Google Ads budget calculator
Work out what you need to spend to hit a lead target — and whether the numbers actually make sense before you commit a budget. No signup, nothing stored, works offline.
Your numbers
What that means
Reading the result honestly
The number most people fixate on is the budget. The number that actually decides whether to proceed is cost per customer against customer value. If it costs £400 to win a customer worth £300, no amount of optimisation rescues that — the model is wrong, not the campaign.
Two things routinely break these projections in practice. The first is sending ad traffic to a homepage rather than a page built for one action, which can halve the conversion rate. The second is broken conversion tracking, which means the bidding algorithm is optimising toward the wrong thing. Both are worth fixing before increasing spend.
If the output here suggests your target is unaffordable, that is useful information rather than a dead end. Local SEO and organic search often reach the same buyers at a lower long-run cost, and are usually the better first move for smaller budgets.
About this calculator
It is a planning model, not a forecast. The arithmetic is exact, but it is only as good as the three numbers you put in. Cost per click and conversion rate vary a lot by industry, location and how well the account is built. Treat the result as a starting range for checking a budget. Not a promise.
If you are already running ads, Google Ads shows average CPC per campaign. If you are not running yet, use Keyword Planner's 'top of page bid' estimates for your main terms, which is free with any Google Ads account. For competitive UK sectors like legal, insurance or trades, expect the higher end.
If you have Google Analytics configured correctly, use your real figure. If you do not have one, use a landing page built for a single action. It converts better than a homepage. Sending ad traffic to a homepage is one of the most common reasons budgets underperform. Start conservative and adjust once you have real data.
Google's bidding algorithms need conversion data to optimise. Below roughly 30 conversions a month, automated bidding has too little signal to work with, and performance stays volatile. That is a practical floor rather than an official Google rule, but it holds up across most accounts.
No. The budget shown is media spend that goes directly to Google. Agency or consultant management fees sit on top of it and are quoted separately.
Want these numbers checked against your real account?
Free audit — I will look at your actual CPCs, conversion tracking and landing pages, and tell you what is achievable.