How to brief a Google Ads freelancer, and the one test that filters the field

Brief a Google Ads freelancer on measurement first and media second, and give every candidate one test: ask them to walk you through exactly what fires when a lead comes in on your website. Most briefs never mention measurement at all, which quietly selects for people who can talk about ads over people who can prove results.

I have read a lot of these briefs, and I have taken over the accounts they produced. Here is what goes wrong, what to write instead, and what the market actually charges.

What do most briefs get wrong?

The typical brief lists channels, years of experience and a request for creative flair, then stops. Nothing in it asks whether the candidate can set up conversion tracking, audit a tag, or tie spend to actual leads, so nothing in the hiring process rewards the people who can. The result is predictable: you hire a fluent presenter, the reports arrive full of clicks and impressions, and six months later nobody can say what a lead costs. In one account I took over in 2026, 75% of clicks were being counted as conversions because the tag fired on page load, and the previous manager had reported that number with a straight face. A brief that mentioned measurement would have filtered that person out on day one.

What should the brief actually contain?

Five things, each one sentence or two.

The business outcome you want, in units you care about: enquiries, booked calls, orders, with current monthly volume if you know it. The state of your measurement, honestly: which conversion actions exist and whether you trust them, and if you have no idea, say exactly that, because a good freelancer treats "we don't know if our numbers are real" as the first piece of work. The media budget, stated separately from the fee, so nobody blurs the two. The access arrangement: you own the account, you keep admin, and the freelancer works through linked manager access, since Google Ads access comes in admin, standard and read-only levels and the client should hold the top one. And the reporting standard: numbers tied to leads, with the checks in the three receipts as the shared definition of a real conversion.

What is the one test?

Ask every candidate: "Walk me through what fires when a lead comes in on my site."

A candidate who has done the work traces the chain concretely: the form submission or thank-you page, the tag that fires there (gtag directly or through a Google Tag Manager container), the conversion action it reports into inside Google Ads, the counting setting (one-per-click for lead generation, so a double submission counts once), and how that number then steers Google's smart bidding, which optimises toward whatever the conversion action counts. A candidate who has never done the work retreats to audiences, ad copy and creative testing within the first sentence. The question takes thirty seconds to ask and it is remarkably difficult to bluff. If your account already shows conversions while the inbox stays quiet, the same chain is where the fault lives, and Google Ads shows conversions but I get no leads walks through it from the buyer's side.

What should you expect to pay?

My own published rates (August 2026) as reference points: monthly management at R6,500 to R10,500, hourly work at $50, and a fixed-price tracking rescue at R4,500 to R8,000 when the measurement needs repair before management makes sense. Percentage fees in the market commonly land somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of spend. One rule I hold regardless of who you hire: below roughly R7,500 a month (about $400 to $500) in media budget, pay no management fee, buy a few hours of setup help instead. The full landscape is in what Google Ads management costs in South Africa, with international figures in the UK, US and Australia version, and if you are weighing a freelancer against an agency or a fractional arrangement, freelancer vs agency vs fractional paid media compares the three honestly.

• What a customer is worth to you · include it

  Without this nobody can tell you whether a cost per lead is good or terrible.

• What you already know does not work · include it

  Saves a month of rediscovering it on your budget.

• Who owns the accounts, stated up front · include it

  Settle it before the work starts, never after the relationship sours.

• A list of keywords you want bid on · leave it out

  That is the answer, not the brief. Hand over the problem instead.

• A promise of a position or a ranking · leave it out

  Anyone who accepts that brief is telling you something about themselves.

What are the red flags?

A candidate who wants to run everything from an account they own, which holds your history hostage when you part ways. A percentage fee quoted on a small budget. Performance promised before they have seen your measurement. Reports built on clicks and impressions with no cost per lead. And a candidate who, given read-only access before the interview, cannot name a single conversion action from your account.

Once you have hired, the handover has its own discipline: how to take over a Google Ads account without breaking it is the checklist your new freelancer should follow in the first two weeks, and watching whether they follow it is itself a test.