It's the first question almost every (new) business owner asks me, and it's the one with the least satisfying answer online. Search it and you get a shrug: "it depends." True, but useless. You have a real decision to make and a real number to put in a budget field. The right number is a calculation, built from two things you can actually work out: how many leads you want, and what a lead costs in your market. This post gives you the formula, the current 2026 numbers to plug i