Google Ads CPA Target Calculator
Work backwards from deal size and target margin to find a CPA worth bidding to — plus the max cost-per-lead at your close rate.
Pawel Wilk, founder of PerfoAds and Google Ads specialist.
Your numbers
Average revenue per closed customer (or LTV if you have it).
What fraction of each deal you'll spend to acquire it. Healthy SaaS: 15-25%. Services: 10-20%. E-com: 20-35%.
Of every 100 leads from Google Ads, how many become paying customers? Pull from CRM.
Targets
Sanity check — does this math hold?
At $50.00 CPL × 25% close rate, every 100 leads costs you $5,000.00 and produces 25 customers worth $25,000.00 in revenue.
Customer acquisition cost: $200.00 per customer (20% of the $1,000.00 deal).
How to use these targets
Google Ads gives you two relevant bid strategies that consume a target number: Target CPA (best when conversions = closed deals or revenue-weighted offline conversions) and Maximize Conversions with a target CPA cap (best when conversions = leads, gives the algorithm room to learn). Pick based on what your conversion action actually fires on.
If conversions are leads: bid to the calculated Max profitable CPL. Anything above that loses money even before you account for sales-team time. Below it you're underbidding and leaving volume on the table.
If conversions are closed deals (via offline conversion import): bid to the Target CPA. This is the cleanest possible signal and the only one that lets smart bidding optimize for actual revenue, not lead volume.
Common mistake: setting target CPA equal to historical CPA without checking if historical CPA was actually profitable. Always validate against this calculator before locking a bid strategy.
Want this calculated against your live account?
A PerfoAds audit pulls real CPL, CPA, and close-rate data from your Google Ads account and tells you exactly where your bid targets should sit — and which campaigns are already wasting money against them.
Start the audit: $149/mo per accountUp to 10 accounts, $149 each · Cancel anytime