How Property Looker built a paid-acquisition evidence base from day one

Property Looker is a UK property-data platform. When the team began running Google Ads, no one in the business had run paid search before. They had four plausible demand surfaces to test against: stamp duty planning, surveyor discovery, property data lookups, and property valuation. The harder question was how to learn enough about each surface to know which one to invest behind.

They brought Addy in on day one and ran the work themselves. Keyword research, intent categorisation of search themes, drafted campaign structures with the right ad groups, weekly performance reads after each campaign went live: all of that ran through the chat. The team held final approval on every move that touched the account.

Surveyor enquiries at aggregator-comparable cost, with a regional standout

Of the four demand surfaces tested, surveyor discovery produced the lead-quality enquiries that scaled at competitive cost.

The Find a Surveyor campaign moved from £81 per surveyor enquiry in its first full month to £35 in the next, as Smart Bidding learned the lead-form signal. Among regional campaigns, Shropshire ad groups landed surveyor enquiries at £23–£30 — comparable to the £10 + VAT that surveyors typically pay aggregator directories for shared leads, but each enquiry going to one surveyor only.

The aggregator comparison is what makes the cost band meaningful. Property Looker's surveyor-marketplace economics need acquisition costs in the band where the platform's offer to surveyors works: exclusive enquiries at a small premium over the shared-lead price aggregators charge. The campaign reached that band in its second month of running.

Within the Shropshire campaign, the Shropshire County and Shrewsbury ad groups produced the strongest cost-per-enquiry numbers (£23.22 and £30.18 respectively). The data suggests local surveyor demand in that region is either less competitive or better matched to the platform's surveyor network than equivalent campaigns elsewhere. Evidence of regional product-market fit shapes investment thinking across the business, beyond the ads account itself.

The regional comparison was only fair because the campaign structure was consistent across geographies. Addy drafted one template and the team applied it to each region, so the cost-per-enquiry deltas reflected demand and competition rather than differences in how the campaigns were built.

What turned up that a campaign-by-campaign view wouldn't catch

Two findings came up in the data passes that ads-account performance review on its own would have missed. Both came from Addy reading paid and organic together, which is more than the brief most operators give a paid-search workflow.

Property Looker ranks position 1 organically for its own brand with 80 to 93% click-through rate. The paid account was bidding on the same brand terms, paying for clicks the organic site was already collecting. The overlap became visible because Addy reads Google Ads and Search Console alongside each other in the same workflow.

Separately, "property owners" was the highest-volume search term reaching the paid account. It was firing inside the Surveyors Near Me ad group. Searchers using that phrase usually want ownership records rather than a surveyor. That's a different product surface Property Looker also offers, which means the unmatched query has commercial value for the platform, just not for the surveyor campaign as it was built.

Both findings sit upstream of the ads work itself. They speak to how the platform's organic visibility relates to its paid spend, and how its product mix maps to incoming search intent. Cross-surface reads like these are how Addy approaches every data pass, looking at the whole picture across paid and organic rather than reviewing campaigns one by one.

What the testing produced for the business

A working read on Property Looker's surveyor-acquisition economics on Google Ads: the cost band at which exclusive enquiries land sustainably, the regions where local demand is best matched to the platform's surveyor network, and where organic visibility is already doing the work paid would otherwise pay for. That picture shapes how the next phase of spend gets structured.

For a small property-data platform with no marketing team, building this kind of read on the paid-search landscape is normally slow work. Property Looker did it in line with the campaign work itself, with Addy in the chat from day one.