Almost every answer to this online is “it depends” followed by a contact form. It does depend — but on two things you can work out in five minutes, and the bands agencies actually publish are narrow enough to be useful.
The short version: Indian agencies charge somewhere between ₹8,000 and ₹50,000 a month as a flat retainer, and the established ones charge 10–20% of your ad spend, with most landing on 15%. A hybrid — a base fee plus a percentage — is the third common shape, and the base usually sits between ₹30,000 and ₹75,000.
The one number that decides everything
Not your industry, not your city — your monthly ad spend. Management is a fixed amount of work whether you spend ₹15,000 or ₹1,50,000, so the fee is roughly flat while the money it can save you scales with the budget. That gives you two thresholds worth memorising.
Below about ₹20,000 a month of spend, no agency fee can pay for itself. Even a brilliant agency that halves your waste saves you a few thousand rupees, and the cheapest real retainer costs more than that. Run it yourself, or buy software and spend the time.
Above about ₹30,000 a month, a competent agency typically reduces cost-per-lead by enough to cover its own fee. That is the point where handing it over stops being a luxury.
The bands, side by side
| Your monthly spend | Flat retainer | Percentage | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under ₹20,000 | — | — | Do it yourself or use software. No fee at this spend can pay for itself. |
| ₹20,000 – ₹50,000 | ₹8,000 – ₹15,000 | not usually offered | Borderline. A flat fee only, and only if it buys real changes. |
| ₹50,000 – ₹1.5L | ₹12,000 – ₹25,000 | 15% ≈ ₹7,500 – ₹22,500 | The flat fee usually wins here — percentage is too thin to fund the work. |
| ₹1.5L – ₹5L | ₹25,000 – ₹50,000 | 15% ≈ ₹22,500 – ₹75,000 | Percentage starts to make sense. Expect whichever is higher. |
| Over ₹5L | ₹50,000+ | 10 – 15% of spend | Percentage, with a floor. Ask what happens if spend drops. |
Fees are the ranges Indian agencies publish; the thresholds are the arithmetic above. Your own numbers beat all of it — which is what the next section is for.
Work out your own break-even
You do not need anyone’s benchmark. You need two figures from your own account and one piece of division.
Find your monthly spend
Google Ads → Campaigns → last 30 days → Cost
The real number, not the daily budget × 30. Pacing means those rarely match.
Find what is provably wasted
Keywords → Search terms → sort by Cost, add the Conversions column
Add up the cost of every search term with zero conversions over 90 days. That is the floor of what better management could recover.
Divide the fee you are quoted by that number
If the fee is larger than the waste, the agency has to grow your revenue rather than merely stop the bleeding — a much harder promise, and one worth asking them to make out loud.
Ask what the fee does when spend drops
A percentage-only deal quietly rewards spending more. A flat fee quietly rewards doing less. Whichever you sign, know which way it leans.
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What the fee should buy
At any of these prices you should be able to name what changed in your account last month. If the monthly report is a screenshot of impressions and clicks, you are paying for reporting, not management. The ten-changes question is the fastest way to find out which one you have.
One thing nobody quotes for
Conversion tracking. A surprising share of Indian accounts are spending with no working tag on the site at all, which means every number in every report — theirs and yours — is describing clicks rather than customers. Before you compare two quotes, check whether either of them mentions fixing it. Most do not, because it means touching your website and that is somebody else’s job.
Admiral prices on the same logic — the fee moves with your spend, because that is what decides whether it can pay for itself. And the audit runs before you pay anything, so you can do the division above with your own numbers first.