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Ad budget calculator
Find out what to spend on Google Ads to hit your revenue target — and whether that spend makes money once your margin is counted.
Your budget appears here
Choose your industry, check your numbers, then press Calculate my budget.
Monthly ad budget needed
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Clicks
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Leads
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Customers
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Cost per lead
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Cost per customer
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Revenue
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Return on ad spend
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Break-even is —
Gross profit after ads
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Cost per click: DataForSEO Google Ads data, pulled September 23, 2026 — the median of 5–8 real commercial keywords per industry per country. Click-to-lead rates: LocalIQ search advertising benchmarks, 2026. Lead-to-sale rate is an editable starting point, not a published benchmark — it swings hugely with how you define a lead. Exchange rates: September 23, 2026.
How the math works
Every number, in order.
No black box. This is the same arithmetic we do before quoting anyone, just with benchmark numbers instead of your account data.
- Customers you need — revenue target divided by average sale value.
- Leads you need — customers divided by your lead-to-sale rate. Skipped for ecommerce, where a click can buy without talking to anyone.
- Clicks you need — leads divided by your click-to-lead rate.
- Budget — clicks multiplied by cost per click.
- The check most calculators skip — we then work forward again. Cost per customer against your margin tells you whether the plan makes money or just makes noise. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your gross margin: at a 55% margin you need 1.82x before you have earned a dollar.
One more thing a spreadsheet will not tell you: Google’s smart bidding needs roughly 30 conversions a month before it has enough data to optimize. A plan that produces fewer will underperform its own math, so the calculator flags it.
Questions
Before you set a budget.
Work backward from revenue, not forward from a round number. Decide what you need the ads to bring in, divide by your average sale value to get customers, then work back through close rate, conversion rate and cost per click. The calculator does that for you. If the answer is more than you can afford, narrow the targeting rather than spreading a small budget thin.
It depends entirely on the market and the intent. Our live benchmark data ranges from under a dollar for ecommerce terms to well over forty for B2B software and emergency trades. The number pre-filled here is the median of real commercial keywords in your country, but your own account data beats any benchmark.
The useful floor is not a dollar amount, it is data. Smart bidding needs around 30 conversions a month to optimize. Multiply that by your cost per conversion and you have your real minimum. Below it, the platform never learns and performance stays flat.
Because cost per customer came out higher than the gross profit that customer brings. That is not a reason to give up — it usually means the offer, the average sale value or the targeting needs to change before the budget does.
One divided by your gross margin. At a 50% margin you need 2x return on ad spend to break even; at 25% you need 4x. Anything above that is profit, anything below is a subsidy. It is the single most useful number on this page.
Cost per click is pulled from DataForSEO’s Google Ads data on September 23, 2026, using the median of five to eight real commercial keywords per industry per country. Conversion rates come from LocalIQ’s 2026 search advertising benchmarks. Close rate is the one number we do not claim as a benchmark — it varies too much with how you define a lead.
Want the version with your real numbers in it?
Send us the account and we will run this on your actual cost per click, conversion rate and close rate — then tell you plainly whether the budget stacks up.