"We'll manage your PPC" covers a huge range of actual effort, from a monthly bid nudge to a disciplined weekly process. Here is the scope-of-work checklist worth holding any Mumbai agency to in 2026, and how Google and Meta certifications actually work, in plain text.
Real PPC management covers six things: an account structure organised around intent, an ongoing negative keyword process, a bid strategy matched to your actual conversion volume, feed hygiene for Shopping and Performance Max, active budget pacing, and a reporting cadence that separates weekly checks from monthly strategy. Google Partner and Premier Partner status, and individual Google Ads or Meta Blueprint certifications, are all publicly verifiable, ask for the agency's Partner ID and check it yourself rather than taking a badge on a slide at face value.
"Managing" an ad account can mean anything from a five-minute glance at a dashboard to a disciplined weekly process across six distinct areas. The gap between those two is most of what separates a wasted budget from a working one.
| Area | Frequency | What "done properly" looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Account structure | Set at launch, revisited quarterly | Campaigns split by intent and margin, not by product catalogue alone |
| Negative keywords | Weekly | Search terms report reviewed and negatives added before spend accumulates |
| Bid strategy | Reviewed monthly, changed rarely | Matched to actual conversion volume, not switched on a whim |
| Feed hygiene | Weekly disapprovals, monthly audit | Titles, attributes and GTINs complete; disapprovals fixed within days |
| Budget pacing | Daily | Spend tracked against a monthly cap, not left to the platform's own daily average |
| Reporting | Weekly and monthly | Operational fixes weekly; CPA, learnings and next month's plan monthly |
The account should be organised around buyer intent and margin, not just mirrored from the product catalogue. Branded, generic and competitor terms sit in separate campaigns so budget and bidding can be controlled independently. Match types are chosen deliberately, exact and phrase for proven intent, broad only inside a Smart Bidding strategy with enough conversion data to guide it. Ad groups stay tight, a handful of closely related terms per group, so ad copy can speak directly to the search rather than covering everything at once.
This is the single most neglected part of PPC management and the fastest way to see whether an agency is actually looking at the account. The search terms report should be reviewed weekly on any live campaign, and daily for the first two to three weeks of a new account or a significant expansion, to catch irrelevant queries before they consume a meaningful share of budget. Negative lists should be shared across campaigns where relevant, not rebuilt from scratch each time, and the reasoning for each addition should be visible in the account's change history.
Bid strategy should follow the data available, not the other way round. Below roughly 30 conversions a month at the campaign level, Smart Bidding has too little signal to optimise well, and manual or enhanced CPC bidding with tight oversight usually outperforms it. Once that volume exists consistently, target CPA or target ROAS bidding can take over, but the target itself should be reviewed monthly against actual margin, not left at whatever number was set at launch.
Any account running Shopping or Performance Max lives or dies on the product feed. That means complete titles and attributes, correct GTINs or MPNs where applicable, accurate pricing and availability synced from the source system, and disapprovals fixed within days rather than left to silently cut off traffic to that product. A monthly feed audit checking attribute completeness and category mapping catches drift that a weekly glance at spend will not.
A platform's own daily budget setting is not the same as active pacing. Real budget pacing means tracking cumulative spend against a monthly cap on a rolling basis, adjusting for day-of-week and seasonal swings, and catching an overspend or underspend trend early enough to correct it, rather than discovering on the 28th that the month's budget ran out on the 19th.
Three separate things get conflated in most pitches, worth untangling before you weigh any of them.
All three are independently checkable, Google publishes a public Partner directory searchable by agency name and location, and individual certifications resolve to a public credential page. If an agency in Mumbai's performance marketing market, among names like Interactive Avenues, Performics India, iProspect India, Schbang, WATConsult, Kinnect, Social Beat or Matrix Bricks, claims Partner or Premier Partner status in a pitch, verify it on Google's own directory rather than the agency's word or a badge image on a slide. The badge tells you the agency spends and retains clients at scale. It does not tell you whether the specific people who will run your account are any good, which is what the checklist above is for.
The checklist above is easiest to see in accounts where structure, bidding and pacing were rebuilt from a weaker starting point. Three from our own work, with the numbers and periods attached.
Cost efficiency gain across six months after restructuring campaigns around product-led intent instead of broad awareness targeting.
Read the case → D2C menswear₹441CambridgeCost per purchase held at 480 purchases a year, on disciplined bid and budget pacing across 53.8L annual Meta impressions.
Read the case → B2B industrial₹15.99LuminaAverage CPC held low through tight account structure and continuous negative-keyword discipline on a WhatsApp-first funnel.
Read the case →The full set is on our case studies page.
For the ten questions to ask before signing any performance marketing contract, and how pricing works across models, see how to choose a performance marketing agency in Mumbai and performance marketing pricing in Mumbai.
Six things at minimum: an account structure built around intent and match types, an ongoing negative keyword process, a deliberate bid strategy matched to available conversion data, feed hygiene for any Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, active daily and monthly budget pacing, and a reporting cadence that separates weekly checks from monthly strategic reviews.
Google Partner status is awarded to agencies that meet a minimum managed ad spend threshold, keep individual staff certified on Google's product exams, and maintain healthy account performance and client retention. It confirms scale and baseline competence, not creative quality or strategic judgment, so it should be one input into a decision, not the whole decision.
Premier Partner is a smaller, higher tier within the same programme, limited to roughly the top few percent of Partner agencies by managed spend, account growth and client retention in a given market. Both statuses are publicly checkable on Google's own Partner directory rather than something to take on an agency's word.
Weekly at minimum for active search campaigns, using the search terms report to catch irrelevant queries before they consume meaningful budget. New accounts or recently expanded campaigns need daily review for the first two to three weeks while the negative list is still being built out.
A weekly check covers spend pacing, any disapprovals or policy issues, and search-term or placement anomalies that need an immediate fix. A monthly report covers cost per acquisition by campaign, creative and keyword-level learnings, budget reallocation logic, and a written plan for the next month tied to a specific hypothesis.