The standard answer is a percentage of revenue. For a small Indian business that answer is close to useless, because it tells you nothing about whether the spend can actually produce a customer.
Work backwards from a single sale instead.
The calculation
Four numbers, and you probably know three of them already.
- Average order value: what one customer pays you.
- Gross margin: what fraction of that you keep before marketing.
- Enquiry-to-customer rate: how many enquiries it takes to close one.
- Target payback: whether one sale must cover acquisition, or you can wait for repeat purchases.
A worked example. A service business charges ₹40,000 at 50 percent margin, so ₹20,000 of room per customer. One in five enquiries closes. That means you can pay up to ₹4,000 per enquiry and break even on the first sale.
That single number tells you whether any channel is viable before you spend anything. If enquiries in your category cost ₹300, you have enormous headroom. If they cost ₹6,000, that channel does not work for this offer at this price.
The minimum that is not a waste
Separate from what you can afford is what the platform needs to function.
Meta needs roughly 50 conversion events in 7 days to exit its learning phase, which is about 7.14 a day. So your daily ad set budget divided by 7.14 is the most expensive result it can reliably buy.
At ₹700 a day that is about ₹98 per result, which supports messages and cheap leads but not a purchase for most offers. At ₹3,000 a day it is about ₹420, which covers most consultation leads.
Budget below the level your objective requires and you do not get a smaller version of the result. You usually get no result, because the campaign never learns.
Where the rest of the budget goes
Ad spend is not the whole marketing budget, and treating it as such is why businesses run ads into pages that cannot convert.
A sensible first-year split for a small Indian business is roughly half on paid traffic, a quarter on the assets that traffic lands on, and a quarter on the follow-up systems that stop leads going cold. The exact ratio matters less than not spending 100 percent on traffic.
What to do in month one
Do the arithmetic above. Then spend ₹700 to ₹1,000 a day for seven days without touching anything, pointed at one page with one offer.
That is roughly ₹5,000 to ₹7,000 to find out whether strangers respond to your offer at all. It is the cheapest genuinely useful information you can buy, and almost nobody buys it before committing to a much larger plan.
The number that should change your budget
Not the industry benchmark. Your own cost per enquiry after two weeks of real spend.
If it is below your break-even number, spend more. If it is above, fix the offer or the page before adding budget, because more traffic to something that does not convert simply loses money faster.
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