Google Ads Expert in Nepal — What It Costs, Who Owns the Account, and What Actually Gets Tracked
I’m Prakash Kushwaha. I’ve spent more than eight years building websites and running search campaigns for businesses across Nepal, from my desk in Kathmandu, and I run the accounts myself rather than handing them to someone junior.
Most pages selling PPC services in Nepal open with what Google Ads is. You already know. This page answers the three things a business owner needs settled before they start: what the whole thing costs, whose name the account sits in, and how you’ll know whether it worked. If you’re still deciding between ads and organic search, I’ve written about which one is right for which situation — start there instead.
First, the thing nobody warns you about: paying Google
Almost every guide to Google Ads in Nepal skips straight to keywords. But the first place Nepali businesses get stuck is billing. Google charges in foreign currency, and a standard domestic card usually won’t complete the setup. Most businesses need an international payment card, which means a conversation with your bank before a single ad runs.
It is worth knowing this at the start, because it changes your sequence. There’s no point building campaigns for a client who can’t fund them for another three weeks. On a first call I’ll ask how you intend to pay Google before I ask anything about your keywords — it’s the question that decides whether we’re starting this month or next.
Whatever we arrange, the card and the billing profile are yours. I don’t run client campaigns through my own account and invoice you for the spend. More on why that matters below.
What it costs — the fee and the spend are two different things
This confuses more first-time advertisers than anything else, so plainly: there are two separate numbers.
The ad spend goes to Google. It is not my money, it never touches my account, and it buys clicks. You set it, you can change it any day, and you see exactly where it went.
The management fee is what you pay me to build, run and improve the account. That’s the number you should be comparing between providers — and of the Nepali Google Ads pages I read while writing this, ranking across “Google Ads expert in Nepal”, “Google Ads services in Nepal” and “PPC services in Nepal”, exactly one publishes a figure at all. It’s quoted in US dollars, starting at $899 for a four-week sprint and $1,800 a month on retainer. Which may be the right price for the clients they want. It is not a number a Kathmandu business can compare against anything.
So, mine:
- Management fee: from NPR 15,000/month — account build or rebuild, conversion tracking, campaign management, ongoing optimisation, and a monthly written report.
- Minimum ad spend: NPR 30,000/month — below this, the account doesn’t collect enough data in a month to optimise honestly, and you’d be paying me to guess.
- Minimum engagement: three months. The first month is largely setup and learning; judging the work before month three isn’t judging the work.
If your budget is below that floor, say so and I’ll tell you straight whether ads make sense for you yet. Quite often the answer is that SEO and a properly worked Google listing will do more with the same money.
Whose account is it?
This is the question I’d ask first if I were hiring. Two of the providers you’ll compare me against now answer it properly, which is progress — a year ago almost nobody did. The rest still don’t, and the difference matters more than anything else on this page.
Some providers run every client through their own manager account, pay Google themselves, and invoice you for “advertising”. It looks tidy. What it means is that when you leave, you leave with nothing — no conversion history, no audience lists, no learning period, no record of which keywords ever worked. You start from zero with the next person, and the account that knew your customers stays behind.
Everything I build sits in your Google Ads account, under your business, with your billing. I get manager access; you can revoke it in two clicks. Your Analytics and Search Console are the same. If we stop working together on a Friday, nothing about your advertising changes on the Monday except that I’m not in it.
Ask whoever you’re considering the same question. If the answer involves their account paying Google, ask what you take with you when you leave.
Conversion tracking comes before everything else
Here’s the pattern I run into constantly. A business has been running ads for months — sometimes years — and the account shows plenty of clicks and a reasonable-looking spend. Then I ask how many of those clicks became a phone call, a form submission or a sale, and there’s no answer. The tracking was never set up, or set up wrongly, or set up once and never checked after the website changed.
That isn’t a small technical oversight. It’s the difference between knowing your ads work and hoping they do. Without it, every optimisation decision after month one is guesswork dressed up as expertise — and you’re paying for it monthly.
So nothing goes live until tracking does. Conversion actions defined for the things that make you money, Analytics connected properly, and — this matters in Nepal — calls counted as conversions. Most enquiries here arrive as a phone call or a Viber message, not a neat form submission. An account that only counts form fills will quietly report that your best campaign is your worst one.
What Google Ads in Nepal actually looks like
The search volumes are small, so broad match is expensive
Nepal is not a market where you can switch on broad match, let the algorithm learn from thousands of daily searches and trim later. There often aren’t thousands of daily searches. Loose targeting here doesn’t buy you cheap discovery traffic. In the accounts I’ve inherited it mostly buys irrelevant clicks from outside the country, and it does it fast, because there isn’t enough local volume to absorb the budget. Tight match types, real negative keyword lists, and location targeting that excludes what it should — including, in most accounts I inherit, the setting that lets Google show your ads to people merely interested in Nepal rather than located in it.
People search in three languages for one thing
English, Nepali script and Roman-Nepali, often for exactly the same product. Someone looking for a laptop deal types “laptop price in kathmandu”, “सस्तो ल्यापटप काठमाडौं” and “kathmandu ma laptop” depending on who they are and what keyboard is open. Keyword lists built only in English miss a real share of the market, and so do ads written only in English. Both get planned in both languages here — the same approach I take to SEO, for the same reason.
The click is cheap and the landing page is usually the problem
Clicks in most Nepali categories are cheap, which sounds like good news and is the reason so many accounts waste money without anyone noticing. When a click costs very little, a bad landing page can survive for a year before the numbers make anyone look at it. If the page the ad points at takes eight seconds on 4G, buries the phone number below three scrolls, or answers a different question from the one in the ad, no amount of bid management rescues it. More than once the honest answer to “why aren’t my ads converting” has been the page they land on, and the fix cost less than a month of ad spend.
What the work has produced
Himalayan Cashmere
THE SITUATION
Himalayan Cashmere wanted to reach international buyers for its cashmere products, particularly in the US, UK and Europe. There was no existing Google Ads campaign to optimise, so the paid-search channel had to be built from scratch with the goal of generating qualified product enquiries rather than simply increasing website traffic.
WHAT I DID
I built and managed the Google Ads Search campaigns from the ground up, targeting commercial-intent searches around relevant cashmere products. I handled keyword targeting, negative keywords, geographic targeting, ad copy and ongoing optimisation, while also working on the company’s SEO to build both paid and organic search visibility.
Himalayan Cashmere uses its website primarily to showcase products and generate enquiries, so campaign performance was measured around qualified leads rather than ecommerce sales.
Qualified Enquiries
Campaign Period
US · UK · Europe
Qualified enquiries up 33% over a three-month campaign period, across three markets — US, UK and Europe.
Five Stars Driving School
THE SITUATION
Five Stars Driving School operates in a competitive local market where people searching for driving lessons are often ready to call or register. The goal was to capture more of that demand through Google Search and turn relevant local searches into enquiries and lesson registrations.
WHAT I DID
I managed Google Search campaigns around the driving lessons and services people were actively searching for in Philadelphia. I worked on keyword and location targeting, negative keywords, ad copy and ongoing campaign optimisation, while also improving the website and SEO so the paid traffic reached clearer, more relevant service pages.
Google Ads was one part of the work for Five Stars Driving School; I also worked on the website and SEO, so improvements in overall enquiries should not be attributed to paid search alone.
For this client, I prefer Qualified Enquiries + Cost per Lead + Calls & Registrations over metrics such as impressions or clicks. A potential Google Ads client cares much more about “Did you generate customers, and at what cost?”
Qualified Enquiries
Cost per Lead
Calls & Registrations
Qualified enquiries up 52%, cost per lead down 23%, and 46+ calls and registrations attributed to paid search. Google Ads was one part of the work here; the website and SEO changed at the same time.
What I'd want to see before hiring anyone — me included
Search “Google Ads expert in Nepal”, then search “Google Ads services in Nepal”, and read the pages properly — the two sets overlap less than you’d expect. Most of the results on display come without a client attached — percentages, cost-per-lead reductions, charts, no names. When I last read this set, the same education-consultancy figures — cost per lead falling from NPR 3,500 to NPR 2,100 — appeared on two different providers’ pages, neither of them saying whose campaign it was. One of those pages has since been taken down. The other is still up, still unattributed.
That’s why every number above this line has a business attached to it. You can search for those companies, open their websites, and ring them if you want to. A figure you can check is a different kind of claim from one you can’t — because it can be wrong, and the person publishing it knows that.
Three questions worth putting to anyone you’re considering, me included:
- Whose campaign is that number from, and can I contact them?
- Will you walk me through the live account on a screen share, rather than sending a PDF?
- Whose name will the account be in when we’re finished?
An account you can watch somebody move around in tells you more than any graphic on any website, mine included.
How the work runs
Week one — audit and tracking
If there's an existing account, I go through it and tell you what's in there: what's been spending, what's been converting, what's been quietly wasting money. If there's nothing, we start clean. Either way, conversion tracking is built and verified before any budget moves.
Weeks two to four — build and launch
Campaign structure around what you sell rather than around what Google's setup wizard suggests, keyword lists in both languages, negative lists from day one, ads written to match the searches rather than to sound impressive, and the landing pages checked before they receive paid traffic.
Month two onwards — optimisation
Search terms reviewed properly rather than skimmed, budget moved toward what converts, bids and match types tightened, ad copy tested. This is the part that justifies a monthly fee, and it's the part most accounts don't get.
Every month — a report you can read
Two pages, written rather than exported. What I changed and why, then what happened: conversions, cost per conversion, spend, and what I'm doing next. If a month went badly I say so in the first paragraph.
When Google Ads is the wrong answer
If your margins can’t absorb the cost of a customer, ads will lose you money faster and more precisely than any other channel. If nobody is searching for what you sell — which is true of more Nepali businesses than the ads industry admits — no campaign creates that demand, and a Google listing plus organic search will serve you better. And if your website can’t take the traffic, fix that first.
I’d rather say that in a free audit than take a retainer for the wrong repair. It isn’t a hypothetical — it’s the conclusion of a handful of audits every year, and those conversations end without an invoice.
Let’s Grow Your Business
Need more traffic, leads or sales? Tell me what you’re working on and I’ll recommend the right approach — SEO, Google Ads or website improvements.
Questions I get asked
Do you spend my money, or do I?
You do. Your card, your Google Ads account, your billing profile. I never hold client ad budgets and I don’t add a percentage to your spend — the fee is the fee, whether you spend NPR 20,000 in a month or NPR 200,000.
How much should I budget to start?
Enough that the account collects real data inside a month, which in most Nepali categories means a floor rather than a ceiling. I’ll give you a specific number for your industry in the audit, based on what the actual cost per click looks like for your keywords — not a figure pulled from a package table.
How soon will I see results?
Traffic on day one, which is the honest appeal of ads over SEO. Useful data in two to three weeks. A properly optimised account at month three. Anyone promising a target cost per lead before auditing your market is guessing.
Can you guarantee a cost per click or a conversion rate?
No, and nobody who has run real accounts will. Both depend on your competition, your margins, your landing page and your offer. What I’ll commit to is that you’ll always know what was spent, what it produced, and what I did about it.
Do I need a new website first?
Usually not. Often one good landing page is enough to start, and rebuilding the whole site before testing whether anyone will click is an expensive way to find out. I’ll tell you in the audit if the site itself is what’s stopping conversions.
Is this the same as PPC?
Yes. PPC services in Nepal, pay-per-click, paid search, AdWords — all the same thing, and Google Ads is the platform almost everyone means. If a provider’s proposal switches between the terms without explaining what’s being bought, ask them to price the platforms separately.
Do you also do SEO?
Yes — it’s most of my work. Plenty of clients run both: ads for the searches that convert today, SEO for the ones you’d rather stop paying for eventually. The comparison is here if you want the longer answer.
Start with the free audit
Hiring a Google Ads expert in Nepal should start with somebody looking at your actual account, not at a package table. If you’re already running ads, send me access and I’ll go through it by hand — what’s spending, what’s converting, and what I’d change first. If you’re not running them yet, tell me what you sell and I’ll tell you honestly whether there’s search demand worth buying.
It costs nothing, and if the answer is that you shouldn’t be running Google Ads at all, that’s what you’ll get. Get in touch, or see what the free audit covers.
- Kathmandu, Nepal
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