PPC Budget Calculator

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) budget planning determines how much you need to spend on paid search or social ads to hit a target number of leads or sales.

This calculator works forward from traffic. You tell it how many clicks a day you want and what a click costs, and it returns the budget, the conversions those clicks should produce, and the revenue behind them.

The core formulas:

Daily budget = Target daily clicks × Cost Per Click, and Monthly budget = Daily budget × 30

Conversions = Clicks × Conversion Rate

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) = CPC / Conversion Rate

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) = Revenue / Ad Spend

Note that the click input is per day, not per month. Enter a monthly figure by mistake and the budget comes back thirty times too large.

What each variable means:

• Target daily clicks: the traffic you want to buy each day
• Conversion rate: the share of clicks that become sales or leads, commonly 2 to 5%
• CPC: what a click costs in your market, from about $0.50 on broad consumer terms to $50 and beyond in legal and insurance
• CPA: what each conversion costs you, which has to sit below your profit per sale or the campaign loses money by design

Worked example:

You want 84 clicks a day at $1.80 CPC, converting at 4%, with an average order of $120.

• Daily budget: 84 × $1.80 = $151.20, so $4,536 a month
• Clicks bought: 84 × 30 = 2,520 a month
• Conversions: 2,520 × 4% = 101
• Cost per conversion: $1.80 ÷ 4% = $45
• Revenue: 101 × $120 = $12,096, a ROAS of 2.67×

At a $60 margin on a $120 product, each $45 conversion leaves $15 of profit, so the campaign clears about $1,500 a month. That margin is thinner than the 2.67× ROAS suggests, which is the trap: ROAS counts revenue, and only margin pays the bills.

Going the other way

If you start from a sales target rather than a traffic target, divide first: 100 sales a month at a 4% conversion rate needs 2,500 clicks a month, which is 83 or 84 a day. Put that daily figure into the calculator.

Typical CPC ranges by industry:

• E-commerce: $0.50–$2.00
• Software/SaaS: $3.00–$10.00
• Legal services: $15–$50+
• Finance/insurance: $10–$30

Always set a daily budget cap to avoid runaway spend, and monitor Quality Score to lower CPC over time.