Free tool · no email required
What can you actually afford to pay for a click?
Not a number someone quotes you. What your own margin allows, before you are paying for the privilege of working.
Your break-even click
Break-even means exactly that. At this figure the job earns you nothing. Anything you pay under it is your margin. Clicks that become an enquiry is the hardest number to know without tracking, so try a few values.
Or have us look instead
Free. We email you what we find within a business day. No call unless you ask for one.
We never share or sell your details, and we do not add you to a mailing list.
Start from what you keep
A $2,000 job and a $30 click make the maths look obvious. It is not your $2,000. After materials, after the bloke you had on with you, after the ute, it might be $600. That is the number the click comes out of.
So the first thing this calculator asks for is what is actually left. Not turnover. What stays.
Then it works backwards. Not every enquiry becomes a job, and not every click becomes an enquiry. Those two fractions are what turn a $600 margin into a click you can afford, and they are why the affordable click is always smaller than it first looks.
What to do with the number
If the going rate for your trade and suburb is well under your break-even, ads can work. You have room, and the job is managing it properly.
If it is close to your break-even, ads are a treadmill. You will be busy and no better off, and the day you stop paying the phone stops.
If the break-even comes out under a couple of dollars, ads are the wrong tool for that job type at that margin. That is not a failure. It is worth knowing before you pay anyone a monthly fee to find out slowly.
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
What it deliberately leaves out
Management fees. If someone runs the account for you, their fee comes out of the same margin, and it comes out before the clicks do. Our own fee is $897 a month; on 40 clicks a month that is another $22.43 a click, on top of the click. Run the numbers before you hire anyone, us included.
Repeat work. A customer who comes back twice a year is worth more than one job, and a straight break-even ignores that. If you hold customers well, your real ceiling is higher than this shows.
And it assumes the enquiries are the same quality as the ones you get now. Ad clicks are often colder than a referral, so the close rate you type in from memory may be optimistic for this channel. Try it a few points lower and see what happens to the number.
How many jobs are you actually chasing?
This number tells you what a click can cost. It doesn’t tell you how many you need. Start from what you want to turn over for the year, put in your average job and how many quotes it takes you to win one, and the turnover goal calculator works back to jobs a month and quotes a month — the number ads, or anything else, has to deliver.
The cheapest click is the one you don’t pay for
Ads stop the day you stop paying. A page that ranks for your suburb doesn’t bill you per click. Both have a place, and knowing this number tells you which one is worth your money first.
Run the free audit