Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 23.06.2026 
When Ignition Digital was founded, it was built on a simple belief: world-class performance marketing shouldn’t be reserved only for businesses with massive budgets. Every client, regardless of size, deserves senior-level expertise, strategic thinking, and campaigns designed to drive measurable business growth.
That belief was put to the test when we partnered with small Irish eCommerce retailer Double In Darts, a specialist darts equipment store competing against some of the biggest names in the industry across Europe.
The result?
A campaign that delivered a 24:1 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), generated €26,857 in revenue from just €1,109 in ad spend, and ultimately helped secure a European Search Award win for Best Low Budget PPC Campaign.
The Challenge: Competing Against Giants
Double In Darts operates in a niche but highly competitive market. The business sells darts, dartboards, and accessories online while competing against international retailers such as Amazon, Dartshopper, Darts Corner, Winmau and other well-funded competitors.
The brief was:
- Achieve a ROAS of 10:1
- Maximise revenue during the Christmas trading period
- Maintain profitability through strict CPA control
- Compete effectively against significantly larger advertisers
The reality was much tougher.
The initial budget available was just €600, and Ignition were able to leverage their Google Partner status for an additional €500 media spend, bringing the total spend available to €1,100. Every click mattered. Every impression mattered. Every decision mattered.
There was no room for waste, broad experimentation, or “spray and pray” tactics.
Building the Foundations First
One of the first things we discovered was that the account’s measurement setup wasn’t providing the quality of data needed to make smart optimisation decisions.
Before exploring campaign strategy, we conducted a full tracking audit and rebuilt the measurement framework from the ground up. This included implementing accurate purchase tracking, validating attribution paths, ensuring revenue values were correctly passed back into Google Ads, and enabling data-driven attribution.
Without accurate data, optimisation is guesswork. With accurate data, every decision becomes more effective.
This foundation allowed us to confidently optimise toward actual business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
A Precision-Led Strategy
Historical account data revealed something particularly interesting: 93% of traffic was coming from mobile devices.
That insight shaped everything that followed.
Ad copy, Performance Max creative assets, landing page experiences, and feed optimisation were all tailored around mobile-first behaviour.
Rather than trying to compete with larger retailers on spend, we focused on competing through relevance.
The account was restructured into four tightly aligned campaign types:
- Brand Search
- Generic Search
- Shopping
- Performance Max
The brand campaign was isolated and manually bid, allowing us to maintain exceptional visibility while keeping costs incredibly low. Through highly relevant ad copy and landing page alignment, we achieved a 10/10 Quality Score and maintained a 91% impression share with an average CPC of just €0.06.
For generic search campaigns, we systematically improved Quality Scores through keyword-to-landing-page alignment, tightly themed ad groups, and highly relevant ad messaging.
The result was a portfolio of keywords scoring between 8/10 and 10/10, helping us secure lower CPCs and stronger auction performance despite being heavily outspent by competitors.
Making Performance Max Work Properly
Performance Max often gets criticised for wasting budget when not managed correctly.
In this case, it became one of the campaign’s biggest opportunities.
We built a fully developed Performance Max setup using high-quality creative assets, product feeds, audience signals, and first-party behavioural data. This allowed us to efficiently remarket to existing users while extending reach across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover.
The campaign was also identified as the primary source of wasted spend within the account. By improving creative quality and strengthening asset relevance, we reduced average CPCs within Performance Max from €0.20 to just €0.02.
That level of efficiency became a major driver of overall campaign profitability.
The Results
The campaign exceeded every objective set at the outset.
Sales increased from 119 to 349 purchases, representing a 193% increase in conversion volume. Revenue reached €26,857, a 237% month-on-month increase. CPA fell by 24% to just €3.18. Most importantly, ROAS reached 24:1 — more than double the original target.
For a business operating with a total advertising investment of just €1,100, these results demonstrated what can happen when data, strategy and execution align.
This wasn’t growth fuelled by massive budgets.
It was growth fuelled by precision.
What This Award Means To Us
Ignition Digital is a senior-led digital growth agency focused on helping ambitious businesses unlock the full potential of paid media. With more than a decade of hands-on experience managing campaigns ranging from local businesses to multi-market brands, our focus has always been simple: deliver measurable commercial outcomes.
Being recognised at the European Search Awards is a significant milestone for an agency who have only been in business for 6 months, but it also validates something we’ve believed from day one.
Great marketing isn’t about who spends the most.
It’s about who executes the best.
What The Client Had To Say
The impact of the campaign was felt immediately by the client.
“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 for December. I would highly recommend working with them!”
Aaron Bell, Founder, Double In Darts
A Word From The Team
Richard O’Sullivan, Founder of Ignition Digital, commented:
“What made this campaign special wasn’t just the budget, it was the challenge. We were competing against businesses spending 10x more than our client, yet we were able to outperform expectations through strong fundamentals, accurate measurement, relentless optimisation and a willingness to challenge conventional thinking. This award proves that you don’t need a huge budget to achieve exceptional results.”
Looking Ahead
This campaign has become a perfect example of what Ignition Digital stands for.
Senior-led expertise. Clear strategy. Technical excellence. Real business outcomes.
As we continue to grow, we’ll keep applying the same principles that helped turn €1,100 of ad spend into more than €26,000 in revenue: focus on what matters, measure everything accurately, and never assume bigger budgets are the answer.
Because sometimes the biggest wins come from the smallest budgets.
