Will Google Ads actually pay?
Most ad calculators work in revenue, which makes everything look profitable. This one works in gross profit — because what matters is the most you can afford to pay for a sale, and whether your clicks cost less than that.
Do the numbers work at your margin?
The question that decides everything is whether a sale costs you less than it leaves you. Put your real numbers in — especially the margin, since that is the one people leave out and then wonder why the ads never paid.
What you'd pay Google itself, not counting management.
R5–R25 covers most South African searches. Competitive trades run higher.
Enquiries divided by clicks. 2–6% is normal on a decent landing page.
Your own close rate. You'll know this better than any benchmark.
What one customer pays you, on average.
What's left after the cost of delivering it. This is the number that decides everything.
Management fees, if you're paying someone
Leave at zero if you run the ads yourself. Ours start at R3 500 a month, separate from ad spend — put that in to see the real picture.
The working: —
Estimates on your own inputs, not a forecast. It assumes every sale is a one-off — if customers come back or refer others, the real ceiling is higher than this shows. It also ignores VAT, which you should take off the sale value if you are registered.
What does break-even actually mean here?
It is the point where a sale costs you exactly what it leaves you. If a R6 500 job runs at 45% margin, that sale is worth R2 925 to you — so the moment winning it costs more than R2 925 in ads, you are buying revenue and losing money.
Revenue flatters everything
A 4x return on ad spend sounds excellent until you learn the margin is 20%, at which point it is barely breaking even.
Thin margins make ads hard
Under about 25%, the ceiling gets so low that only very cheap clicks work. That is a real answer, and it is better to know it now.
Repeat customers change it
If a customer comes back twice a year, you can afford to pay far more to win them. This tool deliberately ignores that, so treat it as the pessimistic case.
Why do ad campaigns lose money?
Rarely because Google is expensive. Usually because the wrong searches are being paid for, the landing page is not built to convert, nobody is tracking what happens after the click, or the margin was never going to support it.
Paying for the wrong searches
Broad match quietly buys clicks from people looking for something else entirely. Negative keywords are where most wasted spend hides.
Sending clicks to the home page
Someone searching one specific thing lands on a page about everything you do. A page built for that search converts several times better. Landing pages
No conversion tracking
Without it you are optimising for clicks rather than customers, and Google cheerfully sends you more of the cheap useless kind.
A slow landing page
You pay for the click whether or not the page loads. Every second of delay is spend you have already committed and then wasted. Performance calculator
Questions about the calculator.
Start at R12 and try it at R8 and R20 as well. What matters is not the exact figure but whether the answer flips from profit to loss inside that range — if it does, your campaign will live or die on click costs and it is worth finding the real number before committing a budget.
Because revenue makes every campaign look like a winner. A retailer at 20% margin and a consultant at 80% can have identical revenue and completely opposite outcomes on the same spend. Margin is what sets the ceiling on what you can pay for a sale, so a calculator that skips it is telling you nothing useful.
Not necessarily, but it means something has to change before you spend. Usually that is the landing page conversion rate rather than the ads — moving 4% to 6% often does more than any bidding change. Sometimes the honest answer is that SEO suits your margin better than paid search does.
Yes, if you would be paying someone to run it. Ours start at R3 500 a month on top of ad spend, and a campaign that only works when you ignore the management cost does not really work. Put it in and see whether the numbers still hold. Google Ads
Deliberately ignored, which makes this the pessimistic view. If a customer typically buys three times, your real ceiling is roughly three times what the calculator shows. Businesses with genuine repeat custom can afford to lose money on the first sale — just be honest with yourself about whether they actually do come back.
No. It runs entirely in your browser and disappears when you close the tab — same as the Scorecard tool and the performance calculator. There is no email field and nothing is sent anywhere.
Before you spend anything.
If the numbers only work at a better conversion rate, the landing page is the problem rather than the ads. The free audit measures what your site actually does with the traffic it already has.