Work out what your advertising has to do to pay for itself.
Put in your budget, your cost per lead, the share of leads that turn into meetings, the share of meetings that turn into contracts and what a contract is worth. It multiplies them out. Every assumption is yours — this page publishes no benchmarks, because we have not measured any.
FUEiNT Technologies is a software studio in Coimbatore, India, building custom software since 2014. This is a free calculator that accompanies our article on advertising channels for software and IT services companies; it does arithmetic in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
The calculator
Change any figure and the results below update.
Every figure above is your assumption multiplied out. It is arithmetic, not a forecast, and it is only as good as the five numbers you put in.
Why there are no default figures in it
The version of this page we replaced arrived with the numbers already filled in: a cost per lead of ₹2,500 on Google and ₹4,000 on LinkedIn, a quarter of leads becoming meetings, a fifth of meetings becoming contracts. Those constants were hard-coded into the page and shown as an estimate. Nothing sourced them, and no FUEiNT client data supports them.
That is not a small problem in a calculator. Its whole output is the product of its assumptions, so an invented cost per lead produces an invented return with a currency symbol in front of it — and a business can commit a year of budget to it.
So the fields start empty. The arithmetic is real and it is the arithmetic that is worth having: it makes visible how brutally a small change in close rate moves the answer, and it does that just as well with your numbers as with somebody else’s.
A starting split for an IT services budget
Shares, not amounts. The logic is that a long, considered, high-value sale needs both the search that catches intent and the presence that survives a six-month decision.
| Channel | Share | Your amount | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 50% | The searches made by someone already looking to buy | |
| LinkedIn Ads | 30% | Reaching the roles that sign — CTOs, founders, heads of engineering | |
| Retargeting | 20% | Staying visible across a sales cycle measured in months |
Before the numbers mean anything
A calculator is only as good as the tracking behind it. Every one of these has to be true or your cost per lead is fiction.
- Conversion tracking is installed and firingConfirm it by submitting your own form and watching the conversion register. Do not take the tag manager’s word for it.
- A lead is defined, and everyone uses the same definitionA form fill and a qualified opportunity are not the same thing. Decide which one you are counting before you count it.
- Phone and WhatsApp enquiries are counted tooFor a services business these are often most of the enquiries, and they are the ones that never reach the analytics.
- You know what a contract is actually worthUse the median of your last ten, not the largest. One outlier deal will make any plan look profitable.
- Someone is following up within the dayResponse time changes the close rate more than the ad copy does, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
What each month is for
What you should be doing, not what you should be getting. Any figure attached to these months would be one we invented.
| Month | What the month is for |
|---|---|
| Month 1 | Setup, tracking, first traffic. Cost per lead is at its worst and that is expected — you are buying data. |
| Month 2 | Cutting. Pause what is not converting, keep what is, tighten the targeting around it. |
| Month 3 | Judging. There is now enough volume to compare cost per lead against the value of a contract and decide honestly. |
Most advertising that "is not working" is working and not being counted.
If your ad platform and your sales figures tell two different stories, send us both and a senior engineer will write back with where we would look first.
Saravanampatti, Coimbatore, TN, India — 641035
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