Who this is for
Businesses whose customers have to come to them or be visited: retail shops, pharmacies and clinics, dental practices, gyms and yoga studios, salons, restaurants and cafes, tuition centers, repair services, plumbers and electricians. In Nepal that means a business in Kathmandu Valley, Pokhara, Chitwan, Butwal or Biratnagar that does not want to pay to reach the rest of the country. Abroad it means the same businesses in a suburb or a town. Restaurants have their own page under Facebook and Instagram ads for restaurants and cafes; the full list is on Meta Ads by industry.
What small business Facebook ads in Nepal include
- Radius targeting around the outlet, usually two to five kilometers in the Valley given traffic and further in smaller cities, with exclusions for areas you do not serve.
- The right objective: messages for enquiries and orders, calls for services people book by phone, store traffic ads where the goal is a visit, and lead forms for consultations. The message side is described under click-to-WhatsApp and Messenger ads.
- Tracking that fits a small business: conversations and calls counted in Ads Manager, a Pixel and Conversions API on the website if there is one, and a simple way to record walk-ins (an offer code, a question at the counter). See Pixel and Conversions API setup.
- Creative from the business itself: the owner, the staff, the shop, the product, filmed on a phone in Nepali, following the approach under Facebook ad creative and copywriting.
- Offers timed to the week and the season: slow days, festivals, new stock.
- A budget that matches the radius: a small audience does not need a large spend.
How a local campaign is built
- Define the customer action: a message, a call, a booking or a visit, and who will answer it.
- Set the radius and exclusions from where customers actually come from, not from where you would like them to.
- Build the always-on campaign at a modest daily budget with two or three creatives, optimized for the action.
- Add retargeting to people who engaged, messaged or visited the website, with the offer of the week; setup under Facebook retargeting ads.
- Run short bursts for festivals, launches and slow periods.
- Review monthly: cost per message, call or visit, and which creative and which part of the radius produced them.
Store traffic ads and Google Business Profile
Meta’s store traffic objective shows ads to people near each outlet with directions and a call button, and suits chains with several locations. For most single-outlet businesses a message or call campaign counts better. Either way, the customer who sees the ad often searches the business name next, which is why local SEO and a complete Google Business Profile work alongside the ads.
Boost or campaign?
Boosting a post is fine for announcing tonight’s special. It sends the post to whoever Facebook thinks will engage, anywhere you allow, with no objective beyond engagement. A local campaign built in Ads Manager chooses the radius, the objective and the creative, and counts the results. Businesses without an international card get the campaign structure through the Facebook boost service, which runs real campaigns from an agency account with rupee invoicing.
Mistakes I see in local accounts
- Ads reaching all of Nepal for a shop in Baneshwor.
- Engagement objective for a business that needs phone calls.
- Nobody assigned to the inbox during opening hours.
- Designed posters instead of the owner and the shop.
- A festival campaign launched on the festival day.
What you receive
A radius and objective plan, the always-on and burst campaigns, phone-shot creative briefs, reply templates for the inbox, retargeting, and a short monthly report showing cost per message, call or visit. Everything is owned by the business.
Pricing and next step
Local business management starts at the lower end of the ranges on the Meta Ads packages and pricing page, on the Starter tier at USD 500 a month, with ad budgets that can sit below the usual NPR 15,000 to 30,000 because the radius is small. The Facebook Ads setup service suits owners who want it built once and will run it themselves. Start with a free Meta Ads audit of what you are running now.