in the account was set to Maximize Clicks. There was no conversion-based bidding and no branded campaign. Google was asked to buy as much traffic as the budget allowed, and nothing told it which traffic was worth anything.

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That also meant the account couldn't grow. Spend had sat flat for seven months. Budget wasn't the constraint. Nobody could see what the spend was producing, so nobody could justify more of it.

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We gave Google a price for every stage of the funnel

Optimizing to lead count in a market this small buys the cheapest form fills available. So we built a value ladder instead.

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We made Cometly the system of record for paid media, so every funnel event, from first form fill to closed deal, tied back to the click that caused it. Then we sent five of those events back into Google as conversions: a lead, a lead above Vori's size threshold, a deal created, a sales qualified opportunity and a closed-won customer. Each carries a value weighted against the others, so a signed grocer counts for far more than a form fill.

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Under Maximize Conversion Value, Google stops needing dozens of one event to learn. It optimizes toward total funnel value and leans hard toward the rare, valuable outcomes.

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We also engineered the signal itself. Conversions only fired for in-profile leads, so the algorithm learned from the grocers Vori actually wants. New campaigns launched in January, including the account's first branded campaign, and the old Maximize Clicks campaigns were retired over the next two months.

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We switched it off when the data broke

In March, the conversion values stopped passing through to Google. Letting smart bidding optimize against numbers we knew were wrong would have taught it the wrong lessons. So we downgraded the bid strategy, told Vori why, and accepted a temporary dip in branded impression share while we rebuilt the connection. Value-based bidding came back on in May.

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We rebuilt the ad copy the same way: around what a grocer stands to lose, not a list of what the product does. Outcome-led copy beat capability-led copy on both branded and non-branded search.

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Demo bookings tripled and got cheaper

Demo bookings per month tripled while cost per demo booked fell 27%. Demos weren't even the bidding goal. Campaigns bid toward the full value ladder, and demos were tracked alongside as an independent read, which makes the result stronger evidence, not weaker.

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Same account, same market, same sales team. The difference is that Google could finally see which clicks were worth buying.

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And the account could finally grow. Monthly spend rose 4.6x in the six months that followed, after seven months of standing still.

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The team

• Paid Search Lead: Het Mavani
• Paid Search Manager: Pranav Srinivasan
• Growth Manager: Moojan Hakim

Thank you to Vori for trusting us with the rebuild, and to the Search Engine Land judges for their time.

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What's next

This is the second award for our Vori work this month, after two Silver Davey Awards for the Meta creative. Same client, two channels, one habit: learn the customer first, then teach the platform what that customer is worth. https://pearmill.com/blog/our-vori-campaign-won-two-silver-davey-awards

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