Meta Ads ROI Calculator
Model Facebook and Instagram the way Meta actually prices them — budget to impressions to clicks to leads to customers to revenue. Indian CPM and CTR ranges, built in.
Your numbers
Pick an industry to load the benchmark midpoints, then edit anything you have real data for.
Media spend only. Creative production and management fees are separate.
Modelled month
One month at ₹1.00 L, assuming the funnel above holds.
- 1Impressions₹1.00 L ÷ ₹235 CPM × 1,0004,25,532
- 2Clicks1.40% CTR · effective CPC ₹175,957
- 3Leads5.5% of clicks convert · ₹305 per lead328
- 4Qualified leads18% survive qualification · ₹1,696 each59
- 5Customers5% close · ₹33,911 to acquire one2.9
- 6Revenue2.9 customers × ₹1,50,000₹4.42 L
At these assumptions the model returns ₹4.42 of revenue for every ₹1 of spend. Note the gap between your ₹305 cost per lead and your ₹33,911 cost per customer — on Meta that gap is usually where the real cost hides.
Estimates, not forecasts. Built from directional benchmark ranges and the assumptions you entered above — not a prediction of what your account will do.
What the model is actually doing
Meta's auction runs on impressions, so the model does too. Every step is visible and every input is editable.
Meta bills per thousand impressions, so the first step is your monthly budget divided by CPM, multiplied by a thousand — that is the reach the budget buys. Multiply those impressions by your click-through rate to get clicks, and the calculator shows you the effective cost per click that falls out of it. That number is a result on Meta, not a lever: you cannot bid it down directly, you can only earn it with better creative.
Clicks times your landing page conversion rate gives leads. Leads times your qualification rate gives the ones worth calling. Qualified leads times your close rate gives customers, and customers times average revenue per customer gives revenue. Revenue over spend is your ROAS.
The CPM, CTR and conversion rate defaults are the midpoints of the Indian ranges published on our benchmarks page. The qualification rate, close rate and deal value are not benchmarks at all — they are CRM numbers no ad platform can see, so we have seeded them with conservative Indian-market starting points and left them fully editable.
Creative is the variable this model cannot capture. On search, the keyword largely determines performance; on Meta, the same budget against the same audience can produce a 0.6% or a 2.5% click-through rate depending entirely on the first three seconds of the video. That single input moves every downstream number by a factor of four. Treat the benchmark CTR as the average of good and bad creative, not as what your next campaign will do.
The model also assumes performance holds flat across the month. It does not. Meta campaigns fatigue: as frequency climbs, CTR falls and CPM rises, so the last week of a month typically performs worse than the first unless creative is refreshed. Nor does it model the learning phase, during which cost per result is meaningfully worse while the algorithm gathers signal.
Finally, attribution. Since iOS restricted tracking, Meta systematically under-reports conversions for some businesses and over-claims credit for others through view-through attribution. Your CRM and Meta will disagree, and the honest position is that neither is fully right. Use this model for direction and sizing, then validate against incremental tests — geo holdouts or spend-down periods — rather than against the platform's own numbers.
Three ways a cheap Meta lead turns expensive
- Instant Forms with no frictionPre-filled lead forms produce dramatically cheaper leads and dramatically worse ones. If you use them, drop the qualification rate in the calculator substantially — often by half.
- Optimising for the wrong eventA campaign optimised for form submissions finds people who fill in forms. Feed qualified-lead or purchase events back to Meta so the algorithm optimises for customers, not paperwork.
- Slow follow-upMeta leads are interruption leads and go cold within hours, not days. A five-minute callback and a five-hour callback can differ by more than 2X on close rate — which shows up in this model as the close-rate input, the one most people never revisit.
Meta Ads ROI questions
Because that is how Meta actually charges you. Meta sells impressions and bills on cost per thousand impressions; the cost per click you see in Ads Manager is a derived number, not a price you bid. Modelling from CPM and click-through rate reproduces the real mechanics — and it makes visible the thing CPC hides, which is that a creative with a weak hook costs you exactly the same in impressions while returning far fewer clicks.
These are directional ranges for the Indian market, compiled from publicly reported platform benchmarks and the spread we see across accounts we manage. They are not a proprietary dataset and not a promise — your numbers depend on your offer, geography, seasonality and how well your tracking is set up. Use them to sanity-check whether your account is roughly in the right postcode, not as a target.
Because the traffic is fundamentally different. Someone searching Google has already decided they want something and is looking for a supplier. Someone on Instagram was watching reels and got interrupted by your ad. That interruption can absolutely produce excellent business, but a larger share of the resulting form fills are curiosity rather than intent. Setting the same qualification rate for both platforms is the single most common modelling error we see, and it is why Meta accounts so often show a cheaper cost per lead and a worse cost per customer at the same time.
Not on cost per lead alone. Compare cost per qualified lead, and ideally cost per closed customer. Meta usually wins on cost per lead and often loses on cost per customer once qualification is applied. The right answer is frequently neither/or — Meta for demand generation and remarketing, Google for capturing the demand that Meta created. Run the two calculators side by side with your own close rates and compare the customer-level numbers, not the lead-level ones.
It is a frequency warning. Divide the impressions figure by the size of the audience you are targeting: if the result is above roughly three or four in a month, you are showing the same people the same ad repeatedly, and both CTR and CPM will drift the wrong way as fatigue sets in. That decay is not modelled here — the calculator assumes a steady state, whereas real Meta accounts need fresh creative on a rolling basis to hold their numbers.
It cannot tell you whether your creative is good, and on Meta creative is the largest single variable — a stronger hook can move CTR by several multiples, which swings every number downstream. It also does not model iOS attribution loss, so Meta will typically report fewer conversions than actually occurred while your CRM shows more. It shows revenue rather than profit, ignores your sales cycle by booking revenue in the same month as the spend, and excludes creative production costs, management fees and GST.
Want this model built on your account, not a benchmark?
We'll pull your real CPM, CTR and close rate, rebuild the funnel on your data, and tell you honestly whether Meta is the right channel for your offer. Free.