Marketing budget calculator
What your growth target actually costs.
Most marketing budgets are set by what feels affordable. This works the other way around: start from the revenue you want, and it shows the jobs, leads, cost per signed job, and ad spend required to get there.
Tell us your goal
How much more revenue you want next year.
Tell us about your jobs
What one is worth, what you keep, how often you win them.
See what it takes
The leads you need each month and what the advertising costs.
Start from a trade
High ticket, low volume. The economics are forgiving, so the real constraint is usually how many qualified estimates your market can actually produce.
Your numbers
Change any number to match your business. Not sure about one? Leave it — the starting figures are real averages, and you can still see roughly what the plan looks like.
Just the extra money, on top of what you already do. If you did $3M last year and want $4M, put $1,000,000.
Roughly what the business brings in per year today. We need it to check whether the ad budget is sensible for a company your size.
Utah replacement averages, a published range of roughly $9,400 to $14,700 (2026).
Residential replacement runs 30 to 33 percent gross. Commercial runs higher.
Retail roofing commonly runs 25 to 40 percent. Insurance work behaves differently.
Where would the leads come from?
Local Service Ads are the green “Google Guaranteed” results at the very top. Search ads are the regular ones below them. They cost very different amounts, which changes everything.
Published roofing ranges plus a thin CMS exterior-services sample. We run no roofing Local Services account, so this is an estimate.
Every call, form and message from a stranger who might buy. Leave it at 0 if you do not track it and we will skip this check.
Our packages: $1,875, $2,875, or $3,875 per month. Ad budget is billed separately and paid directly to the platforms.
To add $1,000,000 a year
$1,940 ad spend + $3,875 management
Check this6.2 more jobs a month · 18 leads to get them
At $110 a lead, and 35 out of every 100 leads turning into work, each job you win costs $314 to win and returns $4,050 in gross profit, so you keep $3,736 of it. Over a year that is $69,780 of marketing against $300,000 of gross profit added.
Is each job worth winning?
Each job returns 12.9× what it costs to win.
Can the business afford it?
Easily. That is 1.7% of $4,000,000 in revenue, well under the 5–10% most companies spend on marketing.
Can you get that many leads?
Fill in how many leads you get today and we can tell you whether this is a realistic jump.
per month · 74 per year
per month · 212 per year
$1,940 ads + $3,875 fee
of $4,000,000 · 7.0% of the new revenue alone
The derivation
Jobs needed
$1,000,000 ÷ $13,500 per job = 74/yr
6.2/mo
Leads needed
6.2 jobs ÷ 35 of every 100 leads winning · 212/yr
18/mo
Cost per signed job
$110 a lead ÷ 35 of every 100 winning
$314
Gross profit per job
$13,500 × 30% margin
$4,050
Ad spend
6.2 jobs × $314 each · $23,280/yr
$1,940/mo
Total marketing, with the fee
$1,940 ads + $3,875 fee · $69,780/yr
$5,815/mo
Gross profit added
6.2 jobs × $4,050 · $300,000/yr
$25,000/mo
Left after marketing
$25,000 gross profit − $5,815 marketing
$19,185/mo
Month by month. 6.2 extra jobs a month need 18 leads, which costs $5,815 a month all in. Those jobs add $25,000 of gross profit a month, leaving $19,185 after marketing — and the spend is 1.7% of a $4,000,000 business.
Plumbing and HVAC cost-per-lead defaults are measured from Custom Marketing Solutions accounts over the 90 days to 25 August 2026, across roughly $1.4M of managed Google Ads and Local Services spend. They are cost per tracked conversion — every call, form and chat the platform recorded. Some share of those are wrong numbers and price shoppers, so your cost per genuinely qualified lead is higher, and the number you enter for leads-that-become-jobs should count the same way. We run no roofing account, so roofing figures are published benchmarks rather than our own data. This is a planning model, not a forecast: it assumes your win rate and average job stay the same as you grow, and it does not model seasonality or whether your crews can absorb the extra work.
Common questions
The math behind the number
Four questions that decide whether a marketing budget is an investment or a guess.
What does this actually tell me?
How many extra jobs you need to hit a revenue goal, how many leads it takes to get those jobs, and what you would have to spend on advertising to buy those leads. It works backwards from the goal instead of guessing at a budget.
I do not know some of these numbers. Can I still use it?
Yes. Every box starts with a real figure taken from companies we manage, so you get a sensible answer straight away. Change the ones you do know and the rest still work. The two worth getting right are what an average job is worth and what a lead costs you.
Why does it matter where the leads come from?
Because the same job can make or lose money depending on what you paid to find the customer. A plumbing lead from the Google Guaranteed ads at the top of the page costs us about $80. The same lead from the regular search ads costs about $116. Nothing about your business changed, but the maths did.
My leads cost more than the numbers you show. Is that bad?
Not by itself. What matters is whether a job is worth more than it costs to win. A roofer can pay a lot for a lead and still do well, because one roof is worth thousands. A drain-cleaning company cannot. Put your real number in and the calculator will tell you which side you are on.
The next signal is yours