Free tool · no signup
Ad budget calculator
Work out what you need to spend on Google Ads to hit a revenue target — and whether that spend actually makes money once your margin is in the maths. Real cost-per-click data for the UK, US, Canada and Australia.
Sets the currency and the benchmark costs.
Pre-fills real benchmarks you can override.
What you want the ads to bring in each month.
What you can spend on ads each month.
Average revenue from one customer.
Revenue left after cost of goods or delivery.
Share of ad clicks that become an enquiry.
Share of enquiries your team turns into customers. A starting point — use your own.
Benchmark for your market. Your account’s real figure is better.
Cost-per-click benchmarks: DataForSEO, pulled 18 September 2026. Conversion rates: LocalIQ search advertising benchmarks, 2026 data. Close rate is an editable starting point, not a published benchmark — it swings hugely with how you define a lead.
Monthly ad budget
$16,000
About $526 a day
Clicks needed
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Enquiries
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Customers
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Cost per enquiry
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Cost per customer
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Revenue
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ROAS
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Break-even is —
Gross profit after ad spend
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Free, no obligation. We will tell you if the numbers do not work.
How the maths 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 order value.
- Enquiries you need — customers divided by your close rate. Skipped for ecommerce, where a click can buy without talking to anyone.
- Clicks you need — enquiries divided by your website conversion rate.
- Budget — clicks multiplied by cost per click.
- The check most calculators skip — we then work forwards 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 penny.
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 optimise. A plan that produces fewer will underperform its own maths, so the calculator flags it.
Questions
Before you set a budget.
Work backwards from revenue, not forwards from a round number. Decide what you need the ads to bring in, divide by your average order 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 thinly.
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 market, but your own account data beats any benchmark.
The useful floor is not a currency amount, it is data. Smart bidding needs around 30 conversions a month to optimise. 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 order 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 18 September 2026, using the median of five 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.