Performance Marketing
2026-10-09 · 9 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Before any paid channel, two things need to exist: a place to send people, and a way to be found for free. The place to send people does not need to be an expensive custom website on day one, a clean, fast, mobile-friendly single page with your services, pricing range, location, and a clear way to contact you (phone, WhatsApp, or a simple form) is enough to start. Basic websites in Nepal run roughly NPR 30,000 to 1,20,000 depending on complexity, and that is a reasonable first investment before any ad spend.
The free way to be found is a fully completed Google Business Profile, correct category, real photos, accurate hours, and your actual service area. This costs nothing but time, and for most local businesses, restaurants, clinics, repair shops, salons, it drives more free discovery than an early paid campaign would, because it captures people already searching for exactly what you sell.
A basic way to measure whether anything happening later is working also needs to exist before spending starts, even something as simple as a phone number that only appears on the website, or a dedicated WhatsApp number used only for online inquiries, so leads can be traced back to a source instead of blending into general foot traffic.
“You do not need five platforms. You need one channel, run properly, for three months before you judge it.”
The channel choice should follow the buying behavior, not trends. If people search for your product or service by name or need, "plumber in Lalitpur," "CRM software Nepal", Google Search ads or SEO fits, because you are catching existing demand. If your product is visual and impulse-driven, clothing, food, home decor, events, Meta or TikTok ads fit better, because you are creating demand by interrupting a scroll with something appealing.
Trying to run Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok simultaneously on a small budget spreads the money too thin to generate enough data on any one of them to know what is working. A budget under roughly NPR 30,000 to 50,000 a month total, management plus media spend, is usually better concentrated on one channel run properly for a full quarter than split four ways and judged after three weeks.
Management fees and ad spend are two separate line items, and conflating them is a common first-timer mistake. A single-channel management fee in Nepal typically runs NPR 15,000 to 30,000 a month at the smaller end, on top of whatever is actually spent with Google or Meta directly. Below roughly NPR 15,000 to 20,000 a month, the fee is often too thin to cover genuine strategy, testing, and reporting, and the work tends to show it.
Ad spend itself should be sized to the business's margin and customer value, not to a round number that feels affordable. A business with a NPR 2,000 average order and thin margins needs a very different daily budget than one selling a NPR 50,000 service, because the cost to acquire one customer needs to make sense against what that customer is actually worth.
A simple way to sanity-check a budget before committing: write down what one new customer is actually worth, including repeat purchases if relevant, then decide what share of that you are willing to spend to acquire them. If that number cannot sensibly cover even a handful of clicks at the channel's typical cost, the business may need a different channel, a better offer, or more margin before paid marketing makes sense at all.
Running a small Google Ads or Meta Ads account yourself is genuinely learnable, both platforms have improved their guided setup significantly, and for a very small budget the platform's own automation can perform reasonably well without a manager actively tuning it daily. The real skill that is hard to self-teach is diagnosing why something is not working, is it the targeting, the creative, the landing page, or the offer, and most beginners burn their first month's budget without knowing which of those four to fix.
Hiring help makes more sense once the budget is large enough that a mistake is expensive, or once the time cost of learning it yourself is worth more than the management fee. There is no universal right answer here; it is genuinely a function of how much the owner's time is worth and how much is being spent.
The most common mistake is judging results after a week or two. Ad platforms need time, and some data volume, to optimize delivery, and a campaign often looks worse in week one than it will by week four purely because the system is still learning. The second most common mistake is sending ad traffic to a page that does not clearly state price, location, or next step, so visitors leave confused regardless of how good the targeting was.
A third, quieter mistake is not tracking what happens after the click at all, no way to know whether a lead actually became a paying customer, which means next month's budget decisions are guesses rather than informed choices. Even a simple shared spreadsheet logging every inquiry's source is enough to fix this at a small scale.
Weeks one and two: finish the website basics and Google Business Profile, set up a simple way to track where leads come from. Weeks three through eight: run one channel, one clear offer, and resist the urge to change the creative or targeting every few days. Weeks nine through twelve: review actual numbers, cost per lead, and how many of those leads became customers, then decide whether to scale the budget, adjust the approach, or bring in outside help for the next phase.
This pace feels slow to an owner eager for results, but it is deliberate: three months is roughly the minimum time needed to collect enough data to tell the difference between a channel that genuinely does not fit the business and a channel that was simply judged too early. Businesses that restart from scratch on a new channel every few weeks rarely build the kind of data history that makes month four, five, and six meaningfully better than month one. Arcetis works with businesses at exactly this stage, where a vendor-neutral read on what is actually working is more useful than a sales pitch.
For a single channel including management, somewhere around NPR 20,000 to 30,000 total is a realistic floor for a managed campaign with ad spend included. Below that, it is usually more sensible to run it yourself using the platform's own tools until the business can support a proper budget.
Paid ads produce results faster but stop the moment spending stops. SEO is slower, often three to six months before meaningful traffic, but compounds over time. Many small businesses do best starting with a basic Google Business Profile and simple on-page SEO, which is largely free, and adding paid ads once there is budget to spare.
Track leads back to their source, even with a basic spreadsheet, and connect that to how many became paying customers, not just how many clicked. A channel that generates cheap clicks but no sales is not working, regardless of how good the cost-per-click number looks.