Calculator
How much do you need to spend to hit a revenue target?
Working backwards from the number you actually care about. Put in the revenue you want from advertising, and this tells you how many jobs, how many enquiries, and what that costs. It is frequently the fastest way to discover that a target is not reachable, which is worth knowing in January rather than in September.
In short
An advertising budget is worked out backwards from the revenue target, not forwards from what feels affordable. Divide the revenue you want by your average job value to get the jobs needed, divide that by your close rate to get the enquiries needed, and multiply by your cost per enquiry to get the monthly spend. The step most businesses skip is capacity: a budget that produces more enquiries than the team can quote inside a day turns into wasted spend rather than revenue, because in trades the first quote back wins a disproportionate share of the work. This calculator runs that chain in the browser and shows every step, with no email required.
Monthly budget from a revenue target
Read the enquiry count before you read the budget
The spend figure gets the attention, but the number that decides whether any of this is possible is the one above it: how many enquiries a month the target implies. Budget can be found. Demand cannot.
If the calculator says you need eighty enquiries a month and your trade in your area generates thirty searches a week in total, no amount of money fixes it. The options at that point are a wider radius, a second service line, or a different channel entirely — and that is a strategy conversation rather than a bidding one.
This is also where the ratio at the bottom right earns its place. Spend as a share of target revenue is a blunt instrument, but it catches the plans that were never going to work. Anything above roughly a third of your gross margin is telling you the chain is broken somewhere upstream, usually at the close rate.
The three levers, in the order they are worth pulling
Close rate
Free, and the fastest. Moving from one in five to one in four cuts the enquiries you need by a fifth, and with them the budget. For most trade businesses that improvement is not a sales technique, it is answering the phone faster and following up the quote once.
Average job value
Selling the larger version of the same job, or refusing the smallest work, changes this calculation more than any campaign optimisation will. It also usually improves margin at the same time.
Cost per enquiry
The one everybody reaches for first and the one with the least room in it. Real gains exist — tighter campaign structure, a negative keyword list, a landing page that answers the question — but they are incremental against the other two.
Want the demand side checked?The budget number is only useful if the enquiries exist. We will pull the search volume for your keywords in your radius and tell you whether the target is reachable at all.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
What cost per enquiry should I put in?
If you are already advertising, use your own figure from the last three months, calculated on total spend including the part that produced nothing. If you are not, there is no honest UK benchmark to hand you — no independent published cost-per-lead figure by industry exists for Britain. Pull a Keyword Planner forecast for your own keywords and radius instead.
The budget it gives me is enormous. What now?
That is the calculator doing its job. It means the revenue target, the close rate and the cost per enquiry are not compatible, and finding that out now is considerably cheaper than finding it out in April. The usual fix is not more budget: it is a better close rate, a higher average job value, or a smaller target.
Does this account for organic and repeat work?
No, deliberately. It sizes the paid channel on its own so you can see what advertising alone would have to carry. In practice a mature business covers part of the target from search, referrals and repeat customers, and the paid budget only has to fill the gap. Take those off the target first if you want the realistic number.
Is there a sensible ceiling on ad spend as a share of revenue?
It depends entirely on gross margin, which is why the calculator flags the ratio rather than ruling on it. A trade running at 45% gross margin can absorb an acquisition cost that would bankrupt a business running at 15%. As a rough sanity check, if acquisition is taking more than about a third of gross profit, something in the chain needs fixing.
Related
Talk to a human
Target look unreachable?
That is usually a close rate or a job value problem rather than a budget one. Call and we will work out which.