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Manufacturing marketing calculator.

Put in seven figures from your own books to see whether your marketing pays for itself.

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  • 7inputsFigures you already have
  • 6outputsIncluding payback and break-even
  • 5formulasWritten out on the page

How do you calculate marketing ROI for a manufacturing business?

Multiply your website visitors by the share who send a request for quote, multiply that by your win rate to get jobs, then multiply by average job value and gross margin to get profit. Compare that profit with what the program costs you over a year. Marketing is paid for out of margin, so margin is the number to judge it against.

Most owners have been handed a marketing report full of clicks and impressions that never says what the work earned. The five formulas below answer that question, and you can check every one of them by hand:

  • Quote requests a month = visitors × conversion rate
  • Jobs won a month = quote requests × win rate
  • Annual gross profit = jobs × 12 × job value × gross margin
  • Cost per quote request = monthly spend ÷ quote requests
  • Break-even = monthly spend ÷ gross profit carried by one quote request

The last line is the one worth writing on a whiteboard. Once you know what a single quote request is worth in gross profit, every marketing decision becomes a simple comparison against that one number, whoever is pitching it to you.

Black and white close up of a vernier caliper resting on a machined metal plate, with a steel rule and hand tools on a dark bench.

The calculator

Your figures

  • Take this from your analytics, counting the whole site. If you are guessing, estimate low.

  • Divide quote requests by visitors and multiply by a hundred. Sites that keep their capabilities inside a PDF tend to sit well under one percent.

  • Ask whoever prices the work. Most job shops know this figure to within a few points.

  • Use the first order value, or the annual value if the work repeats. It is the number you would see on a purchase order.

  • This is revenue less direct cost, as a percentage. Marketing is paid for out of margin, so margin is the fair measure.

  • Include everything ongoing: agency fees, advertising, tools, and an allowance for your own team’s time.

  • The calculator spreads this across the first year when it works out payback. Enter 0 if the site already does its job.

Result

Annual gross profit from web-sourced work

$103,680

Quote requests a month
6.4
Jobs won a month
1.60
Cost per quote request
$234
Cost per won job
$938
Gross profit per quote request
$1,350
Break-even quote requests a month
1.1
Return on the first year's cost
5.2x
Payback on the first year
2.3 months

One more quote request a month is worth$16,200a year in gross profit.

Until you change anything, these figures are a worked example for a plant with 800 visitors a month and a $18,000 average job.

Traffic, conversion and win rate are worth exactly the same

The three multiply together, so raising any one of them by the same proportion produces exactly the same gross profit. Since the arithmetic treats them equally, the real decision comes down to what each one costs you and how long it takes to work.

Each lever raised by 25%, against the worked example. Annual gross profit at the starting figures is $103,680.
LeverWhat it means in practiceAnnual gross profitWhat it costs you
More visitorsRankings, advertising, listings$129,600This costs the most. You pay for it every month, and it stops when the spending stops.
Better conversionCapability text, tolerances, a shorter quote path$129,600This costs the least. It is done once and works on traffic you already have.
Higher win rateQuote speed, quote quality, qualifying earlier$129,600This costs little, and it sits with your sales team more than with marketing.

Questions owners ask about the numbers

What is a good cost per request for quote for a manufacturer?
A good cost per quote request is any figure comfortably below the gross profit one request carries, so the right number depends on what your jobs are worth. That makes the comparison more useful than any benchmark: what one quote request is worth to you, against what it costs to bring in. In the worked example on this page, a quote request carries $1,350 of gross profit and costs $234, so the program is worth running. Put in your own figures and apply the same test.
Should we spend on more traffic or on a better website?
Start with the website, because raising your conversion rate is almost always the cheapest way to the same result. Traffic, conversion rate, and win rate multiply together, so the same percentage increase in any one of them produces the same gross profit. With the arithmetic level, cost decides it. A better website is paid for once and works on visitors you are already getting, while extra traffic has to be bought every month.
How do I work out my visitor to RFQ conversion rate?
Divide the quote requests that came through the website in a month by the website visitors in the same month, then multiply by a hundred. Count only real requests for quote (RFQs). Newsletter signups and general inquiries turn into revenue at a very different rate, so leaving them out keeps the figure accurate.
Why does the calculator use gross margin rather than revenue?
Marketing is paid for out of margin, so margin is the fair test. A job worth $40,000 at a 30% gross margin contributes $12,000 toward overhead, marketing, and profit. Measured against the $40,000, almost any spend looks justified, and that is how a program keeps running for years after the margin stopped covering it.

Send us your numbers and we will tell you whether it is worth doing.

Paste in your figures and what the calculator returned. We will tell you plainly whether the spend makes sense at your job value, even when the answer is to leave things as they are.

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