What is a normal website conversion?

There is no general norm: it depends on the niche, the price and the traffic source. The benchmark is your own conversion for the previous period, split by phones and computers and by source.

How soon does a website pay off?

That is what the calculator shows: the price of the site divided by monthly profit. At HEXIS a landing page costs from $900, a corporate site from $2,000, a store from $3,500.

What if the ads do not pay off?

Raise the site's conversion, the average deal or the deal share, cut irrelevant queries and send each campaign to its own page. While a lead costs more than the break-even point from the calculator, more budget means more loss.

Website payback calculator: leads and profit

Will a website pay off: a leads and profit calculator

A website pays off when the profit from its clients over a few months covers its price. The profit comes from five numbers: visits, the conversion to a lead, the share of leads that become deals, the average deal and the margin. Put yours into the calculator below and it shows the leads, the monthly profit, the payback time and the cost per lead above which advertising loses money.

Calculator

The numbers in the fields are an example. Replace them with yours: where to find them is explained below.

Visits a monthConversion to a lead%Leads that become deals%Average deal$Margin%Price of the site$

A site at HEXIS starts at

The site pays off in1.5 months

Leads a month: 10
Clients a month: 2
Profit a month: $600
Break-even cost per lead: $60
Break-even cost per click: $1.2

How it is calculated

Leads a month = visits × conversion to a lead.
Clients = leads × the share of leads that became deals.
Monthly profit = clients × average deal × margin.
Payback = the price of the site ÷ monthly profit.
Break-even cost per lead = average deal × margin × deal share. If a lead from ads costs more, the ads lose money.
Break-even cost per click = break-even cost per lead × conversion to a lead.

Where to find your numbers

Visits: Yandex Metrika or Google Analytics, the monthly visits report. For a new site, take the number of searches for your topic in Yandex Wordstat and count two variants, a cautious one and a bold one.
Conversion to a lead: leads in a month divided by visits. Leads are counted by goals in Metrika: a form sent, a messenger click, a call.
Deal share: how many leads out of a hundred become paid orders. A CRM shows it if it records where each lead came from.
Average deal and margin: from your accounts. The margin is the share of the deal left after the cost of delivering it.

What changes the result most

Conversion is a multiplier in the formula, so raising it does as much as raising traffic. If it goes from 2 to 3%, there are half as many leads again from the same visits and the same ad budget.

Try it with your own numbers: raise the conversion in the calculator by one percent, then the visits by a third, and compare the payback time. Whichever is cheaper to move in your case is where to start.

When advertising pays off

Compare the break-even cost per click from the calculator with the cost per click the ad account shows for your queries. If the auction is pricier, the ads will lose money before they start: raise the site's conversion or the average deal first, then buy traffic.

Search optimisation works differently: a lead from it gets cheaper every month, but the first results take a few months. So ads bring leads fast, and search lowers their cost over time.