Briefing your Google Ads agency: The information it should include

You've decided to have your Google Ads managed professionally. The budget is approved and the agency selected. This is often the exact moment that determines whether a campaign burns money or drives growth, because what you give the agency determines what you get back.

No agency can read minds. Without a clear, data-driven briefing, it has to guess who your best customers are, what margin you need and what sets you apart from the competition. In this guide, we break a strong briefing into its components, explain the reasoning behind each one and give you a template that brings immediate clarity, both internally and with your agency.

Your briefing is the biggest lever in the partnership

A briefing isn’t a bureaucratic chore for a Friday afternoon. It’s the strategic foundation of the entire partnership.

Google Ads today is about far more than matching keywords. Bid strategies like Smart Bidding and AI features like AI Max run on machine learning and depend on precise signals. If your agency doesn’t know your goals and numbers, it can’t send those signals. A good briefing delivers:

• Shorter learning phases: Campaigns are set up correctly from day one.
• Less wasted spend: No budget lost on the wrong audiences or irrelevant search terms.
• A strategic partnership: The agency understands your business goals and advises you rather than simply executing.

Your agency needs to understand your business as well as you do

Surface-level descriptions like “We sell shoes” aren’t enough.

Your market position determines the campaign structure

Describe where you stand: Are you the challenger trying to win market share, or the market leader defending its position? A young company often has to bid more aggressively and accept more risk than an established brand managing for profitability. This one piece of information shapes the entire campaign structure.

Your unique selling point needs proof

The most common briefing mistake: the unique selling point is missing or generic, such as “good quality.” Explain why someone buys from you rather than from Amazon or a competitor. Is it 24-hour shipping, your engineering expertise, your personal support?

Then back it up with proof: reviews, awards, certifications. If you promise “the best service,” you have to be able to show it. That proof belongs directly in your ad copy and assets.

Your goals need numbers grounded in your margin

“We want more revenue” is a wish. Managing Google Ads takes solid metrics.

Being open about budget leads to the right strategy

Don’t hold back your budget to keep negotiating room. A campaign with a €1,000 monthly budget calls for a completely different strategy than one with €50,000.

• Smaller budget: Focus on search terms with clear purchase intent, meaning people ready to buy now.
• Larger budget: Also cover earlier stages of the buying decision, brand campaigns, Display and YouTube.

Target CPA and target ROAS translate your margin for the algorithm

This is the most important part of the briefing from a technical standpoint. For Smart Bidding to work, your agency, and therefore the algorithm, needs a target.

Target CPA (cost per acquisition) is the benchmark when you generate inquiries, for example as a service provider or in B2B. The question is: How much can an inquiry cost and still be profitable? An example: If you earn €1,000 per customer and one in ten inquiries becomes a customer, each inquiry is worth €100. Your target CPA should sit below that, say around €70, so there’s profit left over.

Target ROAS (return on ad spend) is the standard in e-commerce. The question is: How much revenue does each euro of ad spend need to generate? A ROAS of 500% means €1 of ad budget turns into €5 of revenue.

Your margin is what matters. At a 10% margin, you lose money even with a 500% ROAS. That’s why your agency needs to know your break-even ROAS. Stay realistic: A 1,500% ROAS combined with a growing budget is often out of reach. Ask for an honest assessment of whether your goals are achievable.

Describe your customers’ search intent

Beyond demographic characteristics, describe above all what problem your customers want to solve and what they search for to solve it. What matters most there is the intent behind the search.

Describe the stage at which you want to reach customers:

• Research: “Which running shoes are good for asphalt?” This calls for education, early in the buying decision.
• Purchase: “buy Nike Air Zoom Pegasus.” This is where the sale has to happen.

Also define who you don’t want to reach. If you sell premium consulting at €5,000, you don’t want visitors looking for free advice.

Set the direction for keywords and competitors

You don’t need to deliver a finished keyword list; that’s the agency’s job. But you do set the direction.

Seed terms show how you see your offering

Give the agency the 10 to 20 terms that best describe your product or service. They’re the starting point for keyword research.

Your competitors show where the gaps in the market are

Name your three to five strongest online competitors. The agency can then analyze which search terms they bid on and which messages they use. That saves time and reveals gaps in the market.

Your landing page decides whether clicks turn into customers

Even the best campaign fails if the landing page doesn’t convince. Google Ads brings the visitors; the page has to do the selling. Check every destination URL before you write the briefing:

• Relevance: Does the visitor find exactly what the ad promises?
• Load time: Does the page load in under three seconds on a smartphone?
• Call to action: Is it immediately clear what the visitor should do, whether that’s buy, call or get in touch?

If your landing page is weak, make improving it part of the engagement. Our article on the perfect Google Ads landing page shows what matters most.

Build your briefing with this template

Copy the structure into a document and fill it out in as much detail as possible.

Subject: Google Ads briefing – [Your company]

1. Company

• Name and website:
• Industry:
• Core products or services: What are your bestsellers or focus areas?
• Unique selling point: What do you do better than others, and how can you prove it?
• Geographic focus: Germany, DACH, worldwide or local?

2. Goals and budget

• Primary goal: for example sales, inquiries or app installs
• Monthly budget: fixed or performance-based?
• Target CPA (cost per inquiry): €[amount]
• Target ROAS (revenue per euro of ad spend): [percent]%
• Margin or contribution margin: per product group or service
• Timeline: When should campaigns go live?

3. Audience and competition

• Ideal customer: Who buys from you: business decision-makers or consumers?
• Top three competitors: names and websites
• Audiences to exclude: Who do you definitely not want to reach?

4. Creative and messaging

• Tone of voice: informal or formal, serious or casual, technical or plain?
• Existing assets: high-resolution images, videos and logos
• No-gos: terms or claims that can’t be used for legal or strategic reasons

5. Technical setup

• Tracking: Is Google Analytics 4 set up, and is conversion tracking active?
• CRM integration: Should inquiries flow straight into your CRM, with closed deals reported back to Google Ads?

The no-gos section matters more than ever: With AI Max, Google now writes and varies ad copy on its own. The clearer your guidelines on language and claims, the better the agency can configure these features. Read more in our article on AI Max.

Avoid these ten briefing mistakes from the start

We’ve seen hundreds of briefings. The same mistakes come up again and again, and they cost results before the first ad even runs.

1. Goals without numbers: “We want to grow” isn’t a goal. “20% more inquiries at a €50 CPA” is.
2. Undisclosed budget: If the agency doesn’t know your budget, it plans around the wrong scale, either too big or too small.
3. Underestimating the competition: Someone is always bidding on your search terms.
4. Audience too broad: Try to reach everyone and you reach no one. Be specific.
5. Too little product knowledge: The agency doesn’t know your product as well as you do. Explain complex offerings in detail or share training materials.
6. Impatience: Google Ads needs data. Stop after two weeks and you lose the budget you’ve already invested. Allow at least three months for reliable results.
7. Micromanagement: Define the what (your goals), not the how (individual keywords). That’s what you’re paying experts for.
8. No feedback loop: Agree in the briefing on how and when reporting happens.
9. Unresolved technical issues: Sending visitors to a broken or slow website is the most expensive mistake of all.
10. Siloed channels: Google Ads works best alongside SEO, social media and email marketing. Share your other marketing activities.

Conclusion: A good briefing is an investment in clarity

A professional briefing takes two to three hours of focused work. Those hours save you thousands of euros in wasted ad spend and months of back-and-forth.

With your briefing, you hand over both information and responsibility. The more precise your input, the better the agency can deliver, and the more clearly you can hold it accountable for results. The two points where 80% of briefings fall short are the metrics (CPA or ROAS) and the unique selling point. Nail those two first.