Performance Marketing
2026-10-28 · 7 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Traditional marketing - a billboard on the Pokhara-Kathmandu highway, a newspaper ad, a radio spot - charges a fixed price regardless of what happens afterward. You pay the same amount whether it brings in ten customers or none. Performance marketing flips that: you primarily pay based on measurable actions - a click, a lead form submission, a sale - most commonly through platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads, where you set a budget and pay as people actually interact with your ad.
This does not mean it is free of guesswork - you are still paying for exposure through an auction system, and clicks do not automatically become customers. What it does mean is that the results are measurable in a way traditional advertising rarely is: you can see exactly how many people clicked, what it cost per click, and - if tracking is set up correctly - how many of those clicks turned into an actual inquiry or sale.
This shift toward measurable spend is also why performance marketing has grown faster than traditional advertising in Nepal over the last several years - a business owner can see, in near real time, whether a rupee spent today produced a call or a sale, which is simply not possible with a billboard.
“In performance marketing, you only pay for what works - but someone still has to make it work, and that someone costs money too.”
Google Ads puts your business in front of people actively searching for what you offer - "web development company Pokhara" or "best momo delivery Kathmandu" - which tends to capture people closer to a buying decision, since they are searching with intent. Meta Ads on Facebook and Instagram work differently - they interrupt someone scrolling with a relevant offer, which is better suited to demand you create rather than demand that already exists, and tends to work well for visual products and impulse-friendly offers.
Both run on an auction - you are bidding against other advertisers for the same audience, and your cost per click or per result depends on competition in your industry and location, the quality and relevance of your ad, and how well your landing page converts once someone arrives.
Which channel to prioritize first often comes down to your sales cycle - a plumber or electrician usually gets more value from Google Ads, since customers are actively searching when they need one urgently, while a clothing or home decor brand often sees stronger results starting with Meta, since the buying decision is more impulse-driven and visual.
There are two genuinely separate pieces of spending that many first-time advertisers in Nepal confuse: the management fee, what you pay an agency or freelancer to plan, build, and optimize the campaigns, and the ad spend itself, the money that goes directly to Google or Meta to actually show the ads. Google Ads management fees typically scale with media budget, while a reasonable starting monthly ad spend might be NPR 15,000-50,000 for a small local business testing the waters, separate entirely from the management fee.
A management fee below roughly NPR 15,000-20,000 a month is usually too thin to cover the actual time needed to research, build, and continually optimize campaigns properly - at that price, campaigns are often set up once and left largely unmanaged, which defeats the purpose of paying for performance marketing at all.
It helps to think of the management fee as paying for expertise and time, and the ad spend as the raw material that expertise works with - a skilled manager with a smaller budget can still outperform an unmanaged account with a much larger one, simply because less of the spend is wasted on poor targeting or ignored underperforming ads.
No honest agency can guarantee a specific number of leads, a specific cost per sale, or a specific ranking - anyone who guarantees these outcomes upfront, before seeing your business, website, and market, is either inexperienced or not being straight with you. What a credible agency can offer is a track record of managing real budgets and a clear plan for testing, measuring, and improving performance over time.
Expect the first four to six weeks of any new campaign to be a learning and testing phase - the data from that period is what makes the following months more efficient, not the other way around. Across our work at Arcetis, we have managed over 270,000 USD in combined ad spend, roughly 200,000 USD through Google and 70,000 USD through Meta, for Nepal and international clients, which is the kind of volume that teaches you what actually moves the needle versus what sounds good in theory.
Seasonality also plays a real role in Nepal specifically - demand and costs shift noticeably around Dashain, Tihar, and other major shopping periods, and a campaign that has been running steadily before these periods is generally better positioned to take advantage of them than one started from scratch in the middle of the rush.
"Boosting a post" on Facebook is not the same as running a properly structured performance marketing campaign - boosting is a simplified, less targeted version of advertising with far less control over audience, placement, and measurement. A real campaign involves audience research, ad structure, conversion tracking, and ongoing optimization, not a single click of the boost button.
More budget does not automatically mean more sales if the website or landing page behind the ad is slow, confusing, or does not clearly explain the offer - a well-run campaign driving traffic to a weak website is a reliable way to spend money and get very little back. The ad and what it points to have to work together.
Start with a budget you can sustain for at least three months, since performance marketing improves with data over time rather than delivering its best results on day one. Make sure basic tracking of which inquiries and sales actually came from the ads is set up before you spend a single rupee, since without it you are flying blind regardless of how the campaign performs.
Arcetis is a verified Google Partner and Shopify Partner based in Pokhara, and performance marketing - Google Ads and Meta Ads managed together with the website behind them - is a core part of what we do for Nepal businesses, with engagements scoped to the business rather than a one-size-fits-all package.
A short initial conversation about your business, your sales process, and what a realistic first-quarter budget looks like will tell you more about whether an agency is a good fit than any pitch deck will.
A workable starting point is roughly NPR 15,000-30,000 a month in ad spend, separate from any management fee, for a small local business testing a single channel like Google Ads. Below that range, there often is not enough data volume for the platform's own optimization to work effectively, which makes results harder to judge.
Expect a four-to-six week learning phase as the platform and your team gather data on what works, with meaningful, stabilizing results typically visible by month two or three of consistent spend. Campaigns that are paused and restarted repeatedly reset much of this learning, which is why a sustainable minimum budget matters more than a larger one you cannot maintain.
They solve different problems and work well together rather than as substitutes. Performance marketing can bring in traffic and leads almost immediately but stops the moment you stop paying, while SEO takes longer to build but keeps working with less ongoing spend once it is established. Most businesses with any marketing budget benefit from at least some of both.