How much should you spend on ads, and where? Answer six questions and get a budget, a channel split, and a 6-month plan — built from published benchmarks, with the reasoning shown.
Your economics support paid acquisition. Start at $6,000/month, concentrated on 1 channel, and scale on evidence.
Ballparks from published, platform-attributed medians for cold traffic — channels running together will each claim some of the same conversions, so blended reality lands below the sum of dashboards. Your creative and offer move these numbers more than any budget decision. Treat months 1–2 as data collection, not verdicts.
Search captures existing demand — the highest-intent clicks you can buy. Split brand terms from non-brand and judge them separately; blended numbers flatter the account. Expect $96–$300 per demo request on non-brand.
Cold audiences and non-brand search — where growth actually comes from. Retargeting closes; prospecting fills the room.
Kept deliberately small: post-ATT, retargeting is the most over-attributed spend in the account, and broad/Advantage+ structures already reach warm audiences.
Two independent floors decide whether an ad budget makes sense, and the calculator checks both. The finance floor: companies under $5M ARR typically put 8–15% of revenue into marketing, with paid media taking 20–40% of that. The data floor: platforms need conversion volume to optimize — Meta's system wants about 50 conversion events per ad set per week, Google's Smart Bidding wants 30+ conversions a month. For most early-stage companies the data floor binds first, which is why the calculator would rather cut a channel entirely than spread budget too thin to learn.
The channel split starts from what you can afford to pay. For B2B, your deal size sets a maximum customer acquisition cost via published payback norms (roughly 9-month payback under $5k ACV, stretching to 18–24 months for enterprise deals), paid media gets ~40% of that, and funnel benchmarks — demo-to-close rates by deal size, trial-to-paid rates from 86 SaaS companies — translate it into the cost per demo or trial you can support. That number gets compared against published cost-per-lead ranges for each platform. When LinkedIn's $100–300 demo-request CPL doesn't fit a $3k contract, LinkedIn is out, and the calculator tells you why. For B2C the same logic runs on first-order breakeven: average order value times contribution margin, against each platform's cost per purchase.
The output is a starting plan, not a guarantee — your creative and offer will move the numbers more than any allocation decision. Once you're live, reallocating across channels based on real data is the job, and Market Intelligence is how Adside keeps the market context in view while you do it.
Every constant in the calculator comes from a published source — benchmark studies, platform documentation, or large-sample survey data, gathered July 2026:
1,150+ real Google, Meta and LinkedIn ads from 800+ YC startups. Filter by platform and industry, play the videos, and steal what works.
Open tool AI tool · FreePaste a Meta or Google Ads export and get a graded audit: wasted spend, fatigue, structure issues, plus a client-ready summary.
Open tool AI tool · FreeTurn raw campaign numbers into the written report your client actually reads: summary, what changed, what happens next.
Open tool