Six Entries, Six Nominations: Lead Ember at Its First Search Awards

This year was the first time Lead Ember entered any search awards. We sent six entries to the MENA Search Awards, and all six made the shortlist.

The nominations cover three pieces of work. Two are Google Ads campaigns, for Parking Lot Geniuses and Just Wills. The third is WAct, WhatsApp conversion tracking software that grew out of our client work. Both campaigns are up for Best Local Campaign (PPC) and Best Low Budget Campaign (PPC), so in those two categories we’re up against ourselves.

About Lead Ember

Lead Ember is a Google Ads agency in Dubai that generates qualified leads for service-based businesses. We judge every campaign on the quality of the leads it brings in, not the number.

We run the campaigns, build the landing pages, and set up conversion tracking that follows each inquiry into the client’s CRM. When the client’s sales team marks an inquiry as qualified, we send that back to Google. Google learns what a qualified lead looks like and goes looking for people like them.

The work we entered

Parking Lot Geniuses: Rags to Riches

Nominated for: Best Low Budget Campaign (PPC), Best Use of Data (PPC) and Best Local Campaign (PPC)

Tac set up Parking Lot Geniuses (PLG), a music studio and audio production house making the move from freelancer to business. Soon after PLG reached out to us start generating them business. The caveat was the budget was small, any revenue generated would be reinvested back into growing the campaign.

PLG sells to two different groups: corporate clients and artists. We built a separate funnel for each ideal customer profile (ICP). To ensure we get the best possible leads, we set up our custom WhatsApp conversion tracking solution (now known as WAct) to track WhatsApp leads. We also established offline conversion tracking for qualified and closed leads. This allows Google to see the full picture and optimise for real business.

From AED 57,640 of ad spend in its first year, PLG signed clients worth an estimated AED 1.86 million in life time value. That’s 32 times the ad spend. Tac raised the budget to AED 8,000 a month using the cash collected revenue. This campaign led to PLG landing projects for the Federal Tax Authority and Huawei through acquired agency work.

We submitted this campaign to the awards because it shows how far a small budget goes when Google learns from clean lead data.

Just Wills: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

Nominated for: Best Local Campaign (PPC) and Best Low Budget Campaign (PPC)

Just Wills helps UAE residents and expats write and register their wills. When they came to us they have never run any form of performance marketing before. They wanted us to work out the smallest budget that would give Google Ads a fair test.

We built a campaign around how people in the UAE search for a will. That includes Muslims, who are looking to understand if they can legally register a will and expats who want to protect offshore assets. We laid out all the different customer variations and built the funnel accordingly.

In June 2026, an AI will-drafting platform moved into the same searches and outbid us. We kept the budget where it was and rebuilt the ads and landing page around Just Wills’ advisers. Just Wills went from 66 leads in June to 95 in July.

Between May 2025 and July 2026, Just Wills received 1,209 leads from the campaign. That’s about 80 a month, against the 30 a month we’d planned the budget around. The client raised the budget twice along the way. We put it forward as proof that local knowledge can do the work of a bigger budget.

WAct: WhatsApp conversion tracking

Nominated for: Best Search Software Tool

We believe conversion tracking is the core of Google Ads. In a market like the UAE this becomes a problem as WhatsApp is one of the most commonly used forms of contact from customer to business. With WhatsApp there was no native integration or third party tool that allowed us to track a WhatsApp message as a conversion. For the sake of performance, we went out to market to build our own solution.

That solution became WAct, a WhatsApp conversion tracking tool that matches each WhatsApp message back to the ad click and uploads the conversion automatically to the paid ads platform. Now agencies and businesses can finally attribute leads from WhatsApp and see all the associated lead data for it. This works for Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads and TikTok Ads. WAct is a Meta approved Tech Partner as of August 2026.

We entered WAct into the awards as we know how important WhatsApp is as a channel in the Middle East market and how much impact WAct will make to performance marketers in the region.

Entering the awards, and what it means to us

Until this year, we kept our heads down and let our clients’ numbers do the talking. Then we had three pieces of work we couldn’t stop talking about, and we wanted to know how they would fare in the big leagues.

Then the shortlist came out with all six entries on it, next to campaigns for companies like Emaar and BYD. One of ours started on AED 2,000 a month. Another was for a client who had never run an ad. The third began as a spreadsheet our clients checked by hand.

To us, that’s the point. Small budget or a new market, as long as you know your ICP and can provide Google with the data it needs it’s going to work.

Seeing our homegrown tool get a nomination for Best Search Software Tool is a big moment. None of this happens without clients who trust you early. Tac brought us in when PLG was a month old, and Just Wills trusted us with their first paid ads. These nominations are as much theirs as ours.

What happens next

The MENA Search Awards will announce the winners online on 11 November 2026. Thank you to the judges and the MENA Search Awards team. We’re grateful to Tac and Just Wills for letting us share their work. Congratulations to everyone else on the shortlist.