How much do you need to spend to hit a revenue target?
Start from the revenue you want rather than the budget you can stomach. This works backwards through jobs, then enquiries, then spend, and tells you what the answer is as a share of the revenue it is meant to produce.
Your numbers
The answer
Monthly ad budget
$9,701
$116,417 over twelve months
Jobs needed
500
41.7 a month
Enquiries needed
1,667
139 a month
Budget as a share of revenue
19.4%
Advertising only — no agency fee, no tools
Cost to win one job
$232.83
$69.85 per enquiry ÷ 30% close rate
How this was worked out
- Jobs needed
- $600,000 ÷ $1,200.00 = 500 jobs
- Enquiries needed
- 500 ÷ 30% = 1,667 enquiries
- Total budget
- 1,667 × $69.85 = $116,417
- Monthly budget
- $116,417 ÷ 12 = $9,701
- Share of revenue
- $116,417 ÷ $600,000 = 19.4%
The same target at three costs per enquiry
| Cost per enquiry | Total budget | Monthly | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| $8.91 — our cheapest published account | $14,850 | $1,238 | 2.5% |
| $69.85 — your figure | $116,417 | $9,701 | 19.4% |
| $112.56 — our median for the trade you picked | $187,600 | $15,633 | 31.3% |
| $220.59 — our most expensive published account | $367,650 | $30,638 | 61.3% |
The cheapest and dearest rows are the two ends of our own published book — 34 Australian accounts across 13 trades, measured in 2026. They are a range from selected work, not a market average, and no business should plan on landing at either end.
What to do with this
- To bill $600,000 you need 500 jobs, which needs 1,667 enquiries, which costs $116,417 at $69.85 each.
- That is $9,701 a month and 19.4% of the revenue it is meant to produce. Every job costs $232.83 to win before you have done any of the work.
- Fund the first two months as setup rather than as a twelfth of the year each. Accounts do not arrive at their settled cost per enquiry immediately, and the early figure is always the worse one.
Change anything above and the link in your address bar changes with it, so you can send the exact result to whoever needs to see it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in your browser.
What this does, and how the maths works
What it does
- Converts a revenue target into the number of jobs behind it, then into the number of enquiries behind those, then into the advertising spend behind those.
- Shows the answer as a share of revenue, which is the form the argument usually takes inside a business.
- Lets you start from our measured cost per enquiry for your trade, or from your own, and shows the difference between them.
How to use it
- Enter the revenue you want the advertising to produce over the next twelve months. Not total revenue — just the part that has to come from new enquiries.
- Enter your average job value and the share of enquiries that turn into work.
- Pick your trade to load the median cost per enquiry from our published accounts, or type your own if you have it.
- Read the monthly budget, then check the share-of-revenue line before you commit to it.
The formula
- Jobs needed = revenue target ÷ average job value
- Enquiries needed = jobs needed ÷ lead-to-job rate
- Total budget = enquiries needed × cost per enquiry
- Monthly budget = total budget ÷ 12
Reading the answer
- If the monthly budget is more than you can fund, the fix is rarely a smaller budget. It is a smaller target, a higher job value, or a better close rate — in that order of how quickly they move.
- The share-of-revenue figure is the one to argue about. A number that looks enormous in dollars often looks ordinary as a percentage, and the reverse is also true.
- This assumes the advertising starts working on day one. It does not. Treat the first two months as setup rather than as a twelfth of the year each.
What it cannot tell you
Straight-line arithmetic with no ramp, no seasonality and no diminishing returns. Buying twice the enquiries usually costs more than twice as much, because the cheapest searches sell out first — so the real budget for an ambitious target sits above what this returns.
Where every figure on this page came from
Every default in the calculator above is either your own number or a figure from one of the studies below, with the market and the sample stated. Nothing here is an estimate somebody felt was about right, and no United States figure is wearing an Australian label.
SoudCoh, 36 published client case studies
SoudCoh · 2026 · measured in AU/UK · high confidence
Cost per enquiry taken from the headline figure published on each case study, for a measured period in 2026. Australian dollars.
A range from selected work on accounts we run, not a market average and not a forecast. Read the individual case studies before using any figure from it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with SoudCoh
Have more questions? Let's chat!
Book a Free Strategy CallThere is no published Australian benchmark that answers this, so the honest method is to work backwards from what you want out of it. Across the plumbing accounts we run, the published cost per enquiry sits between $57.21 and $176.78 in Australian dollars, with the one Melbourne account in that set at $74.42. At $74.42 an enquiry and a 30% close rate, one $1,200 job costs about $248 to win, so $10,000 of revenue a month needs roughly 8 jobs, 28 enquiries and about $2,100 of spend. Change any of those three inputs and the answer changes — which is the point of doing it this way rather than quoting a figure.
Every percentage in circulation — 5%, 7%, 10% — traces to a survey of businesses that look nothing like a service trade, or to nothing at all. We do not publish one. The percentage this tool shows is an output, not a target: it falls out of your job value, your close rate and what an enquiry costs you. If it comes back at 6% and the work is profitable, 6% is your number.
No. This is media spend only — the money that goes to Google or Meta. Management fees, call tracking, landing pages and CRM licences sit on top, and they are what turns a cost per lead into a real cost per job. The cost per booked job calculator adds them.
In this tool it does not — the arithmetic is a straight line. In a real auction it does, because the cheapest and most relevant searches sell out first. Doubling the enquiries usually costs more than double, so treat this as the floor for an ambitious target rather than the estimate.
Longer than the month you spend it in, for two reasons. New accounts start above their settled cost per enquiry — several of our published case studies record exactly that, with cost per enquiry falling 20% to 58% inside the same account. And an enquiry is not an invoice: quoted work often closes weeks later. Fund the first two months as setup.
Run these next
One number rarely settles anything on its own. These three answer the questions this one raises.
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Turn a daily budget and a click price into a monthly range of clicks, enquiries and jobs, banded by the conversion rates measured across 25 of our own accounts.
SoudCoh case studies · WordStream 2026
Cost per lead calculator
Work out cost per click, conversion rate and cost per lead from three numbers, then compare against a US benchmark and our measured Australian range.
SoudCoh case studies · WordStream 2026
Break-even ROAS and max cost per lead
Turn job value, gross margin and close rate into the maximum you can pay for an enquiry, the break-even return on ad spend, and how much headroom your current cost per lead leaves.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
We will read
your real ones.
Send us the account rather than the estimate. We will tell you what it is actually costing to win a job, which part of the chain is leaking, and whether it is worth fixing — before anyone asks you to sign anything.