Calculate your ideal ad budget based on revenue goals or plan reach from your budget.
The Ad Budget Planner reverse-engineers your revenue or reach goals into precise daily spend recommendations. It uses 2025 industry benchmarks and accounts for the "Learning Phase" required by platform algorithms.
Why it matters: Campaigns fail not from bad creative, but from mathematical insufficiency—whether the daily budget provides enough data for the algorithm to optimize. This tool calculates the exact "escape velocity" required.
Budget recommendations consider platform learning phase requirements (50 conversions/week) and industry benchmark conversion rates. Actual results depend on creative and targeting quality.
An ad budget planner translates a business goal—revenue, leads, trials, purchases—into a monthly advertising budget that makes sense. The usual mistake? Starting with "what we can afford" and hoping performance works out. A good planner flips that: start with outcomes and work backward through the funnel.
Budgeting is a constraint problem. You're juggling expected conversion rates, average costs (CPC or CPM), and the time platforms need to learn. Get it wrong and you hit one of two failure modes: underfunding (never collecting enough data to optimize) or overfunding (scaling before you have a repeatable acquisition engine).
Use a budget planner when you need to justify spend to a stakeholder, plan cash flow for the quarter, or decide how to split budget across channels based on your margins. It's not about hitting a perfect number—it's about getting close enough to start testing.
Answer this with targets, not guesses. Start with the outcome: how many customers, leads, or trials do you need? Estimate how many clicks that requires (using a conversion rate), then multiply by expected cost per click. That's your first-pass budget.
If you're running CPM campaigns (awareness, video), work backward: impressions to clicks using CTR, then clicks to conversions.
Don't build a single-point estimate. Ad auctions fluctuate. Performance shifts during learning phases. Build a range instead—best case, expected, worst case. You'll refine it over time as real data comes in, but the range keeps you from being blindsided when costs spike or results dip.
Allocation is about matching channel strengths to funnel stages. Search captures demand. Social and video create it. Retargeting closes the loop.
A practical split uses three buckets:
Core — the channel driving your best unit economics right now
Scale — channels that work but aren't maxed out
Experiments — new creatives, audiences, or platforms you're testing
Consider measurement too. If you can't reliably attribute lift for a channel, keep it capped as experimental until you have evidence.
Finally, build in a reallocation rule. Something like: "Move 10% weekly from lowest performer to highest performer." That way the plan improves with data instead of sitting static.
Budget planning isn't just "how much." It's "when" and "for what purpose."
Campaigns ramp up slowly. Platforms need conversion events to stabilize delivery. Creative needs iterations before you find a winner. Plan a testing period with enough spend to reach statistical confidence before judging results.
Factor in seasonality and competitive spikes. Q4 auction pressure can double costs overnight. You don't want to be surprised.
Align budget with unit economics. If your margins require a 90-day payback, your plan should reflect that. If you're optimizing for lifetime value, the targets look different than immediate profit.
The best plans are living documents. Revisit inputs—CTR, CPC, conversion rate, AOV, LTV—and update assumptions as performance data arrives.
The Learning Phase is when platform algorithms (Meta, Google) need ~50 conversions per week to optimize delivery effectively. Underfunded campaigns stay in learning indefinitely.
Use Bottom-Up (revenue target) if you have clear revenue goals to hit. Use Top-Down (reach-based) for brand awareness campaigns or when entering new markets.
B2B typically has 60-90 day sales cycles. Budget spent today generates revenue 2-3 months later, so plan for sustained investment through that period.
Optimize your budget allocation across Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn based on your goals.
Estimate impressions, clicks, and conversions based on your budget and industry benchmarks.
Calculate your click-through rate and benchmark against industry standards.
Calculate your cost per click and compare against platform benchmarks.
Calculate ROAS instantly from revenue and ad spend to see whether your ads are profitable.
Calculate cost per 1,000 impressions, total ad cost, or impressions from your budget in seconds.
