You can test any sales target on one sheet of paper. Start with the sales you want and work backwards to the enquiries, clicks and ad spend it would take. If the answer is more than your team can handle or your bank account can carry, the target is too ambitious. If it barely uses what you’ve got, it’s probably too conservative.
What’s the difference between a sales target and a forecast?
A forecast is what you think will happen, given what you know today. A sales target is what you want to happen. The gap between them is the work your marketing has to do, so write the forecast first.
How do you forecast sales if you’ve never done it?
- Write down your sales for each of the last 12 months.
- Circle any month skewed by a one-off, such as a big order or a closure.
- Adjust for what you already know: booked work, price changes, customers you’ve won or lost.
- Write three figures for each coming month: low, likely and high.
Keep the months separate, because income and costs change with the time of year. Business.gov.uk advises leaving yourself some room for that in a cash flow forecast, and the same goes here.
If you’re new and have no history, start from capacity. Work out what you could deliver in a month, then treat a modest share of it as your likely figure until real numbers replace it.
How do you set a sales target by working backwards?
You need six numbers. Use your own wherever you have them.
- Target sales from ads. Your target minus your forecast. This is what you’re asking ads to bring in.
- Average sale value. Total sales divided by the number of sales, over the last few months.
- Sales needed. Target sales divided by average sale value.
- Enquiries needed. Sales needed divided by the share of enquiries you win.
- Clicks needed. Enquiries needed divided by the share of website visitors who enquire.
- Ad spend needed. Clicks needed multiplied by the price of a click.
Steps four and five are both conversion rates. A conversion rate is the share of people who take the next step, and it’s worth counting them separately, because a weak website and a weak quote need different fixes.
What does this look like as a worked example?
Every number here is an example, apart from the click price. Picture a small roofing firm in Manchester. Its average job is £1,500 and it wins one in four enquiries (25%). Eight in every 100 website visitors enquire (8%), and each job leaves £525 of profit before ad spend.
For the click price, we’ve used Google’s own estimate. A roofer in Manchester can pay up to £6.35 for a click on “roofer near me”, according to Google Keyword Planner on 3 November 2026. That’s an estimate rather than an invoice, and your clicks may cost more or less. You can look up your own trade and city.
Here are three versions of the target.
| Step | The sum | Ambitious | Middle | Cautious |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Target sales from ads | Your choice | £15,000 | £7,500 | £1,500 |
| Jobs needed | Target ÷ £1,500 | 10 | 5 | 1 |
| Enquiries needed | Jobs ÷ 25% | 40 | 20 | 4 |
| Clicks needed | Enquiries ÷ 8% | 500 | 250 | 50 |
| Ad spend needed | Clicks × £6.35 | £3,175 | £1,587.50 | £317.50 |
| Ad spend per job | Ad spend ÷ jobs | £317.50 | £317.50 | £317.50 |
| Profit before ad spend | Jobs × £525 | £5,250 | £2,625 | £525 |
| Left after ad spend | Profit − ad spend | £2,075 | £1,037.50 | £207.50 |
The ad spend per job stays the same because this is a straight-line sum. Real life is less tidy. Your best-fitting searches are limited, and Meta says its system takes lower-cost opportunities first, so costs can rise as you grow. Treat the bigger columns as the most optimistic.
To try your own figures, the cost per customer calculator does the last part for you.
How do you know if your target is too ambitious?
Put the £15,000 column through four checks.
Profit. Does a customer earn more than they cost? £525 of profit against £317.50 of ad spend passes, with £207.50 left to cover everything else.
Demand. Are there enough people looking? Google shows between 100 and 1,000 monthly searches for that term in Manchester. Not every searcher clicks your ad, so 500 clicks a month is a stretch. You’d need more search terms or a wider area.
Capacity. Could you do the work? If a job takes two working days, 10 jobs is 20 days, which is close to a full month for one crew. And 40 enquiries at an hour and a half each for a site visit and quote is 60 hours. If that time doesn’t exist, you’d be paying for enquiries you can’t answer.
Cash. Can you carry it? Google charges you when you reach a payment threshold and on the first of the month, and Meta works in a similar way. So the ad bill lands while the work is still ahead of you. If two months pass between a click and the customer’s payment, you’re carrying 2 × £3,175 = £6,350 of ad spend, plus materials and wages. Business customers can be slower still: GOV.UK says business payment terms are usually up to 60 days, and longer can be agreed.
The firm passes on profit and struggles on the other three. For now, £15,000 is too ambitious.
A cash flow forecast shows this clearly, as long as it follows when customers pay rather than when you invoice. GOV.UK links to a free template.
How do you know if your target is too conservative?
Look at the £1,500 column. One job and 50 clicks a month is too little to learn from, because a single job won or lost swings the result completely. Ad platforms need volume too. Meta says an ad set usually settles after about 50 results in a week.
Other signs that a target is too cautious:
- It’s below what you did in the same months last year, with nothing changed.
- You’ve got spare capacity going unused.
- Your ad spend per customer is well below your profit per customer, and you’ve got the cash to do more.
Which target should you pick?
Usually the highest one that passes all four checks with some room to spare. For our example firm, it’s the middle column. Five jobs is 10 working days, 20 quotes is 30 hours, and 250 clicks sits more comfortably inside the search numbers.
Then test it for a bad month. Halve the website conversion rate to 4%: 250 clicks gives 10 enquiries, which gives 2.5 jobs. That’s £3,750 of sales and £1,312.50 of profit against £1,587.50 of ad spend, a loss of £275. If you could live with that for a month or two while you fix things, the plan is sound.
Last, turn it into a daily figure. For most campaigns, Google’s monthly limit is 30.4 times your daily setting, so £1,587.50 ÷ 30.4 is about £52 a day. Some days can run up to double that.
Questions people ask
What if I don’t know my conversion rates?
Count your last 50 enquiries and how many became sales, which gives you one rate. For the website rate, run the sum at a few different percentages. Treat them as guesses until you’ve got real data.
Should a sales target be monthly or yearly?
Both. Set the year’s figure, then split it by month using last year’s pattern. A flat monthly target will look like failure in your quiet months and success in your busy ones.
Is there a right percentage of sales to put into ads?
We’d avoid rules like that, because margins vary too much between businesses. Work from profit per customer instead. If customers come back, count what they’re worth over time as well, not only the first sale.
What to do next
Try the sums with your own numbers, even if some are guesses. Start by looking up a click price, then run the cost per customer calculator. If you’re already running ads and the numbers don’t add up, our Ads health check is a one-off review with a list of fixes in plain English. If you’re unsure where to begin, try Help me choose.
Related guides
- How much does Google Ads cost, and how much should you spend?
- Which part of your marketing funnel isn’t working?
- What should you expect from ads in your first 90 days?
This guide is general information based on publicly available sources, correct when written in November 2026. It isn’t legal, financial or tax advice, and ad platforms change their rules and menus often, so check the latest guidance before you act.