We did the advertising maths for 40 New Zealand industries

There is a pattern that repeats across the advertising industry. A business starts running ads. Month one: money going out, customers not yet coming in. Nerves. Month two: still negative — and the decision gets made that "advertising doesn't work for our industry". The quitting usually happens around day 60.

Most of the time the problem isn't the advertising. It's that nobody did the maths with them first.

A healthy advertising curve goes down before it goes up

The first two months of a campaign are a learning period: the system is finding out which keywords actually produce customers, which ads get clicked, which hours are worth bidding on. Output during learning is naturally below steady state — roughly half of it in month one, three quarters in month two.

At the other end, revenue arrives late. For most businesses a customer is worth more than their first order: a cleaning client comes back weekly, an accounting client quarterly, a gym member monthly. That repeat revenue is real — but it lands month by month after the sale, not on the day of it.

Put both facts into the arithmetic and a healthy curve looks like this: a small loss in month one, break-even in month two or three, then a steepening slope as the repeat base compounds. Down-then-up is not the shape of failure. It is the shape of the maths. Businesses that quit at day 60 mostly stopped a week before the curve turned.

What the real numbers say, across 40 industries

To ground this, we sampled the Google advertising market for 40 New Zealand service industries — six common commercial search terms per industry, with their suggested cost per click and monthly search volume. A few findings worth stating:

Click prices span a 30× range. A click costs about US$0.49 for driving schools and about US$15 for insurance broking. The same unit — one visit — costs wildly different amounts depending on the industry.

Expensive does not mean unprofitable. $15 per click sounds alarming — but the first-year commission on a single life-insurance policy is often more than 150% of the annual premium. At that customer value, $15 clicks break even in month three. Markets don't sustain high prices for worthless customers: the industries with expensive clicks are precisely the industries with valuable customers.

Cheap does not mean easy, either. Industries with cheap clicks tend to have small order values — the maths only works through repeat business and volume. Cleaning companies live on weekly service, gyms on monthly memberships. For these businesses the advertising account must be read over twelve months; read month by month, it always looks wrong.

Every industry earns differently. Renovations and re-roofs are one-off big tickets; accounting and property maintenance run on a quarterly rhythm; childcare and fitness are subscription businesses. The same ad budget, placed into different earning structures, can shift break-even by three months.

A negative number is not a verdict — it is a position

If you put your own numbers into the arithmetic and the result is negative, that is not proof your industry "can't do advertising". It is a coordinate: it tells you which of four levers to move, and how far, to turn positive —

• Landing page conversion: whether visitors leave an enquiry. Going from 2% to 3% is achievable for most websites, and that single step is often the difference between profit and loss.
• Cost per click: negative keywords, bids, keyword selection — this is what day-to-day campaign work compresses.
• Close rate: enquiries becoming customers. The biggest lever here is usually response speed.
• Profit per order: pricing and bundling — the business-side homework.

Each lever has an owner: some belong to campaign operations, some to the website, some to the business itself. Once the maths is on the table, "can advertising work for us" stops being a feeling and becomes a division of labour.

We turned this arithmetic into a tool

All of the above is now a free online tool: the budget & break-even planner. Each of the 40 industries has its own page, preloaded with real market data — the typical click-price band, monthly search demand, and defaults calibrated to how that business actually earns. Drag the sliders and watch, month by month, when the cumulative curve crosses zero. If your numbers come out negative, the tool tells you directly which lever to move, and to where.

Two honest notes to close. First, the data is a market reference: it comes from Google Ads historical market data on a suggested-bid basis — actual auction prices usually land below suggested bids, but every account differs. Second, the planner is arithmetic on your own assumptions, not a promise of results. Its value is not in predicting the future — it is in letting you see the shape of the investment before you spend the first dollar.

The businesses that quit at day 60 usually weren't short of budget. They were short of a picture that showed day 90.