Digital Marketing Spend Calculator
Not sure how much to spend on your digital marketing?
Most of our customers don’t know how much they should be spending on their ads and we get asked this a lot! So we’ve put together a handy tool to help you find out how much to spend depending on where you’re at and your business goals.
To use the spend calculator, click the ‘Calculate my spend’ link and follow the Google prompts to make a copy
Click the link and add your relevant figures into the boxes on the left hand side of the calculator to see what level of marketing spend you would need to reach your goals. The 4 key numbers you need are:
- Your revenue target (it’s best to keep this realistic to start with!)
- You average order value (you should be able to get this from Shopify, WooCommerce or you eCommerce platform of choice)
- Cost per click (if you don’t know this, use one of the industry averages below)
- Website conversion rate to show what % of sessions converts to a sale (you can get this from your eCommerce platform or from Google Analytics)
Play around with the figures to see various options, and what would happen as you scale.
It’s really worth noting that this is a very loose estimate for planning purposes. The true cost of your digital marketing results does depend on a number of factors including (but not limited to!):
Things brillea can control and influence:
- Your Ad Click-Through Rate (% CTR)
- Ad relevance
- Target audience
- Ad creative
- Spend
But there are also things that with the best will in the world, we can’t immediately control or influence, like:
- Your sector (more on this below)
- What the competition is doing
- The demand for your products and how appealing they are to your target audience
- How niche or large your target audience is
- Your price point
- Your postage and packaging costs
- Your website and how well it can sell and convert (this is a big one!)
- Your Quality Score (for Google Search)
- Seasonality effects
These will all have a factor on your results.
Need some help using the calculator?
I don’t know my Cost Per Click (CPC)
As of September 2020, the Facebook CPC for an eCommerce conversion campaign on average stood at around £0.86 and for Google at around £1.17.
Here are some industry benchmarks which may help you:
| Industry | Average CPC (Facebook) | Average CPC (Google) |
|---|---|---|
| Food and Beverages | £0.70 | £1.04 |
| Fashion | £0.94 | £1.00 |
| Beauty & Cosmetics | £2.31 | £1.98 |
| Fitness | £1.38 | £1.03 |
| Technology | £0.92 | £0.37 |
| Finance & Insurance | £2.74 | £2.50 |
I don’t know my Website Conversion Rate
- Average Conversion Rate in the UK is around 2.65% for paid Facebook/Instagram or Google traffic (note, the overall website conversion including all traffic is around 1%)
- We consider a conversion rate of over 4% to be really good, and over 8% to be excellent (but do have customers with a conversion rate as high as 17%)
- The global average eCommerce conversion rate falls between 1% and 4%
- It’s worth thinking about your business/product; when making decisions about high-ticket items, consumers tend to spend a substantial amount of time researching and comparing their options, meaning your website conversion rate may lower
It doesn’t look like I’ll make much money!!
When starting out, most businesses will only just break even on their ad spend in the first 1-2 months. So if they spend £1,000 on ads, they may make say £1,200 on sales with a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of 1.2x
This may not sound like much initially but you have to remember this is just the starting point:
- Everyone starts in this place! Very few businesses hit it out of the park on day one
- Facebook’s algorithms will improve over time, meaning your results will improve
- New tests introduced by brillea each month mean your ad Click Through Rate should increase
- This should all mean that your CPAs will go down over time and your ROAS will go up. Most of brillea’s customers have a ROAS of 1-2x on month one and then a ROAS of 3-5 by month 3
There are also some other big advantages to carrying on with paid ads, even if only breaking even:
- You are getting your products into your customers hands which helps your brand
- You’re creating world of mouth, customers are likely to tell other people about you
- They may come back and repeat buy from you. Their longer term value to you may be a lot more than the initial order they put through your store
- You also get to learn more about your customers, what products they purchase and how your ad performance and website are helping achieve this. Invaluable stuff :)
If you have any questions, get in touch with the brillea team, we’ll do our best to help!