What a Campaign Costs
A worked model of a six-month launch: what the media costs, what it produces, and what a booked customer ends up costing.
This models a commercial campaign: production plus paid media. Corporate video and social retainers are priced differently. See where each starts →
Estimates only, using the benchmark rates set out below. Production is assumed at $25,000 over a 6-month flight. We hold cost-per-lead flat across this budget range — past roughly $20,000 a month in one metro, added spend buys frequency rather than new households, and the maths stops being honest.
01 — Where the money goes
Budget structure
$8,500 moves every month. The $25,000 production budget is spent once, up front, then amortised evenly across the 6-month flight so it shows up honestly in the cost-per-lead and cost-per-acquisition maths below, instead of disappearing into a sunk cost.
Monthly media — $8,500
CTV media is whatever is left after $30/day of paid social — 89% / 0% split.
Production — $25,000 one-time
Covers both :30 CTV spots and a multi-location shoot built to produce a library for the social cutdowns — roughly 30 over the flight.
Added on top of the media budget for a fully loaded monthly investment of $12,667.
02 — The audience
Sizing the Denver Metro target
The CTV buy isn’t aimed at the whole metro — it’s aimed at the slice of it that can actually buy a $40,000 project: affluent, suburban homeowners in Highlands Ranch, Castle Rock, Parker, Cherry Hills, Littleton and similar submarkets.
≈69.3K addressable households. At $7,588/month and a $32 CTV CPM, the buy delivers ~237.1K impressions monthly — enough to reach an estimated 68% of that audience every month at 5.0× per household. Raise the budget past the point where reach levels off and the extra impressions buy frequency, not new households.
03 — The funnel
From lead to closed project
Three separate conversion stages, not one rule of thumb: a 60% booking rate (a lead schedules an appointment), a 85% show rate (that appointment happens), and a 40% close rate (the held appointment signs). Multiplied out, that is a 51.0% effective appointment rate and a 20.4% blended lead-to-close rate.
04 — The cost curve
Cost per lead and cost per acquisition, month by month
Cost per lead starts high — the market doesn’t know the brand yet — and steps down every month as CTV frequency and a steady social cadence compound into recognition. Media-only is what the ad platforms report. Fully loaded adds back the $4,167/month of amortised production, which is the number that should actually drive budget decisions.
| Month | Target CPL | Leads | Appts. | Closes | CPL loaded | CPA media | CPA loaded | ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6-month blended | — | 169 | 86.2 | 34.5 | $450 | $1,479 | $2,204 | 18.1× |
05 — The payoff
What $76,000 buys
6-month return
Revenue = closed customers × $40,000 average project value. ROAS = revenue ÷ fully loaded investment.
Why cost per acquisition keeps falling
The production spend is fixed at $4,167/month regardless of performance, so as the media buy gets more efficient that fixed cost spreads across more closed customers — pulling fully loaded cost per acquisition from $2,957 in month 1 to $1,725 in month 6, a 42% improvement, with no increase in monthly budget.
06 — Assumptions
How these numbers were built
This is a hypothetical planning model, not a client’s reported results. Every input is either a stated planning figure or a market benchmark, shown here so the maths can be checked — and swapped for real numbers once a campaign is live.
Hypothetical model, for planning purposes only. Actual cost per lead, close rates and revenue vary with creative, seasonality, local competition and live media pricing. We re-run this with real campaign data at the close of every month.
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