Will Google Ads make you money? Find out before you spend
Many ad calculators stop at revenue. This one goes on to profit after ad spend. It shows what your budget buys in a conservative, expected and optimistic case, the most you can afford per click, and the budget a sales goal needs.
| $3,000 a month | Conservative | Expected | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per click | 10.00 | 8.33 | 7.00 |
| Leads | 15 | 29.0 | 42.9 |
| New customers | 1.5 | 5.8 | 10.7 |
| ROAS | 2.00x | 7.73x | 14.29x |
| Profit after ad spend | -1,200 | 3,958 | 9,857 |
| Most you can pay per click | 6.00 | 19.32 | 30.00 |
What's inside
- Planner. Start from a monthly budget. Three scenarios side by side give clicks, leads, new customers, cost per lead and per customer, revenue, profit after ad spend and lifetime profit. Add your Keyword Planner search volume and it also checks whether there are enough searches to spend the budget.
- Break-even numbers. Break-even ROAS, the most you can pay per customer and the most you can pay per click. Your CPC turns red if it's above what you can afford.
- Goal Planner. Start from the number of customers you want. It works back to leads, clicks, impressions and budget on Google, Meta or a split between them.
- Benchmarks. 2026 Google search benchmarks for 23 industries and Meta lead-campaign benchmarks, with sources. Pick your industry on the Planner: the expected column starts on its Google benchmarks, ready for you to replace with your own numbers.
The formulas
| Number | How it's worked out |
|---|---|
| Clicks | Budget ÷ CPC, capped by searches × impression share × CTR |
| Leads | Clicks × conversion rate (Google: conversions ÷ interactions) |
| Profit after ad spend | Customers × sale value × gross margin − ad spend |
| ROAS | Revenue ÷ ad spend (Google's “conv. value / cost”) |
| Break-even ROAS | 1 ÷ gross margin |
| Most you can pay per click | Gross profit per sale × conversion rate × close rate |
Definitions follow Google Ads Help. Break-even ROAS (1 ÷ margin) matches Amazon Ads' “ads math” guide.
Where many ad calculators mislead
- They stop at revenue. A 4x ROAS sounds great, but on a 20% margin you need 5x just to break even.
- They call ROAS “ROI”. ROI here means profit after ad spend divided by ad spend. 100% means each $1 of ads made $1 of actual profit.
- They double-count channels. If Google and Meta each have a budget big enough to bring all your leads, adding them together overstates what you need. The Goal Planner splits the leads between channels.
- They plan on the best case. Budget on the conservative column.
About the benchmarks
Google benchmarks come from WordStream by LocaliQ's Google Ads Benchmarks 2026: 13,474 US search campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026, covering Google and Microsoft Ads. The all-industry median is a 6.64% CTR, $5.42 CPC, 8.18% conversion rate and $66.69 per lead. Meta figures come from the same publisher's Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2026 lead campaigns. I checked every value against the published tables. They're medians from that publisher's clients, and the conversion rates are leads, not purchases. Online stores usually convert far lower. Your own account data beats any benchmark.
Want a second opinion?
I run Google Ads for e-commerce and service businesses. If the numbers say your ads should work but they don't, message me and I'll look at the account.
Google Ads Profit Calculator
Excel .xlsx · 20 KB · Works with Google Sheets, Excel and LibreOffice