Heres another way, that avoids using fancy gismos to measure the ogive.
Buy a 3 ft 1/4 inch wood dowel from the hardware store. Close the action on your pump gun. Insert dowel from muzzle end until it butts against the bolt face. Scribe a line on the dowel with a sharp pencil at the muzzle. Remove dowel, open action, drop bullet into chamber, tamp lightly with a piece of bent coat hanger. Insert dowel into muzzle until it touches the end of the bullet. Scribe line on dowel. Push bullet out with dowel, very important!. Measure between the two scribed lines on the dowel with a vernier - this is the overall length needed to touch the rifling. Subtract an appropriate amount - I use 0.030 in for hunting rounds.
To get really fancy - measure the length of the bullet in your trial. This becomes your reference bullet. When you set up your seating die, use the reference bullet to get the desired COAL - then knock it our for further use with a puller. Alternatively, you can use an bullet from the same box or lot that has the same length as the reference bullet.
Warning - if you go down this path, anytime you change bullets, you have to redo your measurement tests. This applies to bullets of the same spec from the same manufacturer, unless they are the same lot.
FWIW - COAL is not that important relative to other parameters, such as bullet weight and charge weight. A given rifle will preferentially tune to a given bullet weight due to barrel harmonics. Fine tuning is done with charge weight. Very fine tuning is done with COAL. When I develop a load for a rifle, I test a few bullet weights with the same powder. A good load will generally show promise "right out of the gate". Further tests are done with charge weight, and possibly another powder if I get ambitious.
So, you got lucky with your 280 - the bullet you chose, and the powder spec worked well. For your 30-06 you need to do some more work in this area...