How much should I spend on ads to hit my revenue goal?
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Revenue from paid ads alone, over one period: a month, a quarter, a launch.
Display only. Your figures are read in the currency you pick — nothing is converted and no exchange rate is applied.
Sales you want paid ads to produce in the period.
Your own figures for paid traffic, from the same recent period. There are no defaults here.
What an order placed after an ad click is worth on average.
The share of ad clicks that end in an order.
From your ad platform reports, for the same period.
Enter the revenue you want ads to bring in, your average order value, the conversion rate of your ad traffic and what you pay per click. There is no budget until all four are in.
- Revenue goal from paid adsNeeded
- Average order value from ad trafficNeeded
- Conversion rate of paid clicksNeeded
- Average cost per clickNeeded
A ROAS above 1x is not yet a profit. The break-even ROAS calculator gives the return your gross margin needs, and the conversion rate calculator works out the rate to bring back here. Planning a sale weekend instead? The BFCM budget planner is built for that window.
No benchmark and no typical rate is used: every figure comes from the numbers you enter. The currency is a label only and nothing is converted. The worked examples stay in US dollars.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. There is no account, no install and no ad account connection.
From a revenue goal to a spend figure, one rate at a time
An ad budget worked back from a revenue goal is the spend it takes to buy enough clicks to produce enough orders to hit that goal, so a skincare brand aiming for 30,000 dollars a month at a 60 dollar average order needs 500 orders, which at a 2.5 percent conversion rate means 20,000 paid clicks and, at 1.20 dollars a click, a budget of 24,000 dollars.
No benchmark and no typical rate is used: the plan runs entirely on your own figures. To check the return it implies against your margin, use the break-even ROAS calculator.
Four figures, and every one of them is yours. Pull order value, conversion rate and click cost from the same ad traffic and the same recent period, or the plan mixes two different stores.
- Revenue goal
- The sales you want paid ads to bring in over the period, not the whole store. Revenue from email, organic search and repeat customers arrives without a click cost and should stay out of this figure.
- Average order value from ads
- What an order placed after an ad click is worth on average. It is often lower than the store-wide figure, because first-time buyers from an ad tend to buy less than regulars.
- Conversion rate of ad traffic
- The share of paid clicks that end in an order, as a percentage. Use the rate for paid traffic only; a store-wide rate includes returning customers and email clicks, which convert far better than a cold visitor.
- Cost per click
- The average you pay your ad platform for one visit to the store. It moves with the season, the audience and the competition for it, so a figure from the last month beats a figure from last year.
- Implied ROAS and ad cost per order
- The revenue goal set against the budget it needs, and the budget spread across the orders it buys. Below 1x the plan spends more on ads than the goal brings in; above it, gross margin decides whether it makes money.
Nudgesmart is available on the Shopify App Store. Browse the template library or see what it costs.
Six revenue goals, budgeted from their own rates
Made-up shops priced in US dollars, and made-up rates too: none of them is a norm to aim for. The table is generated by the code behind the calculator above.
| Scenario | Goal | AOV / conv. / CPC | Orders | Paid clicks | Ad spend | ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skincare brand, monthly goal | $30,000.00 | $60.00 / 2.5% / $1.20 | 500 | 20,000 | $24,000.00 | 1.25x |
| Outdoor gear, higher-ticket orders | $50,000.00 | $180.00 / 1.2% / $1.80 | 278 | 23,167 | $41,700.60 | 1.20x |
| Snack subscription, cheap clicks | $12,000.00 | $35.00 / 3% / $0.45 | 343 | 11,434 | $5,145.30 | 2.33x |
| Jewellery store, low conversion | $20,000.00 | $95.00 / 0.6% / $1.10 | 211 | 35,167 | $38,683.70 | 0.52x |
| Same skincare goal, conversion lifted | $30,000.00 | $60.00 / 3.2% / $1.20 | 500 | 15,625 | $18,750.00 | 1.60x |
| Home decor, a quarter | $90,000.00 | $120.00 / 1.8% / $0.95 | 750 | 41,667 | $39,583.65 | 2.27x |
What this budget quietly assumes
Rates do not stay still as spend grows
Doubling a budget rarely doubles the orders. Ad platforms find the cheapest, most likely buyers first, so the next thousand clicks usually cost more and convert worse than the last.
Every order is credited to the ads
The plan treats each order as bought by a click. If your ad platform also claims shoppers who would have come anyway, its reported conversion rate is flattered, and a budget built on it will come up short.
Margin is not in this plan
A ROAS above 1x only means the ads bring in more than they cost. Whether that is profit depends on the cost of the goods, shipping and fees behind each order, which is what the break-even ROAS calculator adds.
Rounding goes up, on purpose
Orders and clicks are rounded up to whole numbers, because a plan that falls one order short of the goal has missed it. On a small goal that can make the budget look a little larger than a straight average would.
Clicks and store visits are not the same count
Ad platforms count clicks; your store counts sessions, and the two rarely match because of blocked tracking and visitors who click twice. Take the conversion rate and the click cost from the same source.
Creative fatigue raises the price of a click
Run the same creative to the same audience for long enough and frequency climbs, engagement drops and the auction charges more for each visit. A plan that holds for the first fortnight of a month can drift by the last, so refresh the rates you feed it.
Ad budget planning questions
How do I work out an ad budget from a revenue goal?
Enter the revenue you want from ads, your average order value, your conversion rate on ad traffic and your cost per click. The calculator works back from the goal to the orders, the paid clicks and the spend. A 30,000 dollar goal at a 60 dollar order, 2.5 percent conversion and 1.20 dollars a click needs a 24,000 dollar budget.
Where do I find my conversion rate and cost per click?
Cost per click is in your ad platform reports. For the conversion rate of ad traffic, use your analytics filtered to paid visits, or the orders your ads report over the clicks they bought. The page does not suggest a figure for either, because a borrowed rate would turn it into a plan for a different store.
What does it mean when spend exceeds the goal?
That at your rates the ads cost more than the revenue they bring in, before the goods are paid for. In the jewellery example a 0.6 percent conversion rate needs more than 38,000 dollars of clicks to reach 20,000 dollars of sales. Budget is not the fix there; conversion, order value or click cost is.
Which lever cuts the budget the most?
Compare the first and fifth worked examples: the same goal, order value and click cost, with conversion lifted from 2.5 to 3.2 percent, and the budget falls from 24,000 to 18,750 dollars. Getting more of the paid visitors you already have to buy is usually cheaper than buying more of them.
How is this different from the BFCM budget planner?
The BFCM planner is built around one sale window and the days leading into it. This calculator is for any period at all, a normal month or a quarter, and works purely from a goal and your own rates.
Should prospecting and retargeting share one budget?
Plan them separately if you can. Retargeting audiences have already seen the store, so their conversion rate and click cost look nothing like a cold prospecting audience. Run each through the calculator with its own rates, then add the two budgets together.
Does it connect to my ad accounts?
No. It never logs in to an ad platform or reads a dashboard. You copy the four figures across yourself, and they stay in this tab.
Every click in this plan is a visitor you have already paid for.
UTM source and UTM medium are targeting conditions in Nudgesmart, so a popup can meet shoppers arriving from a tagged ad link with an offer of its own.
