Performance Marketing
2026-10-23 · 9 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Run an ad, send the click to the homepage, wait for someone to find the contact page and fill out a form - this is how most small business ad campaigns in Nepal work, and it is not really a funnel, it is a hope. A real funnel is deliberately designed for each stage of the decision, with a specific next step at each point, rather than dropping everyone into the same general page and hoping they figure out what to do.
“A funnel is not a landing page with a form on it. It is a sequence of specific, deliberate steps that matches how your actual customer moves from noticing you to contacting you.”
Awareness is where someone first notices your business, usually through a social post, a search result, or word of mouth. Interest is where they look closer - visiting a landing page, reading reviews, watching a video. Decision is where they compare you against alternatives and look for a reason to trust you specifically. Action is the actual contact - and in Nepal, this is very often a WhatsApp message or phone call rather than a form submission, which most funnel templates built for Western markets do not account for.
Designing for this means your landing page needs a prominent WhatsApp or call button, not just a form buried at the bottom of the page, because for a meaningful share of your audience, that is the step they will actually take.
A landing page that converts has one clear offer, not five competing messages. It states specifically what the visitor gets and from whom, puts the WhatsApp or phone contact option above the fold where it does not require scrolling to find, and removes anything that is not directly relevant to the decision at hand - extensive company history, unrelated services, navigation menus that let someone wander away before taking action.
A generic "Contact Us" page pulled from a template is almost always a leak in the funnel, not a step in it - it gives the visitor too many options and too little reason to act right now rather than later, which in practice often means never.
A lead that sits unanswered for a few hours has usually already contacted at least one other business by the time anyone replies. Response within the first several minutes, while the person is still actively in a buying mindset, converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a response the next day, across virtually every category we have seen data for in Nepal. This is a funnel problem as much as a sales problem - if nobody is monitoring the WhatsApp number or form inbox in real time, the funnel is broken at its final, most expensive step.
Every stage of this funnel needs to be measurable, which usually means proper GA4 event tracking for WhatsApp clicks, calls, and form submissions, plus a simple lead log or CRM that tracks what happens after the first contact - how many inquiries actually became customers, and how long that took. Without this, you can see that a campaign generated inquiries but have no real way of knowing whether it generated customers, which is the only number that ultimately matters.
Building a proper funnel - landing page, tracking, a lead response process - typically takes two to four weeks to set up properly for a small or mid-size business, and it is worth doing once rather than rebuilding it every time a new campaign launches. Arcetis builds this funnel structure as the foundation of every lead-generation campaign we run, because sending paid traffic into an untracked, generic contact page is the most common way we see ad budgets get wasted in Nepal.
This varies enormously by category and traffic quality, so treat any universal benchmark with caution. What matters more than hitting a specific percentage is whether the rate improves over time as you test the offer, headline, and page structure against your own traffic.
A spreadsheet can work for very low lead volumes if someone disciplined is maintaining it, but it breaks down quickly once more than one person is handling inquiries or once follow-up reminders start getting missed. See our dedicated comparison of CRM versus spreadsheets for a fuller answer.
Expect the first two to four weeks to be largely about testing and adjusting - the offer, the page, the targeting - rather than peak performance. Funnels that get left untouched after launch tend to decay in performance over time as the initial creative and copy go stale.