Decide what a suitable enquiry looks like.
A campaign needs a defined service and audience. If your team is targeting one type of lending conversation, an unrelated form submission should not look like equal success simply because it was inexpensive.
Agree what feedback the broker will record. Simple reasons such as wrong service, wrong geography or not ready for a conversation can make a campaign review much more useful.
For example, a brokerage that focuses on refinancing for owner-occupiers in Brisbane might define a suitable enquiry as someone with an existing home loan, in or near its service area, who wants to talk about switching. A first home buyer in Perth who clicked through a broad search is a real person with a real question. They are just not the conversation that campaign was built for, and counting both as the same conversion hides the difference.
Give the broker an easy way to record outcomes.
Lead quality cannot be judged from the ad account alone. The person who takes the call knows whether it was useful. The hard part is getting that knowledge back to whoever manages the campaign.
Keep it simple. A short list of outcomes recorded against each enquiry is usually enough: booked a conversation, not ready yet, wrong service, outside the area, could not contact, duplicate. If the brokerage uses a CRM, this can be a single field. If not, a shared sheet reviewed each week will do. What matters is consistency, so that a month of feedback can be read as a pattern.
Be careful with what goes into that record. The feedback is there to improve targeting, pages and follow-up. It does not need sensitive borrower details, and it should not contain them.
Look beyond the headline number.
Cost per enquiry can help track efficiency, but it needs context. Tracking errors, repeated forms and low-intent traffic can make an account look attractive while creating work for the team.
Read search terms and landing-page behaviour alongside the actual conversations. Check that the event counted as a conversion means what the report says it means.
An illustrative example: campaign A produces 40 form submissions in a month and campaign B produces 25. On cost per enquiry, A looks better. Then the broker’s outcomes come in. Twelve of A’s enquiries became booked conversations, compared with fifteen of B’s. If spend was similar, B delivered more of what the brokerage wanted. These figures are made up for the example, but the pattern is worth checking for in your own account.
Exclude the searches you do not want.
Search campaigns can attract searches that sound relevant but are not. A refinance campaign might match searches for rate tables, a particular lender’s login page or jobs at a brokerage. Each click costs money, and none of them is likely to become a conversation.
Review the search terms report regularly and add negative keywords for patterns that keep appearing. For a small campaign, a fortnightly review in the first few months is a reasonable starting point. Keep a note of what you excluded and why, so the list can be checked later instead of growing with nobody remembering its purpose.
Check the location settings too. A campaign can be set to reach people located in the areas the brokerage serves, or anyone who has shown interest in those areas. If the brokers meet clients in person in one region, enquiries from interstate may turn into polite conversations that go nowhere.
Make the page match the promise.
A person who clicks a specific advertisement should find a page about that service. The first screen should explain who the service is for and what the next step involves. A generic homepage may force them to reconstruct the promise.
Claims and material changes need review. Do not use unsubstantiated outcomes or implied approval to make the ad more clickable. The page and follow-up should support the same expectation.
Say an ad offers a review of an existing home loan. It should lead to a page about refinance reviews: what the broker looks at, what to have ready and how to book. Sending that click to a homepage that opens with first home buyers asks the visitor to do the matching, and many will not bother.
Check the follow-up before blaming the campaign.
Sometimes enquiries look poor because of what happens after the form. If a good enquiry waits two days for a reply, that person may have spoken to another broker in the meantime. The campaign report still shows a conversion, and the broker records a lead that went nowhere.
Before changing targeting, check response times and who owns new enquiries. It is usually a cheaper fix than a campaign rebuild, and it makes every later change to the campaign easier to read. A brokerage that replies within the hour will learn more from the same campaign than one that replies whenever someone has time.
Change one thing you can learn from.
A small campaign needs enough focus to interpret what happened. If targeting, copy, geography and the page all change at once, it becomes harder to learn which decision helped.
For example, if the feedback shows many enquiries from outside the service area, tighten the location settings first and leave the ad copy alone for a few weeks. If the share of out-of-area enquiries falls, you know why. If you had rewritten the ads at the same time, you would not.
Budget should match the scope and capacity to respond. Our Ads service states its account, campaign and spend limits, with wider work quoted separately. The purpose of a cap is to define the service, not to promise an outcome at that budget.
