Ecommerce marketing budget calculator
This calculator takes the revenue you expect for a period, applies the share of it you are willing to spend on marketing, and gives you the total budget. It then splits that budget between paid advertising and the rest, which covers email, SEO, creative, tools and any agency fee, using a split you choose. It does not tell you what share is right. That depends on your margin, your growth target and whether you are trying to hold revenue or grow it. Use the MER calculator to sanity-check the share against what your marketing has returned in the past.
Total marketing budget
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- Paid advertising
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- Email, SEO, creative, tools and fees
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Plain arithmetic on your inputs. Nothing is sent anywhere. Not a forecast.
The arithmetic
Total budget is revenue multiplied by the marketing share. Say a store expects 500,000 dollars over the year and sets aside 12 percent: that is 60,000 dollars. The paid ads line is that budget multiplied by the ads share, so 60 percent of 60,000 is 36,000 dollars. The remainder, 24,000 dollars, is the second line and covers everything that is not a media bill. Change the ads share and the two lines move against each other while the total holds. Change the marketing share and both lines scale together.
How to pick the marketing share
Start from the marketing share you spent last year, which is your spend divided by revenue, and from the MER that spend produced. If last year's MER was comfortably above your break-even ROAS, you have room to raise the share and buy growth. If it was near break-even, raising the share will buy revenue at a loss and the better move is to fix conversion, order value or retention first. A store holding steady can often run a lower share than a store trying to grow, because repeat customers and organic traffic carry more of the load.
Why the non-ads line deserves protecting
When budgets get cut, the paid ads line usually survives because its results are visible in a dashboard, and the other line gets squeezed. That is the wrong way round for most stores. Email and SMS flows work the repeat purchases lever at a cost that barely moves with revenue. SEO on collection and product pages brings visitors that do not stop when spend stops. Creative production decides whether the ads budget works at all. Set the non-ads share deliberately and keep it, and review the ads share monthly against MER rather than against what the platforms report.
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