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How much should a Nepali business spend on Facebook ads?
There is no single right number, but there is a sensible way to set your Facebook and Instagram ad budget in Nepal, test it, and raise it only when the numbers say so.
Dyangai ·
One of the first questions Nepali business owners ask about Facebook ads is how much they should spend. The honest answer is that it depends on what you sell and what a customer is worth to you. But there is a clear way to work out a starting budget, test it fairly and decide when to spend more. This guide walks through it.
Start with what a customer is worth
Before choosing a number, work out how much you can afford to pay for one customer. Take the profit you make from a typical first order, not the price. If customers come back and buy again, you can afford to pay a bit more to win them the first time.
For example, if a first order makes you Rs 1,500 in profit, you know that paying Rs 3,000 to win one customer loses money unless they come back. That one number, the most you can pay for a customer, is what every budget decision should be checked against.
Then work back to a test budget
A test budget needs to be big enough for Meta to show your ads to enough people and for you to see a difference between ads. If it is too small, every result looks like luck.
A simple way to think about it: you want each ad you are testing to bring in a handful of the results you care about, whether that is messages, leads or sales, before you judge it. If you expect a message to cost a few hundred rupees and you are testing three ads, the test budget should cover enough messages for each ad to show a pattern. Spread it over at least a week so that weekdays and weekends are both included.
Small businesses often start with a modest daily budget and grow it once they know their numbers. That is sensible. What does not work is spreading a small budget across many products, many audiences and many ads at once, so that none of them gets enough to learn anything.
Remember the money is in dollars
In Nepal, Meta ads are usually paid with a dollar card issued by a Nepali bank, and banks set limits on how much can be spent. Check your card's limit before you plan a monthly budget, so that ads do not stop halfway through the month. Exchange rates and any bank charges also change the real cost in rupees, so track spend in rupees in your own records.
Spend on ads, not only on posts
Budget is not only the amount you give Meta. Ads need new videos regularly, because the same ad shown to the same people gets more expensive over time. A business that spends all its money on ad spend and nothing on new creative usually sees costs rise after a few weeks. Plan for fresh ads every month as part of the budget.
Know when to spend more
Raise the budget when you have an ad or a campaign that brings customers at a cost you can afford, and keeps doing so for at least a week. Raise it gradually, a step at a time, and watch whether the cost per result holds. If costs jump after an increase, step back and give it a few days.
Do not raise the budget to fix bad results. If an ad brings messages at a cost that loses you money, more budget usually means more losses. Fix the ad, the offer or the follow-up first.
Know when to stop
Pause an ad when it has spent enough to judge and the cost per result is clearly worse than your other ads. Pause a whole campaign when nothing in it reaches a cost you can afford after a fair test. Then change one thing, such as the offer, the opening of the video or the audience, and test again.
Track the right numbers
For most Nepali businesses selling through Messenger and WhatsApp, the numbers that matter are:
- Cost per message or lead, from Ads Manager.
- How many of those messages became real enquiries, from your own records.
- How many became sales, and the profit from them.
The last two are the ones most businesses do not track, and they are the ones that tell you whether the budget is working. A cheap message that never buys is not cheap.
What to do next
Write down your profit from a typical first order and the most you would pay to win one customer. Then set a test budget for one product, three ads and one week. If you would like a team to plan and manage this for you in your own ad account, read about our Facebook and Instagram ads management, or see what each package includes on our pricing.
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