Media Puppies
PPC forecast calculator
Before committing a budget, it is worth knowing roughly what it buys. This runs your budget down the funnel and tells you whether the answer is a business or a rounding error.
Set from your location. The maths is the same in any currency — only the labels change.
Landing page conversion rate.
Your sales close rate.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or stored anywhere.
A forecast is a conversation, not a promise
Nobody can tell you what a budget will produce before it runs. What a forecast does is expose whether the plan can work arithmetically — and a surprising number cannot, which is much better to discover before the money is committed.
Where the numbers come from
- Cost per click. From your own account if you have one. If not, run a small test for two weeks rather than guessing; estimates for competitive categories are usually optimistic by a wide margin.
- Click to lead. Your landing page conversion rate. Two to five percent is common for cold paid traffic; above eight is unusual and worth verifying before you plan around it.
- Lead to customer. From your CRM. If you do not have it, this is the number to go and find before spending anything.
Change the close rate by five points and the whole forecast moves more than any bidding change ever will.
Read it backwards too
Set the budget aside and ask what you need. If you want thirty customers a month and the funnel says you need eight hundred leads to get them, you now know the real question is whether your sales team can call eight hundred people — and that is a staffing decision, not a media one.
Watch the volume floor
Automated bidding needs conversions to learn from. A forecast showing four customers a month is telling you to optimise to an earlier event, because no algorithm improves on four data points.
For the conversion stages in more detail, use the lead funnel calculator. To check whether the budget can clear Meta’s learning threshold, use the learning phase calculator.
Questions
How accurate are these forecasts?+
As accurate as the rates you put in. With real historical data they are a reasonable planning tool. With guessed rates they are arithmetic, not a forecast, and should be labelled as such to anyone you show them to.
What if I have never run ads?+
Run a small test for two to four weeks to get a real cost per click and conversion rate, then come back. A forecast built on benchmarks from an article is the most expensive kind of guess.
Should I use gross margin or net?+
Gross. This compares advertising against the profit a sale contributes before fixed costs, which is the right frame for an acquisition decision.
Does this work for ecommerce?+
It works, but ecommerce usually buys the purchase directly rather than a lead. Set the lead-to-customer rate to 100% and treat click-to-lead as your store conversion rate.
Embed this calculator
Free to use on your own site. Copy this into your page — the attribution line is the only condition.
The paragraph below the iframe is the part that matters: an iframe's contents are served from our domain, so a link inside it is not a link from your page. The paragraph is. The small script just resizes the frame to fit your column — drop it if you prefer, the fixed height still works.
Other free tools
Want someone to run the campaigns behind these numbers?
We run Meta and Google ads for businesses where one customer is worth real money. You will get a straight answer on whether paid works for you — including “not yet”.
Get a free lead plan →