PPC launch budget calculator

How each line is calculated

The break-even line is the one this whole page exists for. Published ACOS benchmarks disagree with each other by eight points, and none of them knows your margin. Whether 35% ACOS is healthy or ruinous is decided entirely by the margin box above — ourbenchmarks guide walks through why the published figures conflict and what each one actually measures.

A worked example

A product at $29.99 with a 32% pre-ad margin, clicks at $1.35, converting at 10%. Substitute your own figures — the point is the shape of the result, not these numbers.

Notice the example loses $3.90 per ad order, and that is normal at launch. Launch advertising buys sales velocity and review count, not profit. The question this calculator answers is not "is this profitable" — it usually is not yet — but"how much does the loss cost per week, and how many weeks can I fund it".A launch plan without those two numbers is not a plan.

What this calculator assumes

• Every ad order needs the full click count. In practice some orders arrive organically or through cheaper placements, so the real blended cost is often somewhat lower. Planning on the pessimistic figure is deliberate.
• CPC is your real average, not the suggested bid. Suggested bids are an auction forecast, not an invoice. After a week of data, replace it with actual spend ÷ actual clicks from the campaign report.
• Conversion rate is per click, from Business Reports. A new listing with no reviews converts below its eventual rate — if you enter your category's mature average, everything downstream is flattered.
• No halo effect. Ad-driven sales lift organic rank, which produces sales this page does not count. That upside is real but unbudgetable, so it is left out of the arithmetic on purpose.
• Budget is spend, not commitment. Amazon can overdeliver a daily budget slightly and average it over the month.

Reading the result honestly

• Launch ACOS under your break-even — advertising is profitable from day one. Rare at launch; when it happens, the constraint is usually impression volume, not budget.
• Launch ACOS above break-even, runway over 8 weeks — a normal launch. The loss per order is the price of velocity; the runway says you can pay it long enough for reviews and rank to move the conversion rate.
• Runway under 6 weeks — the campaign will likely be cut off before it matures. Either lower the daily order target, raise cash, or accept a slower organic-first launch. Underfunding the learning phase and then abandoning it costs the spend and buys nothing.

The conversion rate is the lever people forget they have. At $1.35 clicks, moving from 8% to 12% conversion cuts the cost per order from $16.88 to $11.25 — a bigger effect than any bid optimisation. Before adding budget, our listing optimisation guide is where that lever lives.

The figures this calculator needs, explained

• Margin & break-even calculator — produces the "profit margin before ads" input. Run it first; this page is its sequel.
• Campaign structure at launch — the four-campaign setup and weekly harvest loop this budget gets spent through.
• ACOS benchmarks — why published averages disagree by eight points, and what each one measures.
• Landed cost — the margin input is only as honest as the cost stack underneath it.
• Cash flow planner — ad spend is charged long before the marketplace pays you; the runway line here belongs inside that timing model.