Srikanth sells apartments in and around Kondapur. Three-bedroom units, mostly, in the ₹80 lakh to ₹1.5 crore range. He’s been running Google Ads for a year and a half, spending close to ₹1,00,000 a month, and until recently he had no real answer to the question we asked him in our first call: “Is that working?”
He knew his ad account was “active.” He knew leads came in, sometimes. He didn’t know his cost per lead, didn’t know how many of those leads turned into actual site visits, and had never compared his numbers against anything, because he had nothing to compare them to.
That last part is the real problem. Not the ad spend. The absence of a benchmark.
Most business owners we talk to are in the same position. They know roughly what they’re spending. They rarely know what “good” looks like for their specific industry, in this specific market, right now. So they either assume everything’s fine because leads are trickling in, or they assume the whole thing is broken because it’s not raining leads. Neither is a useful way to run a budget.
Here’s what we’ve found, working across Google Ads accounts for Hyderabad businesses in different sectors. These are ranges, not guarantees — your actual numbers depend on your specific service, competition, and how tight your targeting is. But they’re a real starting point, which is more than most business owners currently have.
What a reasonable cost per lead looks like, by industry
Clinics and healthcare. Expect somewhere in the ₹800 to ₹1,800 range per lead for most specialities, with cosmetic and elective procedures often running higher because of intense competition on those keywords. If you’re paying meaningfully more than that consistently, the issue is usually landing page relevance or overly broad match types, not the platform itself.
Retail and e-commerce. Generally the cheapest lane, often ₹300 to ₹700 per lead or qualified click-through, because purchase intent tends to be clearer and the funnel shorter. If your retail account is running well above this, check whether you’re bidding on broad, unqualified search terms instead of specific product searches.
Real estate. This is where Srikanth’s numbers live, and it’s naturally one of the more expensive categories — ₹2,500 to ₹6,000 per lead is common for residential projects in this price bracket, given how few people are genuinely ready to buy a flat this month versus just browsing. The number that matters more than cost per lead here is cost per qualified site visit, which most real estate advertisers never actually track.
Professional services — legal, chartered accountancy, consulting, architecture. Typically ₹1,200 to ₹3,000 per lead, reflecting the high value of each client relationship and the smaller, more competitive keyword pool.
If your numbers are close to these ranges, your account is probably in reasonable shape. If they’re two or three times higher, something in your setup is leaking money, and it’s almost always fixable.
What a healthy account actually looks like
It’s not just about the cost per lead number. A healthy Google Ads account has a handful of things in place that a lot of accounts we audit simply don’t:
Conversion tracking that’s actually accurate — not just “form submitted,” but ideally tied to genuinely qualified leads, not spam or accidental submissions. A negative keyword list that’s been built and updated, not left as the default empty list from setup day. Landing pages that match the specific ad someone clicked, rather than sending every click to the same generic homepage. And a campaign structure organised by intent — someone searching “apartments for sale Kondapur” and someone searching “real estate agent near me” are different people with different needs, and lumping them into one generic campaign wastes budget on both.
Srikanth’s account, when we opened it up, had none of the above. Conversion tracking counted every form view as a lead, whether or not it was submitted. There wasn’t a single negative keyword. Every ad, regardless of what someone searched, sent traffic to the same homepage.
5 signs your ad spend is being wasted
You’re seeing clicks but can’t say with confidence how many became real, qualified leads. Your cost per lead has crept up over months without anyone investigating why. You’re running the same ads and keywords you started with a year ago, untouched. Your landing page is your homepage, for every single campaign. And nobody can tell you, in one sentence, what your target cost per lead actually is.
If two or more of these sound familiar, it’s worth a proper look before spending another month on autopilot.
How we audit an account in 48 hours
We don’t need weeks to tell you where the money’s going. Give us access, and within two days we’ll walk your account structure, check conversion tracking accuracy, review search term reports for wasted spend on irrelevant queries, and benchmark your actual cost per lead against what we’d expect for your industry.
For Srikanth, that audit found roughly 40% of his monthly spend going to search terms that had nothing to do with his actual listings — people searching for real estate jobs, real estate courses, and property in cities he doesn’t operate in. Fixing the negative keyword list and tightening his campaign structure brought his real, verified cost per lead down from an estimated ₹9,000 to just under ₹4,200 within the first month. Still real estate money, but a number that finally made sense against the benchmark.
If you’re spending ₹1,00,000 a month or anywhere close to it and you can’t say with confidence what you’re actually getting for it, that’s worth fixing before next month’s budget goes out. Get in touch for a free Google Ads account audit — we’ll show you exactly where you stand against these numbers.
