The honest answer is that percentage-of-revenue rules are a starting point for a conversation, not a budget. Here is how to get to an actual number.
Why the usual rules mislead here
The advice you will find online, spend five to ten per cent of revenue, comes from markets with stable customer acquisition costs and established categories. Dubai has neither. Competition in visible categories is intense, a large share of the population turns over every few years, and paid click costs in real estate, clinics and legal services are several times what the same keywords cost elsewhere.
A percentage also tells you nothing about allocation, which is the decision that actually determines whether the money works.
Start from what a customer is worth
Three numbers, and you probably have all of them:
- Average order value. What a first purchase is worth.
- Repeat rate. How much of that customer arrives later without you paying again.
- Gross margin. What is left after cost of delivery.
Multiply them out and you have the maximum you can pay to acquire a customer while staying profitable. Divide by your close rate and you have the maximum you can pay for a lead. That ceiling is the budget conversation; everything else is detail.
Then work backwards from the leads you need
If you need thirty customers a month, you close one in four enquiries and you can afford AED 400 a lead, the maths gives you a media budget of roughly AED 48,000. If that number is uncomfortable, the fix is on the close rate or the margin, not on hoping clicks get cheaper.
Agency fees sit on top of media, and should be quoted separately. An agency that blends the two is making the only number that matters unreadable. Our view on that is under how we charge.
What the first year usually looks like
For a Dubai SME with no existing organic traffic, a common starting shape is roughly thirty per cent to Google Ads, twenty-five to SEO, fifteen each to social and content, ten to the website and five to email.
That shape should not survive contact with data. By month six the split should have moved toward whatever is producing leads below your ceiling. If your agency is still running the original allocation a year later, nobody has been reading the reports.
The number below which it is not worth starting
In competitive Dubai categories, paid campaigns below roughly AED 6,000 a month in media never gather enough data to optimise. SEO below a few thousand a month buys attention rather than work. If the total available budget is smaller than that, the better purchase is usually a better website and a working follow-up sequence, which cost once rather than monthly.