Short answer
Judge an agency on three things it cannot fake: whether it will publish or state its prices, whether it can show measured results with the method and period attached, and whether it tells you what its fee excludes before you sign. Awards, follower counts and a long client logo wall tell you almost nothing about whether the work will move your business.
Almost every agency in Kathmandu describes itself in the same words: creative, result-driven, 360-degree, leading. Those words are free, so they carry no information. This is how to evaluate on things that cost something to be true.
Why comparing agencies is deliberately hard
Proposals are rarely structured to be comparable. One quotes a monthly retainer, another quotes per deliverable, a third quotes a project fee with the ongoing work left vague. Some include ad spend in the headline figure and some do not — which can make a proposal look forty per cent cheaper while delivering less. This is not always deliberate, but the effect is the same: you end up choosing on rapport.
The fix is to normalise every proposal onto the same sheet before you read any of them properly: monthly fee, one-off fees, what is excluded, what you own at the end, and what happens if you leave in month four.
Seven questions that separate agencies quickly
- 01What is your price, and what does it exclude? An agency that will not name a number until after a discovery call is managing your expectations, not protecting its pricing.
- 02Show me a result with the method attached. Any figure should come with how it was measured, over what period, and from which source. "Increased sales by 300%" with no baseline is not a result.
- 03Who actually does the work? Ask for the names and the split between senior and junior time. Pitch teams and delivery teams are frequently different people.
- 04What do I own if we stop working together? Ad accounts, pixels, domain, source files, content, CRM data. The correct answer is "all of it, and we will transfer it".
- 05What would you tell me not to buy? An agency that recommends every service it sells has not diagnosed anything.
- 06How do you define a qualified lead? If you and the agency have different definitions, you will spend a year arguing about lead quality.
- 07What does month one look like, day by day? Vague onboarding is where retainers quietly lose their first month.
Answers that should worry you
| What you are told | What to ask |
|---|---|
| "We guarantee first-page Google rankings." | Ask which keywords, and ask them to put the guarantee in the contract with a refund clause. Rankings are not something any agency controls. |
| "We are Nepal's No. 1 agency." | Ask who ranked them, on what criteria, and when. |
| "We'll make your content go viral." | Ask what happens to the fee if it does not. Reach is bought or earned, not promised. |
| "Our packages start at NPR 9,999 a month." | Ask how many hours that buys and who does them. Below a certain fee the only way to deliver is volume juniors on templates. |
| A client logo wall with no case studies | Ask which of those were retainers, which were one-off jobs, and which are current. |
| "We'll handle everything, don't worry about it." | Ask for the reporting cadence and what you will see each month. |
Separate the fee from the spend
This is the single most common budgeting error we see. If you have NPR 1,00,000 a month, that is not NPR 1,00,000 of advertising. A reasonable split is roughly 30–40% management fee and 60–70% media spend, though it moves with the channel and the amount of creative production required.
An agency charging NPR 15,000 to manage NPR 20,000 of spend is not cheap — the fee is 43% of the total. An agency charging NPR 60,000 to manage NPR 3,00,000 is charging 17%. Compare ratios, not headline numbers.
Specialist or full service?
Specialists usually go deeper in their channel. Full-service agencies reduce coordination cost and stop the familiar problem where the ads agency blames the website and the website agency blames the ads. Neither is inherently better.
The practical test is where your bottleneck is. If your website converts and you simply need more traffic, a paid media specialist is efficient. If enquiries arrive and disappear, or your brand contradicts itself across channels, the coordination is the thing you are actually buying.
What to check in the contract
- Notice period — 30 days is normal; six-month lock-ins for a monthly service are not.
- Intellectual property transfer on final payment, in writing.
- Account ownership: accounts should be created under your business, with the agency granted access.
- Revision limits, stated as a number rather than "reasonable".
- What happens to work in progress if either party terminates.
- Whether reporting continues to the end of the notice period.
How Brandx answers these questions
We publish our prices, including what each fee excludes. We do not currently publish client results, because Brandx was established in May 2026 and we have not measured any yet — writing "we increased sales by 340%" would be an invention. When results exist, they will be published with the measurement method, the period and the source attached.
You own everything on final payment, including source files and accounts. And if the honest answer to your problem is that you do not need what we sell, we would rather say so than take a retainer for six months of activity.
Sources
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — Google Search Central
- Meta Ads Library — search any advertiser's live ads — Meta
