Start With the Number of Leads You Need. Work Backwards From There.
Most Google Ads conversations start with budget. This one starts with your goal.
If you already know how many leads or sales you need per month, this calculator tells you exactly what it will cost to get there. Enter your target conversions, your expected conversion rate, and your average cost-per-click. You’ll get the required monthly budget, required clicks, cost per conversion, and daily budget equivalent.
Three inputs. Four answers. No guesswork.
Required Budget = Required Clicks × CPC
Cost per Conversion = Required Budget ÷ Target Conversions
Daily Budget = Required Budget ÷ 30.4
What You Need to Know Before Using This
Target conversions should reflect a real business number, not an aspiration. If your sales team can only handle 15 new leads a month, there’s no point engineering a campaign to deliver 50. Start with what your operation can actually absorb.
Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that turn into an action: a form submission, a phone call, a booking. For a service business with a purpose-built landing page, 3% to 12% is a realistic range for a search campaign, for display this drops to 1% or lower as you’re now dealing with people who are not actively searching and so your tactics need to change. If you’re running traffic to a generic website homepage, expect the lower end or below it.
Average CPC is where most people get this wrong. The average cost per click in South Africa can vary significantly by industry and competition level. Legal and financial services can run R60 to R100+ per click. Trades and home services typically sit between R10 and R40. If you’re not sure, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to get a category estimate for search campaigns before plugging in a number. For display the cost per click gets lower because you are no longer bound to the search results. For a conservative display CPC go with anywhere from R2.5 to R5 but it can go lower.
The required budget this calculator produces is a minimum floor, not a ceiling. Google’s algorithm needs room to learn and optimise. Campaigns running at the absolute minimum budget required to hit a conversion target often underperform because there’s no headroom for the system to work with. A 20% to 30% buffer above the calculated figure is a reasonable starting point.