Lost inquiry and break-even calculator.

What does the calculator calculate?

Two things. First, if your site’s quote conversion rate rose from its current value to the target value, how many extra inquiries and how many extra customers would come each year, and what those customers' lifetime gross profit would be. Second, after how many customers and how many months the three-year extra cost of a custom-built site over a ready-made template would be covered. The calculation is the same formula as in the true cost of a cheap website guide.

• Lost inquiries per year: T = Z × 12 × (d2 − d1)
• Lost customers per year: T × k
• Gross profit from these customers: B = T × k × g × L
• Break-even number of customers: M = ΔK ÷ (g × L)
• Break-even time: M ÷ (customers per year ÷ 12) months

Why gross profit and not revenue?

Because lost revenue also includes costs that would never have been incurred to produce it, and makes the loss look bigger than it is. What an order leaves you is the gross profit that remains after production and delivery costs are deducted from the sale price. If you do not know the annual gross profit per customer, start with the average of a few regular customers from the last two years and repeat the calculation with two different values; you will see how sensitive the result is to this value.

An example: the same number of extra customers can cover the cost within a few months for a manufacturer with high annual gross profit per customer, and over years for one with low profit. That is why the calculation is meaningful not with a sector average but with your own profit and customer lifetime data; the same formula gives two different decisions at two different companies.

Where do I find the inputs?

Monthly visitors and the current conversion rate are in your analytics tool. The denominator of the conversion rate varies by tool: Google Analytics 4 counts sessions, ad tools count interactions or clicks. Whichever denominator you use, write the number of visitors with the same denominator. If you have not defined quote form submission as a key event in your analytics tool, do that first and wait at least a month; a calculation made with an unmeasured rate only multiplies an assumption.

The win rate is how many of the quotes you gave in the last year turned into orders; it is in your sales team’s records. Customer lifetime is how many years a customer buys from you on average. The three-year extra cost is found by subtracting the three-year total of the template quote from the three-year total of the custom-build quote; the items are in the guide’s table.

• Z and d1: the average of the last three or six months in your analytics tool; a single month may carry a seasonal effect.
• k: the number of quotes given and the number of orders that came from them; in your sales records.
• g: annual sales per customer minus production and delivery costs.
• L: the average number of years your regular customers have worked with you.
• ΔK: the difference between the three-year totals of the two quotes.

How do I choose the target rate?

From your own past data. The calculator does not suggest a target rate, because no published rate can be your site’s target. The data below only points in a direction; the limit of each is next to it.

• A visitor-to-lead conversion of 2.2% was published for the manufacturing sector; it is a marketing agency’s own client data, and the number of clients is not disclosed.
• In the study Deloitte Digital carried out for Google at the end of 2019, a 0.1-second speedup on mobile raised the progression from form start to submission by 21.6% for lead generation brands; in the same group, mobile conversion fell by 1.9%. A correlation, not a cause.
• In Vodafone Italy’s A/B test, when LCP improved by 31%, the progression from visit to lead rose by 15%; consumer sales.
• On the agricultural marketplace Agrofy, abandonment during loading fell from 3.8% to 0.9%; real user data, a correlation.

A practical route: choose a target rate slightly above your current rate, do the calculation, then change the target and repeat. Seeing how sensitive the break-even time is to the target rate tells you more than a single target number.

How do I read the result?

The break-even number of customers tells you after how many customers' lifetime gross profit the extra cost is covered; the break-even time tells you how many months that takes, based on the number of customers lost each year. If the time is short, the extra cost is small compared with the loss you measured. If it takes years, or if the gap never closes because the win rate is zero, a ready-made template may be the right decision in your situation. The calculation counts only quote conversion; the costs of items such as speed, security and accessibility are in the guide’s table.

The result is not a forecast but a conditional calculation: it tells you what happens “if the rate really rises this much”. Whether the rate will rise, the calculation cannot say; only measuring a change made on the site itself shows that. That is why you should use the calculation not as the sole basis of an investment decision but as a tool that shows which item changes the result most.

The Fill in the example button enters the guide’s example: 1,500 visitors a month, conversion from 1.0% to 1.5%, a 10% win rate, an annual gross profit of 200,000 TL per customer, a three-year customer lifetime and an extra cost of 1,800,000 TL. These values are not real data; they only show how the calculation is read.

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. The calculation is done entirely in your browser: the numbers you enter are not sent to a server, not saved in the browser and are deleted when you close the page. If you want to share the result with someone, copy the lines on the screen and send them; the tool produces neither a link nor a record.

Let’s do the calculation with your own data together: we read the rate in your analytics tool and your quotes together and write down which input changes the result most.

İletişim formu →

Source code ↗