Performance Planner is a Google Ads tool that enables the creation of plans for advertising spend and to determine how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance. So when should it be used, and how useful can it be?
The Performance Planner tool is available under Tools & Settings in a Google Ads account, and it determines the best opportunity for the plan by modelling the best budget allocation across the campaigns.
It’s available for Search, Shopping, Display, App, Video, and Local campaigns, however if any of the following settings or states apply to the campaign, it’s ineligible to be used:
- Has been changed to meet the eligibility requirements, but has been running for fewer than 10 days with new settings;
- Is in draft or an experiment state;
- Has been deleted.
You can learn more about the eligibility factors and requirements.
The Performance Planner can be used by advertisers to:
- Access forecasts for campaigns;
- Explore outcomes by adjusting campaign settings;
- Understand opportunities in seasonal periods;
- Manage budgets across accounts and campaigns.
Key Benefits
- Review campaigns’ projected monthly and quarterly performance;
- Get suggestions that can help campaigns perform better for the same spend;
- Find out how your spend and performance goals are affected if you change your campaign settings.
How It Works
To provide the most accurate forecasts possible, Performance Planner takes into account billions of search queries, usually updated every 24 hours. It simulates relevant ad auctions over the last 7-10 days, including variables like seasonality, competitor activity, and landing page.
After running simulations and collecting data, the accuracy of Performance Planner forecasts are measured by running campaigns against their eventual performance and machine learning is used to fine-tune the forecasts.
Forecasts conversions are based on the conversion types in the ‘Conversions’ column of the Google Ads performance reports. (If the campaigns haven’t had enough conversions to create a forecast, but they have enough clicks, it’s possible to manually enter a conversion rate to assess conversion forecasts).
You can learn more about how to create and edit a plan with Performance Planner.
Remember that Performance Planner is just a forecast and there may be individual factors for your own campaigns that will mean the forecast is not that accurate. However, it can be used to get forecasts even though no changes will take place in your Google Ads account unless you make those changes yourself.
If you do then decide to implement the forecast, you should monitor the actual trends compared to the expected or required metrics, and make changes if the reality turns out to be quite different to what would be expected from this tool.
If you want to know more about how the use of Performance Planner could help your business’s Google Ads results, please get in touch.