I’ve been in search and performance for over twenty years. In that time, the budget conversation has barely moved.
How many leads do you want?
What does a lead cost?
Multiply.
Done.
That maths held up for a long while. However, it doesn’t anymore, and most people planning next quarter still haven’t noticed.
We built a calculator that does the version of the sum that actually reflects how Meta delivers ads now. It’s free. It takes about ninety seconds.
Use the Meta budget calculator →
But before you do, here’s the argument behind it. If you disagree with the argument, don’t trust the number.
Meta stopped ranking your ads first
Andromeda is the retrieval layer. It runs before the auction.
Someone opens Instagram. Meta has tens of millions of ads it could show them. Andromeda picks a few thousand candidates in a few hundred milliseconds. Only those go through to ranking.
Read that again, because it reorders everything. Your bid doesn’t matter yet. Your budget doesn’t matter yet. Your targeting definitely doesn’t matter yet.
Your creative has to get picked first. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing for the auction to rank.
Meta built this deliberately, with a hierarchical index designed to cope with the flood of AI-generated ads that started arriving in 2024. It’s built for volume and variety. It rewards both.
It also burns through creative faster, because it’s better at finding the exact pocket of people your ad works on — and then exhausting it.
Which means the old sum is broken
“40 leads × $75 = $3,000 a month” assumes two things. That your cost per result stays where it is. And that creative is free.
Neither is true.
Put $3,000 behind one offer and two ads and it will spend. Every dollar. It’ll just spend into a shrinking pool of relevance, and by week five your cost per lead has drifted and nobody can say why.
The budget wasn’t wrong. The creative supply was.
Go the other way and you get the opposite failure. Five offers, three states, same $3,000. Nothing gets enough signal to leave learning. You’ve bought fragmentation.
Budget, creative and complexity are one sum. Planning one without the other two is how sensible spends produce disappointing quarters.
This is the bit that annoys me. Most of that waste isn’t a bidding problem or a targeting problem. It’s a planning problem, decided in a spreadsheet weeks before anything went live.
So we built the sum properly
Eight questions. It asks what you’re optimising for, what industry you’re in, how many results you want, and what a customer is worth.
Then it asks the three things nobody else asks.
How much creative can you actually produce? Minimal, some, solid, or strong with AI. This is the input that moves your cost per result most, and it’s missing from every other budget tool I’ve seen.
How many genuinely different things are you advertising? Not variations. Different things.
How many separate markets or customer types? Every extra one needs its own signal, its own spend and its own creative.
You get three numbers back: a monthly budget, how complex your account really is, and how much creative you’ll need to feed it.
The industry benchmarks seed an indicative Australian cost per result. If you know your real number, override it. Your data beats our benchmark, always.
What it won’t tell you
It can’t see your tracking. It doesn’t know if your pixel is clean, whether your offer is any good, or that your landing page is losing half the people who reach it. Any one of those will move your real cost per result more than anything in the tool.
It’s a planning number, not a promise. I’d rather say that plainly than dress it up.
Three ways to use it
As a reality check. If the number is well above what you had in mind, better to find that out now than six weeks into the quarter.
As a creative brief. The creative figure tells you what your production line has to deliver. If it looks impossible, that’s your actual growth constraint — and it’s usually cheaper to fix than more media.
As a scope test. Drop from three markets to one. Five offers to two. Watch the required budget move. Focus is the highest-return decision available to most advertisers and it costs nothing.
The short version
Meta made creative the lever. Budget still matters, but it now buys results at a rate your creative supply sets.
Plan for one and ignore the other and you’ll spend the money either way. You just won’t get the results.
