How to Brief a Google Ads Agency So You Get What You Want

A brief that says get us more leads produces a campaign built on guesswork. The agency fills every gap with an assumption, and assumptions about a market, its lead capacity and what a lead is actually worth are rarely as accurate as the answers already sitting inside the business being briefed.

Start with what a lead is worth, not a target budget

Most property businesses arrive at a first call with a monthly figure in mind rather than a value in mind, and the two are not the same thing. An agency can build a far sharper campaign around a client worth eighty thousand pounds and a target cost per lead of one hundred and fifty pounds than around an instruction to spend three thousand pounds a month and see what happens. If margins or commission per instruction are commercially sensitive, even a rough range is more useful than nothing at all. Budget conversations for property businesses tend to start at around two thousand pounds a month and rise from there once the value of a lead is clear, not the other way round.

Share what has already been tried

An agency taking over an existing account, or starting fresh where Google Ads has already been tried through a previous agency or in-house, needs to see what actually happened last time, not just be told that it did not work. Export history, old ad copy, keyword lists and whatever conversion data still exists all shorten the time it takes to work out what to repeat and what to avoid. Without that history, an agency spends its first month rediscovering problems the business could have described on day one.

Be honest about how many leads the business can handle

A brief asking for as many leads as possible rarely accounts for what happens after the enquiry lands. A two person sales team already fielding viewings, valuations or site visits has a ceiling, and a campaign built past that ceiling produces enquiries that sit unanswered for days, which drags down conversion rate and wastes the spend that generated them in the first place. Stating a realistic weekly or monthly capacity for new enquiries lets a campaign be paced to match it, rather than built to a volume nobody can follow up on properly.

Agree who signs off before the first proposal, not after

Campaign structure, targeting decisions and landing page copy all move faster when one person on the client side has the authority to approve them. Briefs that route every decision through a director who reviews work once a month, or that get rewritten by a second stakeholder after an agency has already built around the first version, cost weeks that a live campaign cannot get back. Naming a single point of contact with sign-off authority before the brief goes out removes this delay before it has a chance to happen.

• What a converted lead is worth, even as a rough range
• Any Google Ads or other paid search history, including account exports if available
• A realistic weekly capacity for handling new enquiries
• The geographic area the business can actually service
• A single named contact with sign-off authority
• Any seasonal patterns in demand the agency should plan campaigns around
• Website or landing page access the agency will need to get started

What a good agency does with a thin brief

A property business filling in a brief for the first time will not have all of this ready, and a competent agency treats a thin brief as the start of a conversation rather than a form to reject. The difference between a useful first call and a wasted one is usually whether the agency asks for the missing pieces rather than filling them in with a generic assumption about the market. Arriving with even half of the checklist above, alongside a clear goal for the Google Ads account itself, still puts a business well ahead of most first briefs an agency ever sees.