Google Ads Performance Planner gives you the power to predict and optimise how your ad campaigns could perform with significant updates. This user-friendly tool helps you make informed decisions to maximise your budget and drive business growth.
Shedding light on this Google Ads tool, Google said in its blog, “Performance Planner is a tool that lets you create plans for your advertising spend and assess how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.”
Using Performance Planner, you can:
- Access forecasts for your campaigns.
- Explore outcomes by adjusting campaign settings.
- Understand opportunities in seasonal periods.
- Manage budgets across accounts and campaigns.
Here are three ways you can use the tool to plan, forecast and grow your campaigns:
1. Plan your budget more effectively: Create a plan to help determine the right advertising budget for your campaigns so you can achieve your business goals.
2. Anticipate campaign performance: See how adjusting your advertising budget or campaign settings may impact performance metrics like clicks, conversions and CPA.
3. Discover new opportunities: Review suggestions that can help you meet your business goals. For example, add new keywords to capture new Search opportunities.
Top Benefits Of Performance Planner
What can you do with this tool?
- Performance Insights: Review projected monthly and quarter-by-quarter performance for your campaigns.
- Optimisation Suggestions: Get recommendations to improve campaign performance without increasing the budget.
- Scenario Planning: Model the impact of campaign setting changes on spend and performance goals.
- Targeted Forecasting: Create forecasts for specific conversion goals that are important for your business.
Note: Conversion actions must be primary and added to forecastable campaigns to appear in the conversion goal dropdown.
How Performance Planner Works
To provide the most precise forecasts, Performance Planner makes use of a massive dataset of billions of search queries, which are updated daily. It simulates real-world ad auctions over the past 7-10 days by taking into account factors like seasonal trends, competitor behaviour, and landing page quality.
By running these simulations and collecting data, Performance Planner generates accurate forecasts by running campaigns against their eventual performance. Google AI then fine-tunes these forecasts by comparing them to actual campaign performance.
Conversion Forecasts
Performance Planner’s conversion forecasts are based on the conversion types you track in your Google Ads performance reports or the specific conversion goal you select when creating a forecast. This helps you understand the potential impact of your campaigns on key metrics like sales, sign-ups, or app instals.
Conversion Delay
Performance Planner accounts for conversion delay, the time gap between an ad click and a conversion action, for both Search and Performance Max campaigns. This enables more accurate projections of traffic and conversions to make informed decisions about bidding strategies, budget allocation, and ROAS.
Scalability and Accessibility
Performance Planner can handle up to 10,000 campaigns per plan, which makes it suitable for large-scale advertisers. It’s also available for manager accounts, providing a centralised view of forecast data across multiple client accounts.
Note: If your campaigns haven’t had enough conversions to create a forecast, but they have enough clicks, you can manually enter a conversion rate to assess conversion forecasts.
Eligibility Requirements For Performance Planner
Is your campaign ready for Performance Planner? Check your eligibility requirements here:
Search Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your Search campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- Manual CPC
- Enhanced CPC
- Max Clicks
- Max Conversions
- Max Conversion Value
- Target ROAS
- Target CPA
- Target Impression Share
Recent Campaign Activity:
- No changes to bid strategy in the past 7 days
- Running for at least 72 hours
- At least 3 clicks in the last 7 days
- At least 3 conversions in the last 7 days
Budget Constraints (Target Impression Share Campaigns Only):
- Search lost IS (budget) less than 5% in the last 10 days
Standard Shopping Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your Standard Shopping campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- Not part of a portfolio bid strategy
Recent Campaign Activity:
- Active each day with a minimum spend of $10 USD in the last 10 days
- At least 100 impressions in the last 7 days
- At least 10 conversions and/or conversion values in the last 10 days
Budget Constraints:
- Not limited by budget
- Target ROAS campaigns: Search lost IS (budget) less than 5% in the last 10 days
Shared Budget Campaigns:
- All campaigns in the shared budget must use the same Merchant Center account
Display Campaigns (Smart and Standard)
To use Performance Planner for your Display campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- No changes to bid strategy in the past 7 days
Recent Campaign Activity:
- Running for 7 days or more
- At least 5 conversions (or 20 clicks for Maximise clicks) and more than $10 USD in cost in the last 7 days
Budget Constraints:
- Not limited by budget
Demand Gen Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your Demand Gen campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- No changes to bid strategy in the past 7 days
- Using a Maximise Conversions or Target CPA bid strategy
Recent Campaign Activity:
- All ad groups have at least one impression in each of the last 7 days
- Using daily budgets
- Not using shared budgets
- Active or paused for less than 7 days
- At least one conversion in the last 7 days
App Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your App campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- No changes to bid strategy in the past 10 days
- Using App Install ads with tCPI or tCPA, or App Engagement ads with tCPA bid strategies
Recent Campaign Activity:
- Running for 10 days or more
- At least 10 conversions in the last 10 days
Budget Constraints:
- Not limited by budget
Local Campaigns (Upgraded to Performance Max for Shop Goals)
To use Performance Planner for your local campaigns (upgraded to Performance Max for Shop Goals), they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- Optimised for store visits
- Sufficient store visit data in the last 30 days
- Not optimised for calls or directions only
Recent Campaign Activity:
- Active for the last 30 days
- Not using shared budgets
- Average daily spend of $500 USD or more in the last 30 days
Note: Upgraded Local campaigns that previously had access to Performance Planner will continue to be held to Local campaigns eligibility requirements, to ensure a seamless experience during the upgrade process.
Video Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your Video campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- No changes to bid strategy in the past 3 days
- Using a Maximise Conversions or Target CPA bid strategy
- TrueView for Action or Video Action Campaign format
Recent Campaign Activity:
- At least 5 conversions and $10 USD spent in the last 7 days
- Using daily budgets
- Not using shared budgets
- Active, not in a draft or experiment state
Performance Max Campaigns
To use Performance Planner for your Performance Max campaigns, they must meet the following criteria:
Bid Strategy:
- No changes to the bid strategy in the past 7 days
- Shared budget campaigns must use bid strategies with a target
Recent Campaign Activity:
- Active or paused for fewer than 7 days
- Not in a draft or experiment state
Performance Metrics:
- Using Maximise Conversions (with or without bids) or Maximise Conversion Value (with or without bids)
- At least 10 impressions, 3 interactions, 1 conversion, and 1 conversion value (for conversion value-related campaigns) in the last 7 days
Budget Constraints:
- Using daily budgets
Ineligible Campaigns
Your campaign may be ineligible for Performance Planner if it meets any of the following criteria:
- Recently modified to meet eligibility requirements, but has been running for less than 10 days with the new settings.
- Currently in a draft or experiment state.
- Has been deleted.
Partner with a Google Ads expert to set up your first campaign. Here’s how we can help you: bring you up to date on the latest platform features, create a media plan that maximises your budget and guide you step-by-step through your first campaign launch.
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