Performance Marketing in India

Performance marketing retainers in India typically fall into three bands: ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 per month for small accounts, ₹40,000 to ₹1,00,000 for SMEs running two or three channels, and ₹1,00,000 to ₹3,00,000 for established brands with a full team on the account. Below about ₹5 lakh of monthly ad spend most agencies charge a flat retainer; above it the common model is a hybrid, a base fee plus 8 to 12 percent of spend. Percentage-only models usually carry a floor of ₹25,000 to ₹50,000.

Mediaverse Digital publishes three tiers. Performance Launch is ₹45,000 per month for Meta and Google managed together on spend up to ₹3 lakh, which is ₹5,000 less than buying the two Launch plans separately and comes with a single dashboard instead of two. Performance Growth is ₹85,000 per month for Meta, Google and YouTube on spend between ₹3 and 10 lakh. Performance Scale is ₹1,50,000 per month plus 8 percent of spend above ₹10 lakh, which pays for a dedicated pod of a media buyer, a creative lead and an analyst.

Ad budget is the larger number and it is yours: it is billed by Meta and Google to your own cards or invoices, and we never route it through our accounts. A realistic floor for a two-channel programme to produce readable data is ₹1 lakh a month combined, and ₹1.5 to 3 lakh for ecommerce brands that need enough purchases each week for the algorithms to learn. Shoots and landing page builds are scoped separately, so the number on this page is the whole management fee.

Running ads is a channel activity: someone manages your Meta account, someone else manages Google, and each reports its own return. Performance marketing is a business activity: every channel is bought against one number, the cost of acquiring a customer or the return on total ad spend. The difference shows up the first time Meta and Google both claim the same purchase. A performance team counts it once, in GA4 or your order data, and moves budget based on which channel is actually adding customers at the margin.

It also changes what gets tested. When one team owns creative across channels, a hook that wins on Instagram becomes a YouTube Short and a Performance Max asset within the week, and a search query that converts becomes the headline of the next Meta ad. This is why we sell the channels together at a lower combined fee: the work is genuinely shared, and the reporting only makes sense when it is.

Start from what each channel does. Google Search captures demand that already exists, so for a service business it deserves the first and most defensible share, typically 40 to 60 percent, until impression share shows the good queries are exhausted. Meta creates demand and retargets it, and for ecommerce and consumer brands it usually carries 40 to 70 percent of budget because it can find buyers who were not yet searching. YouTube is demand creation at a lower cost per reach, and it earns its 10 to 20 percent by making the other two cheaper over 2 to 3 months.

Those are starting points, not rules. From month two the split is set by marginal cost per acquisition: we look at what the last ₹50,000 on each channel produced, not the average, and move money toward the channel whose next rupee is cheapest. On Scale this is modelled with allocation curves; on Launch and Growth it is a monthly written recommendation. Either way, the reallocation is proposed to you with the evidence, and increases in total budget remain your decision.

One weekly session covers every channel. The analyst reconciles platform numbers against GA4 and your order or CRM data and flags any tracking drift. The media buyer moves budget between channels and campaigns against the blended target, cuts the audiences and placements that missed it, and decides which tests graduate. The creative lead briefs the next batch from what the test matrix taught. Everything is written into one change log with a date and a reason. On Growth the senior lead joins a fortnightly review; on Scale the dashboard updates weekly and a quarterly business review looks at the whole funnel.

We work from Bangalore and deliver remotely across India, and for US, UK and UAE clients we run the same pod on their hours for review calls. All accounts, pixels, tags and audiences are created in your own Business Manager and Google account, and the dashboard is built on your GA4 property, so the entire setup survives the day you decide to bring it in-house or change agencies. Month-to-month terms follow from that: we have to earn each renewal on the dashboard numbers.