Ad Budget Calculator
Work backwards from the jobs you want to the budget that would actually produce them.
Most budget calculators multiply two invented numbers and present the product as advice. This one goes the other way — from the jobs you actually want, back through your close rate and conversion rate, to the spend that would produce them. Then it says whether that spend makes sense.
Your numbers
Nothing here is sent anywhere. It calculates as you type.
Gross revenue from a typical job. If customers come back, use what they are worth over a year.
Additional work, on top of what search, referrals and repeat customers already bring in.
Be honest rather than optimistic. Most local businesses land between 20% and 40%.
Typical local landing pages convert 3% to 10%. Under 2% is usually the page, not the ads.
Pick a category above to prefill this, then adjust — clicks cost several times more in an expensive metro.
To book 10 extra jobs a month. Platform spend only — management is charged separately, typically as a flat fee or 10% to 20% of spend.
- Clicks needed
- 667
- Leads needed
- 34
- Cost per lead
- $160
- Cost per booked job
- $533
- Revenue produced
- $8,000
- Return on ad spend
- 1.5×
Viable, with no room for error
Every dollar returns about 1.5 in revenue before your own cost of delivering the work. For most local businesses that is near break-even once labour and materials are counted. It can work — usually by improving the conversion rate or bringing the click cost down first, and both are normally achievable.
What the number is and is not telling you
The spend figure is platform money only. Management is separate, and so are landing pages, call tracking and creative — all of which affect the result more than the bid strategy does. A campaign pointing at a slow homepage will underperform this model badly, and the model has no way to know.
Return on ad spend here is gross revenue against advertising cost, not profit. A three-times return looks healthy and can still be break-even once labour and materials are counted, which is why the verdict treats anything under three as needing work rather than as a green light.
The most useful thing to do with a result you do not like is to change the conversion rate rather than the budget. Moving a landing page from three percent to six halves your cost per lead, costs a fraction of the ad spend, and is usually the single most available improvement in a local account.
Check this against your actual market
Send us your details and a strategist will pull the real click costs for your category and service area, and tell you whether these numbers hold up locally — including if the honest answer is that ads are the wrong place to start.
- Real click costs for your category and city
- An honest read on whether ads are the right first move
- Free, no card and no obligation
Loading the consultation form.
Questions people ask
They are US market averages for local search advertising by category, which is why the field stays editable. Your actual cost depends heavily on your market — the same keyword can cost several times more in Seattle than in a small regional city — and on how competitive your specific category is locally.
No. The figure is platform spend only. Management is charged separately, either as a flat monthly fee or as a percentage of spend, commonly 10% to 20%. Any quote that gives you one blended number without a breakdown is worth questioning.
What management actually costsThen it has told you something valuable before you spent anything. Usually one of three things is wrong: the landing page converts too poorly, the targeting is too broad for the job value, or the category is too expensive for what a customer is worth. All three are fixable, and all three are cheaper to fix than to advertise around.
Your actual one, not your best month. Count how many enquiries you got last month and how many became paying customers. Most local businesses land between 20% and 40%, and the ones that guess high usually guess about ten points high.
Because below roughly that level most local accounts never accumulate enough conversions for the platform to optimize against, so you pay for a learning period that does not finish. It is not that small budgets cannot work — it is that they cannot improve, which is a different and more expensive problem.
No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing is submitted. The form further down the page is separate and optional.