Agencies sell audits and strategies as interchangeable discovery products. They are sequential instruments: one measures the present, the other designs the future. Buying them in the wrong order — or buying both when one suffices — is the most common wasted spend in Nepali marketing procurement. This post separates them using published scopes and prices (valid till Mar 31, 2027), so the decision is arithmetic. Pricing context: honest cost guide, hire packages.

1. What the audit contains (Rs. 82,800, ~44.5 hours)

Technical review, Business Profile and listings audit, review and reputation scan, map-ranking check, authority and backlink review — closing with a prioritized action plan and a presentation walkthrough. Hour mix: 36 standard + 2.5 simple + 6 complex. Deliverable is diagnosis plus sequenced fixes, not a retainer pitch disguised as findings (demand the fix list be executable by anyone, including a competitor — that constraint keeps audits honest).

2. What the strategy contains (Rs. 42,000, ~17.5 hours)

A 3–6 month strategy document and presentation: positioning, channel mix, budget allocation, content and campaign calendar, measurement definitions. Hour mix: 15 complex + 2.5 standard. Deliverable is a dated plan with owners and metrics — not inspiration. A strategy without numbers, dates and owners is a blog post you paid Rs. 42,000 for; reject it at delivery.

3. Decision rules: which first

• Buy the audit first when: inheriting an unknown state (new marketing role, agency switch, post-redesign confusion), something is visibly broken (traffic fell, Maps vanished, leads dried), or no trustworthy measurement exists. Diagnosis before prescription — always.
• Buy strategy first (skip audit) when: clean Analytics with 6+ months history, known baselines and working tracking already exist. Paying to re-diagnose measured ground wastes Rs. 82,800.
• Buy neither yet when: the business cannot name its customer or margin. Strategy built on unknown economics is fiction; fix offer and numbers first, then return.
• Buy both in sequence when: new leadership, new market entry, or post-crisis rebuild — audit (weeks 1–3), strategy (weeks 4–6), retainer after. The combined Rs. 124,800 is cheaper than one misdirected quarter of media.

4. How to evaluate either deliverable

An audit worth its price: every finding has evidence attached (screenshot, query, log line), fixes ranked by impact-per-hour, and a 90-day sequence — not a 200-page data dump. A strategy worth its price: channel budgets with reasoning, calendar with owners, kill criteria per initiative (“pause Search expansion if CPL exceeds X for 3 weeks”), and measurement definitions matching your analytics setup. Reject deliverables missing these; pay promptly for ones containing them — good diagnosticians are scarce.

What to do this week

1. Answer one question honestly: do we have trustworthy measurement of the present? No → audit. Yes → strategy.
2. Request both scopes in writing with hour tables before any call — compare like the Meta anatomy method.
3. Schedule the presentation walkthrough with decision-makers in the room; emailed PDFs get skimmed, walked-through findings get funded.

Related reading: honest cost guide, Meta retainer anatomy, COD attribution, analytics setup, and contact.