Start from a lead or revenue goal and work backwards to the exact monthly pay-per-click spend you need. See clicks, leads, cost per lead, ROAS, and cost per acquisition instantly — no email required.
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Budget = (Goal ÷ funnel rates) × Avg CPC. All figures are estimates for media-planning purposes.
ROAS
4.29×
Cost / Acquisition
$280.00
Budget is reverse-engineered from your goal: leads ÷ conversion rate × CPC.
Conversion rate is click→lead; close rate is lead→customer.
A 5.00% conversion and 25.00% close rate drive these projections.
A profitable PPC budget is built from your goals and funnel math, not a number pulled from thin air.
Whether you plan by leads or revenue, you work backwards. Define the outcome first, then let conversion and close rates reveal the clicks — and the spend — required to reach it.
Cost per click is set by auction competition, keyword intent, Quality Score, and your industry. High-value B2B and legal terms cost the most; long-tail and branded terms cost the least.
This is the share of clicks that become leads. Strong landing pages, fast load times, and clear offers can double it — halving the clicks and budget needed for the same result.
Not every lead becomes a customer. Your sales close rate turns leads into revenue, so improving follow-up and qualification lowers your true cost per acquisition.
Return on ad spend ties it all together. A 4:1 ROAS is a common target, but the right number depends on your margins — high-margin offers can scale profitably at lower ratios.
Platforms spend on a daily budget that can flex ±20%. Divide your monthly target by 30.4 to set a daily cap and keep delivery steady all month long.
Most PPC budgets fail because they are set by affordability rather than by arithmetic.
A PPC budget is not a preference, it is a consequence. Once you fix a lead target, a cost per click and a conversion rate, the required budget is determined — you do not get to choose it. The common failure is picking a comfortable number, discovering it produces a third of the needed volume, and concluding that PPC does not work.
There is also a floor below which paid search stops functioning. Campaigns need enough conversion volume for the bidding algorithms to learn; roughly thirty conversions a month per campaign is the usual threshold. Below that, you are paying for clicks while the system guesses.
| Business type | Workable monthly floor | Why that level |
|---|---|---|
| Local single-service (one city) | $900 – $1,500 | Enough click volume in one metro to gather signal within a month. |
| Local multi-service (several trades) | $2,000 – $4,000 | Each service line needs its own conversion volume to optimise. |
| Dental / medical clinic | $1,800 – $3,500 | Higher CPCs mean fewer clicks per dollar; needs headroom to learn. |
| Legal (personal injury) | $6,000 – $20,000 | CPCs above $100 make anything smaller statistically meaningless. |
| E-commerce (Shopping) | $1,200 – $3,000 | Cheap clicks, but you need volume across a product catalogue. |
| B2B lead generation | $3,000 – $8,000 | Small audiences, long cycles, and expensive clicks compound. |
These are floors for a campaign that can be judged, not recommendations. Spending under the floor is usually worse than not running the channel at all, because you pay full price for data too sparse to act on.
Start from the leads you need, divide by conversion rate to get clicks, multiply by cost per click. That is your budget. If it exceeds what you can spend, reduce the goal — not the arithmetic.
Google treats a daily budget as a target it can exceed by up to double on any given day, balancing over the month. Plan monthly, not daily, or the pacing will look alarming.
New campaigns run inefficiently for the first two to four weeks while the algorithm gathers data. Budget for it rather than judging performance during it.
Spending the same amount every month in a seasonal business wastes money in the trough and leaves demand unmet at the peak. Weight budget toward when buyers are actually searching.
Reserve roughly 10–20% for testing new keywords, audiences and creative. Accounts that spend everything on proven terms stop improving and slowly decay.
Whether it is an agency fee or staff time, management is a real cost of the channel. Excluding it makes the return look better than it is.
Five campaigns at $200 each will all sit below the learning threshold. One campaign at $1,000 will actually optimise. Concentration beats coverage at low budgets.
You cannot see their conversion rate, margin or close rate. Their budget is a fact about their business, not a target for yours.
Cost per lead rises seasonally and as you scale. Reacting to every fluctuation prevents campaigns ever exiting the learning phase.
A budget that generates more leads than the team can call is money converted into ignored voicemails.
If the required budget comes out higher than you can commit, the productive response is to narrow rather than to underfund. Cutting from five cities to one, or from every service to the two with the best margin, concentrates the same money above the learning threshold on terms that can actually pay back. A focused campaign that works beats a broad one that never gathers enough data to improve.
We plan and manage Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising campaigns for businesses across Canada. No long-term contracts.