Google Ads punishes carelessness more directly than Meta does. On Meta, a weak campaign underperforms. On Google, a weak campaign can spend a full day's budget on searches that were never going to buy.
Here is what to know before hiring anyone in Delhi to run it.
Where Google fits versus Meta
Google captures existing demand. Someone typing "CPC medical coding course fees" already wants the thing. Meta creates demand — it puts an offer in front of people who were not looking.
Most businesses need both, but the order matters. If people are already searching for what you sell, start with Google: it is the shorter path to revenue. If nobody knows your category exists, start with Meta, because there is no search volume to capture.
The mistake is running both from day one on a small budget, and starving each.
Campaign types, briefly
Search is the workhorse for lead generation and should usually be first.
Performance Max is Google's automated everything-campaign. It can work well with clean conversion data, and it can quietly spend heavily on low-value placements without it. It rewards good tracking and punishes bad tracking more than any other campaign type.
Display is cheap per impression and easy to waste. Useful for remarketing, weak for cold acquisition.
YouTube is strong for demand creation when you have real video. Weak when you upload a static image with music.
The three settings that leak the most money
Broad match without negatives. Broad match will find searches you never imagined, including "free," "jobs," "salary," and your competitors' names. It needs an actively maintained negative keyword list from week one.
Search Partners and Display Expansion left on. These are enabled by default and quietly extend spend to lower-intent inventory. Test them deliberately, do not inherit them.
Location targeting set to "presence or interest." The default includes people merely interested in your area. A Delhi clinic does not need clicks from someone in another state reading about Delhi.
Ask any prospective agency about these three. The answers are diagnostic.
Benchmarks worth watching
Quality Score matters because it directly affects what you pay per click — improving relevance lowers cost without touching bids.
Search impression share tells you how much of the available demand you are capturing. Low share with good ROAS usually means you should raise budget.
Conversion rate by keyword matters more than overall conversion rate, because it shows which searches actually buy. A keyword with high volume and no conversions is a subsidy you are paying.
Search terms report — not keywords, terms — shows what people actually typed. Review it weekly. It is the single highest-return half hour in Google Ads management.
What management costs
Delhi NCR agencies typically charge ₹20,000 to ₹1,00,000+ monthly, or 10–20% of ad spend. The same ratio logic applies as with Meta: if fees exceed roughly a quarter of spend, the economics are working against you.
Below about ₹75,000 monthly ad spend, ongoing agency management often does not pay for itself on Google. A one-time build with structured training frequently returns more.
Red flags specific to Google Ads
- They cannot show you the search terms report. This is the most basic artefact of active management.
- Everything is Performance Max. Convenient for the agency, opaque for you, and dependent on tracking quality they may not have built.
- No negative keyword list. Or one that has not been updated in months.
- Conversion tracking counting form views instead of submissions. Inflates results dramatically. Check what the conversion action actually measures.
- One ad group with fifty keywords. Relevance collapses, Quality Score falls, costs rise.
Tracking, again
Google Ads optimises on the conversions you report. Report the wrong thing and it will get very good at producing the wrong thing.
Define conversions as the action that has business value — a qualified form submission, a booked call, a purchase — and where possible send offline conversion data back so the platform learns which leads actually became customers. Without that loop, you are optimising for form fills, and form fills are not revenue.
Before you sign
Ask for a proposed account structure, the first negative keyword list, what conversion actions they will define, and how they will handle the search terms report. Then ask what they would do differently if your budget were half what it is.
That last answer separates people who plan around your economics from people who plan around their retainer.
For a starting read on where your site is losing conversions, run our free growth audit.