Roughly half the businesses that call us have already run Google Ads and stopped. The account is usually still sitting there, paused, with three months of spend in it and a handful of leads. The conclusion they have drawn is that Google Ads does not work for their category.
When we open those accounts, the campaigns are rarely the problem. The structure is fine, the keywords are reasonable, the landing page is adequate. What is wrong is the budget — not because it was small, but because nobody worked out what number the category required before switching it on.
Why Gurugram clicks cost what they do
Cost per click is set by how many businesses want the same customer and what that customer is worth to them. Gurugram concentrates buying power into a small area, so both halves of that equation run hot. A dental implant enquiry, a two-bedroom site visit and an IIT coaching admission are all worth enough that a dozen advertisers will pay four figures to be in front of one.
| Category | Typical CPC | Typical cost per enquiry |
|---|---|---|
| Dental and cosmetic clinics | ₹90–₹220 | ₹700–₹1,800 |
| Real estate and interiors | ₹120–₹400 | ₹1,200–₹4,000 |
| Coaching and test prep | ₹60–₹180 | ₹500–₹1,600 |
| Home and appliance services | ₹35–₹110 | ₹250–₹900 |
| B2B and industrial | ₹80–₹300 | ₹1,500–₹6,000 |
Those numbers are why a campaign that would be comfortably profitable in a tier-two city loses money here on identical settings. The same keyword, the same ad, the same landing page — three times the click price.
The floor, worked out from your own maths
There is a floor below which paid search cannot be evaluated, and it has nothing to do with what you can afford. Google's bidding needs a supply of conversions to learn from. Below roughly thirty conversions a month it is largely guessing, results swing wildly week to week, and you cannot tell a bad campaign from an unlucky fortnight.
So work backwards. Take the number of customers you want this month, divide by the rate at which your team closes an enquiry, and multiply by the cost per enquiry your category is likely to carry.
What actually happens below the floor
Underfunded accounts fail in a specific, recognisable sequence, and it is worth knowing because it looks like bad luck rather than arithmetic.
- 01The daily budget runs out by mid-morning, so your ads are absent for the afternoon and evening searches — often the ones that convert best.
- 02With too few conversions, smart bidding never exits the learning phase, and cost per lead stays high for reasons that have nothing to do with your offer.
- 03Because volume is thin, one expensive week reads as a trend. The budget gets cut, which makes the next week thinner still.
- 04Three months in, there is not enough data to justify continuing, and the account is paused with the question still unanswered.
“The cheapest campaign we ever ran was also the most expensive. Six months of spend, no answer at the end of it.”
If the maths does not work, narrow the problem
The instinct when the number comes out too high is to spend less. That is the one move that reliably fails. Narrow instead — the same budget concentrated on a smaller problem clears the conversion floor that the same budget spread thin never will.
- Cut the geography. Five kilometres you can genuinely serve beats all of NCR you cannot.
- Cut the service list. Advertise the one treatment, course or product line with the best margin, not the full menu.
- Cut the hours. If nobody answers the phone after 7pm, do not buy clicks after 7pm.
- Start on search only. Save display, video and broad prospecting until something is working.
And if paid search genuinely cannot clear the floor in your category, that is useful information rather than a dead end. It usually means the budget belongs in SEO and local visibility first, where a clinic or institute can compete on effort rather than on bid.
How we handle this in practice
Every proposal we send states an assumed media budget separately from our fee, with the conversion maths behind it written out. If the number is higher than a business wants to hear, we would rather have that conversation before the account is built than four months later. What we charge, and why it is a flat fee rather than a share of your budget, is answered in the FAQ; the campaign work itself is described under performance marketing.
If you are weighing this up for a business in NCR, our Gurugram page covers what the local market does to these numbers in more detail — and a growth call will get you a straight answer on whether your category can carry paid search at the budget you have in mind.