What Will Your Google Ads Budget Actually Get You?
Most businesses set a Google Ads budget based on what they can afford, not what they can expect. That gap between spend and outcome is where campaigns go wrong before they even launch.
This calculator gives you a realistic forecast before you commit a single rand. Plug in your monthly budget, your expected cost-per-click, and a conversion rate and you’ll instantly see your projected clicks, estimated leads, cost per conversion, and the daily budget Google will work with.
Three inputs. Four answers. No spreadsheet required.
Conversions = Clicks × Conversion Rate
Cost per Conversion = Budget ÷ Conversions
Daily Budget = Monthly Budget ÷ 30.4
What You Need to Know Before Using This
Average CPC The average cost per click varies wildly by industry. Finance is the most expensive area of Google Ads where the cost per click can run well over R100 per click. R25 per click is a nice estimate for local service businesses, not too liberal but not too conservative either. If you don’t know your industry’s CPC on search, the Google Ads Keyword Planner gives you a range or use R20–R35 as a rough South African starting point for most service businesses on search. For Display where you’re not limited by keyword searches the cost per click can get as low as R1 per click but… you’re no longer targeting people who are in the active search mindset which means your strategy needs to account for this.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who click your ad and then take action such as fill in a form, call you, book a consultation. A well-built PPC style landing page for a service business typically converts between 3% and 12% on search and lower in display. If you’re sending traffic to a generic business card style website expect worse performance than focused offer pages. As a general rule:
“The greater the level of commitment required, the lower the conversion rate”.
Cost per conversion is the number that actually matters. It tells you what you’re paying to acquire one lead. If your average job is worth R5,000 and your cost per lead is R250, that’s a business worth running. If your cost per lead is R1,800 on a R2,500 job, the math doesn’t work and no amount of optimisation will save a fundamentally broken budget.