Cost and contracts
How much does a performance marketing agency cost in India?
There is no single rate, because the fee tracks the work rather than your revenue: how many channels run, how many markets, how big the product catalogue is, and whether the tracking has to be rebuilt first. What matters more than the headline number is the ratio of fee to ad spend. If management costs a large fraction of the media budget, most of the money is buying attention rather than customers.
What a performance marketing agency costs →
Should an agency charge a retainer or a percentage of ad spend?
A flat retainer, in almost every case. A percentage pays the agency more when you spend more, so the day the honest recommendation is to cut a budget, that advice costs them money. The structure survives everybody’s good intentions, which is why it matters more than the number attached to it.
Retainer vs percentage vs performance →
What is the minimum ad budget worth hiring an agency for?
It is really a minimum number of conversions, not rupees. Ad platforms need a volume of conversion events before bidding stabilises; below that the account cannot learn and every reading is noise. Convert that conversion count into a budget using your own conversion rate and click cost, and you have your floor. Below it, run one channel yourself and put the fee into media instead.
Who owns the ad account when an agency runs it?
You should. If the account was created inside the agency’s business, the conversion history, the pixel, the audiences and the year-on-year reporting belong to them, and none of it can be exported. Check Google Ads under Admin, and Meta under Business Settings, where the Owner column should name your company rather than theirs.
Results and timelines
How long does it take for paid ads to work?
Expect two weeks of setup and data gathering, four to six weeks for the platform’s bidding to stabilise, and a first trustworthy read somewhere between week six and week twelve. The clock is driven by how fast the account gathers conversions, not by effort, so a business with few monthly conversions sits at the slower end whatever anyone does.
How long until paid ads work →
Can an agency guarantee a ROAS or a cost per lead?
Not honestly, before seeing your margins, your offer and your historical data. A confident number on the first call is a sales device that later becomes an excuse. There is also a reliable way to hit a guaranteed return without growing the business: concentrate spend on branded search and remarketing, which is demand you already had.
Why nobody can guarantee a ROAS →
What is a good cost per lead?
Whatever your own margin and close rate allow. Take the gross profit a customer is worth, decide what share of it you will spend to win them, and multiply by your close rate from that channel. The result is your ceiling. Industry averages blend businesses with different deal sizes and close rates, so they are true of none of them.
Setting your own cost per lead target →
How do I know if my agency is doing a good job?
Falling results are not the signal, because costs rise and seasons turn. What is diagnostic is whether anyone noticed before you did, whether the reports contain decisions rather than dashboards, whether anything in the account has changed in the last six weeks, and whether bad news arrives before you ask for it.
Seven signs your agency has stopped working →
Choosing an agency
What should I ask an agency before signing?
Three questions do most of the work. Who specifically will run the account and how many others do they carry. What would make you tell me to stop spending. And show me a report you sent a client last week. Specific, fast, slightly uncomfortable answers are a good sign; smooth and flattering ones are the product of a sales process rather than a media team.
Should I hire an agency, go in-house, or use a freelancer?
An agency is faster to start, carries pattern recognition from accounts you have not seen, and can be stopped. A hire is cheaper at steady state and keeps the knowledge. The common mistake is hiring a first in-house marketer to prove a channel nobody has proved yet, which means paying someone to learn alone what an experienced team already knows.
Agency, in-house or freelancer →
Does a Google Partner badge mean an agency is good?
It means they manage a minimum level of spend, hold current certifications, and meet Google’s account health thresholds. None of that measures results on your account, and part of it rewards adopting Google’s own recommendations, which are not always in your interest. It is useful for escalation when an account is wrongly suspended, and weak as a hiring signal.
What the Google Partner badge measures →
How do I read an agency case study?
Ask four things: what was the starting number, over what period and against what comparison, what else changed in the business at the same time, and which metric is being reported. A percentage with no baseline is half a result, and platform-reported ROAS is the number the platform most wants to claim credit with.
How to evaluate agency case studies →
Running the work
Should I start with Google or Meta?
Google first if people already search for what you sell, because search captures demand that exists. Meta first if they do not know the product exists yet and you need to create the demand. Running both on a budget that can only fund one properly is the most common way to learn nothing from either.
Are instant lead form ads better than a landing page?
Instant forms produce cheaper leads precisely because they remove the friction that was doing your qualifying. They also give you no pixel event and no visitor to retarget. For low-ticket, fast-response businesses they work; for considered purchases the landing page usually produces fewer, better enquiries at a lower cost per closed deal.
Lead form ads vs landing page →
Should I run SEO and paid ads at the same time?
Yes, where the budget supports both, because each makes the other cheaper. Paid search shows you which queries actually convert, which is better keyword research than any tool provides, and organic rankings reduce what you have to pay for the same demand over time. The common failure is running them as two unconnected projects with separate reports.