Google Ads budget calculator that starts from the leads you need

Google Ads is priced per click, so a budget is a number of clicks times what each costs, and the leads are those clicks times the share that convert. Turn that around and you have the planner: cost per lead is CPC divided by conversion rate, and the budget is the leads you need times that cost per lead. Everything else, daily budget, clicks per month, CAC and ROAS, follows from those two rates.

The two rates are also the two things you can look up. Your account's average CPC is in the campaign table; the landing page conversion rate is conversions divided by clicks. If you have no account yet, the industry presets are typical search values for lead generation, and they are deliberately conservative: a plan built on a 12 percent conversion rate that turns out to be 6 is a plan for half the leads.

Start from a goal when sales has said how many leads they need. The planner returns the budget that buys them and the daily figure to set in Google Ads (monthly ÷ 30.4; Google averages the daily budget over the month and may spend up to twice it on a given day). Start from a budget when finance has set the number, and the planner returns the leads it buys, so the conversation with sales starts from a forecast rather than a hope.

In either mode the what-if row shows what half, one and a half and twice the budget would produce. It is linear on purpose, which is right for planning and optimistic in practice: as you scale into broader keywords the CPC rises and the conversion rate falls, so treat the 2x column as a ceiling rather than a forecast.

Bids are the smallest lever. In order of how much they move the budget for a lead target:

• Conversion rate. One point, from 7 to 8 percent, cuts the cost per lead by an eighth and the budget with it. A page change, not a bid change.
• Quality score. A higher expected CTR and relevance lowers the CPC you pay for the same position; ad copy and keyword grouping do this, not bidding.
• Tracking. Smart Bidding spends the budget towards the conversions it can see. Without offline conversion import from your CRM it sees 60 to 70 percent of them and bids for the wrong subset; the budget is the same, the leads it buys are fewer.