Winning an APAC Search Award is always an honour.
Winning it by rebuilding an entire business model through search? That’s something else entirely.
We’re incredibly proud to share that Connected Culture has won the 2026 APAC Search Award for Best Use of Search – Retail / eCommerce (PPC) alongside our client Urban Sales, for the campaign:
“Hej då Ikea! Kia Ora Growth! (Rebuilding revenue beyond the IKEA era)”
Turning Risk into Resilience
This wasn’t a typical performance campaign.
Urban Sales came to us facing a major commercial inflection point. IKEA, which accounted for 54% of its total revenue, was being phased out. At the same time, the furniture market was tightening, consumer demand was shifting, and growth targets weren’t getting any smaller.
The brief wasn’t “scale ads.” It was “replace revenue, protect profit, and rebuild the business.”
That meant our Google marketing strategy couldn’t operate in isolation. Google Ads, Performance Max, search intent targeting, and first-party data had to work together as a unified commercial growth engine, grounded in margins, inventory realities, and long-term sustainability.
Performance Marketing, Done Properly
Instead of chasing short-term ROAS wins, we rebuilt the PPC framework around profitability first:
- Margin-based Performance Max architecture
- First-party data and intent-led audience segmentation
- SKU-level budget control tied directly to gross profit
- Tight alignment between media, merchandising, and inventory
The goal wasn’t dependency on a single brand or traffic source; it was resilience.
And it worked.
The Results
📈 $16.1M in annual revenue, exceeding the $15M target
🔻 IKEA dependency reduced from 54% to under 3% of total revenue
🎯 ROAS consistently above 4.0, while maintaining ≥35% gross profit
💡 Marketing Efficiency Ratio held below 25%, outperforming benchmarks
Urban Sales didn’t just replace lost revenue; they emerged as a profitable, independent retail brand with their own digital gravity.
What the Judges Said
The APAC Search Awards judging panel summed it up best:
“This campaign is a standout example of performance marketing done properly. Faced with a major commercial risk, the team demonstrated exceptional strategic maturity by turning a deep dependency into a scalable growth opportunity. What impressed us the most was the rigour behind the execution; this was not simply a media play, but a true business partnership grounded in margin, profitability, and long-term resilience.”
We’ll happily take that.
Why This Win Matters
This award validates what we believe about modern Google marketing strategy:
It’s not about clicks.
It’s not about inflated ROAS screenshots.
It’s about aligning Google Ads performance with real commercial outcomes, profit, efficiency, and long-term growth.
This is also our second APAC Search Award win in two years, following our 2025 win for Best Use of Search – Retail eCommerce (PPC). Different challenges. Same philosophy.
Search, when done properly, doesn’t just scale spend; It scales businesses.
Onward
Massive thank you to the team at Urban Sales for trusting us with a genuinely high-stakes challenge, and to our own Connected Culture crew for proving, once again, that when strategy, data, and commercial reality align, search can do far more than scale spend.
Here’s to building brands that last 🥂