Ad budget calculator: from a revenue goal back to a daily budget
Most budget calculators start from a budget. This one starts from the money you want to make and works back up the funnel: sales, booked appointments, leads, spend. It uses the same four step funnel the Aevin platform builds from a real CRM.
The arithmetic
- Sales a month
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- Booked appointments a month
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- Leads a month
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- Ad spend a month
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- Ad spend a dayOver a 30 day month
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Fill in the fields and the numbers appear here. Nothing is sent anywhere.
This is arithmetic on the numbers you typed. It is not a forecast and not a recommended budget. It holds your close rate, booking rate and cost per lead steady while you spend more, and in a real account none of the three usually is.
Counts are rounded when they are printed, not while they are worked out. Multiplying the rounded numbers back by hand can land a little away from the line below them.
Where a number cannot be worked out, these calculators leave it blank instead of printing zero. A CTR of 0% means impressions ran and nobody clicked. A blank CTR means no impressions ran at all. The first is a creative problem, the second is a delivery problem, and they are fixed in different places.
How this is worked out
Four divisions, run in reverse. The sales you need are the goal divided by your average sale. The appointments are those sales divided by the share that close. The leads are those appointments divided by the share that book. The spend is those leads multiplied by what one lead costs you. The daily figure is the month divided by 30.
Every division goes through the platform's own guard, so a zero in a denominator leaves a blank instead of printing infinity. The shares are entered as percentages because that is how the platform reports them: a funnel step returns its conversion rate as a percentage, and a calculator quietly using fractions instead would disagree with your account by a factor of a hundred.
Questions about this calculator
- How much should I spend on Facebook ads?
- There is no figure that is right for every business, and a calculator that hands you one without asking about your funnel is guessing. What can be worked out is the spend implied by your own numbers: the revenue you want, your average sale, how many appointments close and how many leads book. Enter those and the arithmetic gives you the leads required and what they cost at the price you pay today.
- Why does this ask about appointments instead of just spend and revenue?
- Because most budget calculators are built for online stores, where a click can become a sale in the same session. A clinic, a law firm or a contractor has a call and a visit in between, and that is usually where the money is lost. Splitting the funnel into leads, appointments and sales shows which of the three is actually short.
- The budget it gives me is higher than I can afford. Now what?
- That is a useful result rather than a failure. The same arithmetic at a higher booking rate needs fewer leads for the same revenue, and the line under the results shows exactly how much the spend moves for five points. Whether it is easier to raise that rate or to raise the budget is your call, but now both sides of the choice have a number on them.
- Does it account for ads getting cheaper or dearer as I scale?
- No, and anything that claims to is not measuring your account. It holds your cost per lead flat, which is the assumption you are already making whenever you plan from a single number. Costs move with the auction, the season and how much of your audience you have already bought, so read the result as the arithmetic of today's numbers rather than a plan for the quarter.
The other calculators
- Cost Per Lead and Funnel CalculatorEnter what a period cost and what it produced. Get the price of a lead, a qualified lead, an appointment and a sale, and the drop between each one.
- Meta Learning Phase Budget CalculatorSize the budget an ad set needs to reach the roughly 50 weekly events Meta documents, and see how many ad sets your budget actually carries.
- Ad Test Readiness CalculatorBefore you switch an ad off: is there enough data to tell a bad campaign from a slow week, or not yet?
Run this on your real numbers
Connect an ad account and Aevin runs this same arithmetic on what actually happened, every day, across every campaign and creative. The same functions, with your data instead of your typing.