B2B B2B wins: digging into our second straight Search Engine Land award (Copy)

Celebrating big wins with great clients will never get old. Most of that time, that means exceeding growth and performance goals, but occasionally some outside recognition qualifies.

The latest: we brought home Search Engine Land’s 2025 award for Best PPC for B2B campaign for our work with long-time client and customer engagement leader Customer.io. That’s enough of an honor on its own, but it’s especially meaningful because it’s the second year in a row we’ve won that category (hence: B2B for B2B), after we won in 2024 for our work growing network detection and response leader Corelight.

That’s two straight trophies for Blackbird in the B2B category.

Our work with Customer.io, which produced a 239% revenue increase with 12% greater lead efficiency, combined our usual relentless approach to campaign optimization with advanced integration of first-party data and international expansion. The results were supplemented by continuous MMM analyses that helped inform optimal budget allocation for 2026 and beyond.

Account management techniques that paid off for Customer.io included a combination of broad match targeting with hyper-aggressive negative keyword application. This, combined with integration of offline conversion data, helped us both expand scope and refine targeting toward high-value users likely to drive revenue. 

Concurrently, we ran eight MMM analyses over a two-month period; the output, combined with insights from an earlier Meta lift test, showed that certain upper-funnel channels (podcasts, YouTube, Meta awareness campaigns) had contributed significantly to Customer.io’s revenue, while others (LinkedIn, newsletters) had underperformed, and Google search had delivered according to expectations.

Using projections from optimized channel allocation of Customer.io’s 2025 budget, and agnostic of any inter-channel optimizations or macro shifts in the industry or economy, we anticipate a year-over-year revenue increase of 7.73% without a corresponding increase in spend.

Winning the award once served as motivation to keep uncovering new paths to growth and efficiency – and that motivation is only getting stronger.