PPC in Gurgaon: check these five things in your account before you hire anybody

Before you take a call with a PPC company in Gurgaon, spend twenty minutes in your own Google Ads account. Four out of five accounts we see described in briefs have one of the same five problems, and an agency that inherits them will spend your first two months fixing what you could have found yourself. Management in Gurugram is normally priced at 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, or a flat INR 15,000 to 50,000 a month for a small to mid sized account, with most agencies asking for a minimum monthly spend of around INR 50,000 before they take the work. Those are working ranges from what Indian agencies publish, not a survey.

The five checks, in order

One: is conversion tracking recording a business event

Open the conversions list. If the only things there are page views, button clicks or a thank you page that fires on every refresh, nobody has been optimising towards revenue. A Gurgaon clinic needs a booking, a developer needs a site visit request, a SaaS company needs a demo. Until a real event is recorded and counted once, every other number on the screen is decoration.

Two: what the search terms report says you paid for

Not keywords, search terms. Sort by cost and read the top thirty. This is where you discover you have been paying for job seekers, for students writing assignments, for competitor brand names you did not mean to bid on, and for the word free. Every rupee there is recoverable with negatives, and a good agency will be able to show you the same report and explain it in plain words.

Three: the brand and non brand split

Add a filter for your own company name. If most of your conversions come from people searching for you by name, your account looks healthy and is mostly collecting demand you already had. That is worth something, and it is not growth. Any agency reporting a blended cost per lead without separating these two is flattering itself.

Four: match types and how many of your keywords are broad

Broad match with a loose budget is the fastest way to lose money in an expensive market, and Gurugram is an expensive market. Look at how much of your spend sits in broad match keywords with no negative list behind them.

Five: who owns the account

Check whether your Google Ads account is yours or a sub account inside an agency manager account you do not control. If it is theirs, your conversion history, your audience lists and your learning go with them when the relationship ends. Fix this before anything else.

How Gurugram agencies price the work

Percentage of spend rewards an agency for increasing your spend, which is worth naming out loud at the start rather than resenting later. A flat fee rewards nobody for anything, which is cleaner. Per lead pricing works only when both sides agree in writing what disqualifies a lead, otherwise every month ends in an argument about junk enquiries. Add 18 percent GST on the management fee, and remember that tax is deducted at source on professional fees, so your finance team will pay slightly less than the invoice face value and the agency should expect that.

The categories that burn money fastest in this market

Gurugram concentrates the most expensive advertising categories in the country in a few square kilometres: residential property, insurance and lending, education and test prep, healthcare and elective procedures, and B2B software. In all of them, clicks are costly because the value of a customer is high and large advertisers are bidding with large budgets. Two consequences for a smaller advertiser. First, you win on specificity rather than on volume: the long tail query that names a sector, a project, a procedure or a problem converts better and costs less than the head term everybody is fighting over. Second, your landing page carries more weight than your bids. An expensive click sent to a generic homepage is the most reliable way to lose money in this city.

The lead quality problem nobody puts in the proposal

In lead generation categories around Gurugram, the account usually works long before the sales process does. Calls ring out after seven in the evening, forms collect numbers nobody calls back for two days, and the agency reports a falling cost per lead while the sales team says the leads are useless. Both are telling the truth. The fix is a feedback loop: your sales team marks each enquiry as qualified or not, once a week, and the agency optimises against the qualified ones. Ask for that in the scope and name who does the marking. An agency that asks for it unprompted is the one to hire. Our longer piece on how PPC management is run properly covers the mechanics, and what sets the price of Google Ads covers the spend side.

What the contract should say

Five lines. Your company owns the Google Ads, Merchant Center, Analytics and Tag Manager accounts, and the agency is granted access. Media spend is billed to your card or your account, not routed through the agency, unless you have a specific reason to do it the other way. The management fee is stated separately from spend on every invoice. A thirty day notice, with account access retained by you on exit. And a named person who is on the monthly call, which in Gurugram is the clause most often broken, because the senior who pitched is rarely the executive who runs the account.

When Google Ads is the wrong purchase

If your category has almost no search demand, which is true of genuinely new products, paid social creates demand better than paid search captures it. If your margin per sale is thin and your average order value is small, the arithmetic in an expensive market rarely works, and the budget belongs in retention and organic. And if your site converts poorly, fix that first: doubling conversion rate halves your cost per acquisition without touching a bid. For the search side of the same plan, how SEO gets bought in Gurgaon runs through the parallel process.

What Gurgaon advertisers ask before hiring a Google Ads agency

What is a reasonable management fee for an account spending INR 1,00,000 a month?

Around INR 15,000 to 20,000, or 15 percent, is a normal Gurugram number for that spend. Below that you are likely buying a shared queue, and above it you should be getting senior attention and a landing page conversation, not only account hygiene.

Should the agency hold our ad account under their manager account?

They can manage it from their manager account, and the account itself should be created and owned by your company. Linking is normal, ownership transfer is not.

Is a Gurgaon agency better than one in a cheaper city?

For an expensive category, experience in that category matters far more than the address. Where a local agency earns its premium is in understanding the Delhi NCR buyer, the seasonality and the micro markets, which is real in property, education and healthcare.

How long before a new account settles?

Four to six weeks for a small account to produce usable data, and a quarter before cost per qualified lead means much. Changing everything every week is the main reason accounts never settle.

Our leads are poor quality. Is that the agency's fault?

Partly, and partly the brief. Tighten the keyword and negative lists, make the form ask one qualifying question, and feed sales outcomes back weekly. Quality improves within two cycles when all three happen.

Can we run Google Ads ourselves with a consultant checking it?

Yes, and in Gurugram that is a good value option: a few hours a month of a senior freelancer at INR 1,500 to 4,000 an hour, with your own marketer running the account day to day.

The question that does not show up in your ads dashboard

Paid search captures the buyer who is already typing a query into Google. A growing share of the same buyers in Gurugram now open ChatGPT or Gemini first, describe their problem and read the two or three businesses the assistant names. There is no auction there and no dashboard, and the names come from pages and listings the model has read, which means an advertiser can be the top bidder on a term and absent from the answer. Ask an assistant the question your best keyword represents and see who it names. There is no bid to raise here, so the work is page level, and it starts with knowing where you stand. A free report from AI Knows Us at aiknowsus.com shows which of those prompts return your name and what each answer was built from.