Setting up the account, in your own name
Create the Google Ads account under your own business email and keep the login. If an agency creates it under theirs, the campaign history, the conversion data and the audience lists belong to them, and starting again costs you the learning period. If someone already manages your ads in their account, ask them to move it or accept that you are renting the history.
Set the account currency and time zone once, carefully: neither can be changed afterwards. For a Nepal-only business NPR and Nepal time are right. If most spend will be for overseas markets, consider USD, because reporting in the currency you are billed in avoids monthly conversion confusion.
Paying Google from Nepal
Google bills in USD for accounts here, which needs a card enabled for international online payments. Under Nepal Rastra Bank rules an individual prepaid dollar card is capped at USD 500 a year; an April 2026 amendment lets banks set their own limits on prepaid dollar cards; and registered IT and communication businesses can obtain cards for online services of up to USD 3,000 a year, or USD 5,000 where they earn foreign currency. Talk to your bank about which product applies to your registration type before you plan a budget, because the card limit, not the strategy, is what usually caps spend.
Set up billing before building campaigns. An account that runs out of payment method mid-flight loses its bidding momentum, and Google’s learning restarts.
Conversion tracking, before anything launches
This is the step most accounts skip and the reason most accounts waste money. Without it, Google optimizes for clicks it can get cheaply rather than enquiries you can sell to.
- Install Google Tag Manager on the site, and Google Analytics 4 through it.
- Create a conversion action for each real enquiry: form submission, phone click, WhatsApp click, and a call from the ad itself.
- Test each one and confirm it registers in Google Ads, not only in GA4. A tag that fires in preview mode but not in production is the classic failure.
- Mark only genuine enquiries as primary conversions. Page views and time on site are not conversions, whatever a dashboard suggests.
In Nepal, phone and WhatsApp matter more than forms, so a tracking setup that only counts form submissions will under-report by a wide margin and lead you to switch off campaigns that work. The conversion tracking service covers this end to end if you would rather it were done once, properly.
Campaign structure that stays manageable
Start with one Search campaign per service line, not per keyword. Inside it, group keywords by the thing the searcher wants, so the ad and the landing page can match. Three to five tight ad groups beat twenty loose ones, because each needs enough traffic to learn from.
Use phrase and exact match to begin with. Broad match plus smart bidding works well on accounts with conversion history and burns money on accounts without it. Add a negative keyword list on day one and review the search terms report weekly for the first month; in this market that report is where you find the free-download, salary and homework-help searches that share your keywords.
Leave Performance Max until you have conversion data. It is the strongest campaign type on a mature account and the fastest way to spend a first budget with nothing to show.
Budget, and what it buys here
Nepal clicks are cheap by international standards, which is genuinely an advantage, but volumes are smaller and a low budget still takes time to accumulate enough conversions for bidding to work. As a starting point, NPR 30,000 to 50,000 a month for a single service line lets smart bidding learn within the first month or two. The budget calculator works the number out from your own lead target and cost per click.
Do not judge the account in week one. Judge the search terms report in week one, the cost per enquiry in month two, and the cost per customer in month three.
Landing pages
Ads inherit the quality of the page they point to. Send each ad group to a page about that specific thing, with the offer above the fold, a form and a phone number visible without scrolling on a phone, and load time under three seconds on mobile data rather than office wifi. If the site cannot deliver that, a purpose-built landing page for ads costs less than the budget a slow page wastes.
The mistakes that cost the most
- No conversion tracking, so the account optimizes for the wrong thing from day one.
- One campaign, all services, so the budget flows to whichever service happens to get clicks rather than the one that sells.
- Ignoring the search terms report, which is where the wasted spend is visible.
- Sending everything to the homepage, which answers nobody’s specific search.
- Changing bids daily, which prevents the bidding system from learning anything.
- Judging on impressions or clicks rather than cost per enquiry.
Next steps
Work through the Google Ads checklist before launch, and use the character counter while writing ads. If you would rather have the account audited than start from scratch, the free Google Ads audit covers wasted spend, tracking gaps and structure, and the Google Ads services page explains what ongoing management involves.
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