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.

A high-volume audience signal on stamp duty planning

The Stamp Duty calculator campaign turned into the account's strongest top-of-funnel surface. Across its life it drew 203,900 impressions and 2,564 events on the campaign's primary conversion action, on £2,124 of spend. That works out at around 83p per engaged user reaching the planning tool.

The conversion action here tracks calculator interactions rather than lead form submissions, so the figure reflects engagement with the planning tool. Commercially, it means Property Looker has a reliable, low-cost channel that brings intent-rich users into the heart of the product at scale. That kind of audience signal is hard to manufacture and expensive to buy through other surfaces.

Addy flagged the stamp duty cluster as a high-volume planning-intent set early in the testing, through keyword research and intent categorisation. The campaign structure Addy then drafted (a single tightly-themed ad group with broad-match keywords and conversion-based bidding) held the cost flat as the campaign scaled.

Surveyor leads, with a regional standout

The Find a Surveyor campaign delivered 74 surveyor leads at an average of £61.65 each across two ad groups. The "Survey Types & Costs - Buy Intent" group outperformed the broader Surveyors Near Me group at £51.82 a lead. Active research-mode queries converted better than generic surveyor searches.

For a marketplace that matches buyers to surveyors, the buy-intent finding has commercial consequences beyond the cost-per-lead number. Searchers researching survey types and prices are in the planning phase of a property purchase, which is when surveyor selection happens. That intent profile is what makes the channel sustainable at the platform's current fee model.

Among the regional surveyor campaigns the team tested, Shropshire stood out: 26 leads at £45.95 each, with the strongest performance in Shrewsbury and Telford. 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-lead 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 the UK Google Ads market for property data: which demand surfaces compound at the platform's budget level, which regions respond best to localised surveyor advertising, 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.