Performance Planner

Why you should plan for performance with Performance Planner

In this module, you'll learn about the importance of using Google Ads Performance Planner to get the most from your Google Ads investment and help maximize your performance.

Planning is the crucial first step to achieving success with Google Ads

Digital marketing is constantly evolving, which helps businesses like yours connect with more customers. By planning your Google Ads budgets on a monthly basis in advance, you can help ensure that when people need products or information, your ads can meet them at the right time to help maximize conversions and achieve your key performance indicators (KPIs). By planning your Google Ads budgets in advance, you can: Understand the future spend potential of current Google Ads campaigns to help drive budget decisions Take advantage of seasonality to capture incremental opportunities Set optimal bids and budgets across your campaigns to help ensure that ROI performance is maximized Find new opportunities to grow your sales volumes with Google Ads

How does Performance Planner forecast campaign performance?

Forecasting: Google Search ad auctions — made up of billions of searches per week — powers our forecast engine. Simulation: Our forecast engine simulates relevant ad auctions with query level variables, including seasonality, clickthrough rate, competitors, landing page, and time of day. Machine Learning: We use machine learning to fine tune forecasts and achieve a higher level of accuracy. Validation: We perform forward and backward measurements of accuracy for thousands of campaign samples — across one, seven, 30, and 90 day periods — to ensure we're making valid recommendations.

Why use Performance Planner in Google Ads over traditional forecasting methods?

Get accurate Forecasts: Forecasts are based on Google data and your account's historical performance, and then validated using machine learning. That means Performance Planner plans are more likely to hit KPIs than prior estimation methods. Get the benefits of Machine Learning: Performance Planner helps you discover the best bids and budgets so you can drive the most conversions for any spend scenario.

Optimal budgets and bids are crucial to getting the most of your marketing budget

Here's how Performance Planner can drive more conversions at different spend scenarios. 1. The additional conversions you can generate at the same spend using Performance Planner. 2. The incremental number of conversions you can achieve and maximum amount you can spend without diminishing returns (maintain your current CPA) 3. The incremental number of conversions you can achieve and maximum amount you can spend at your desired target CPA goal (in order to remain profitable) 4. Additional spend and resulting conversion scenarios at higher target CPA goals (reduce profitability to increase total conversion volume)

3. Take action with Performance Planner

In this module, you'll learn how to use Performance Planner to forecast and implement budget plans that you created in Google Ads. Plus, you'll discover budget planning best practices to help you find new growth opportunities.

How to use Performance Planner

Learn ->Create a new budget plan to learn the best bids and budgets for your campaigns to drive incremental conversions. Explore ->Explore further optimizations and forecast how you can grow your business with Google Ads. Do ->Review and implement changes prescribed by your Performance Planner plan. Repeat ->Ensure you react to external factors and optimize to the target metrics set. Use Performance Planner on a monthly basis for best results.

What changes will Performance Planner recommend?

Once you use Performance Planner to create a plan with the target date, campaigns, budget, target conversion volume, and target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for upcoming periods, the tool will provide one of the recommendations below. These recommendations are campaign settings forecasted to help drive maximum conversions and the most efficient return on your investment for your targeted budget. Search Manual cost-per-click (CPC) or Enhanced CPC campaigns Recommended average daily budget and campaign bid scaling (1.5 scaling means + 50% bid scaling) Search Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions campaigns Recommended average daily budget Search Target CPA or Target return on ad spend (ROAS) campaigns Recommended average daily budget, Campaign-level Target CPA, or Campaign-level Target ROAS

How does the Performance Planner work?

Performance Planner determines the optimal bids and average daily budget allocations across all of your campaigns to help increase the number of conversions you can achieve for any future spend scenario. It uses the following process: -Performance Planner will generate a forecast of what your campaigns will achieve for a future period, if you make no changes to your current campaigns. This forecast is represented by the grey dot. -Using Google's seasonality data and insights, Performance Planner will predict the results if you use optimal bids and average daily budgets across your campaigns to maximize the number of conversions for any future spend scenario. These results are represented by a blue line. -When you choose a spend point on the blue line, Performance Planner will improve your ROI by reallocating spend between campaigns through adjusting bids and average daily budgets. See these changes in the campaigns table or via CSV download.

Performance Planner Best Practices

Performance Planner forecasts for conversion types that are activated for the Include in Conversions setting in the Conversions column. To allocate budgets that drive incremental conversions, include non-last click attribution conversions in the Include in Conversions column. It's a best practice to separate campaigns with different marketing objectives into different Performance Planner plans, so that spend isn't reallocated between two different marketing objectives. Instead, consider grouping campaigns by marketing goal or budget. For example, you could split consideration and intent-focused campaigns by separating generic search campaigns (such as a campaign containing keyword "suv sale") and brand search campaigns (such as a campaign containing keyword "buy Landriver suv") into separate plans. Unpredictable external factors in a dynamic auction environment mean that Performance Planner forecasts may have discrepancies. As a result, it's important to continually track and optimize performance. Use the performance targets feature to monitor targets set in Performance Planner and receive alerts and recommendations when a campaign isn't on track. Performance Planner is used for forecasting future periods and recommendations in Performance Planner can be used as guidance to ensure seasonality and budget reallocation are accounted for future periods so you can prevent your campaigns from becoming "Limited by Budget"

What's the Google Ads Performance Planner?

Performance Planner is a new forecasting tool that uses machine learning to reveal the possibilities for your Google Ads campaigns. With this tool, you can explore forecasts for your upcoming monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets for current campaigns, while also helping to improve your return on investment.

How do I see and implement these recommended changes?

Performance Planner provides a CSV download with the recommended bid scaling, Target CPA, Target ROAS, and average daily budget amounts. You can manually apply these suggestions through the Google Ads campaign management interface, or you can download a Google Ads Editor file and upload to Google Ads Editor to see and action the recommended changes.

Why should I use Performance Planner every month?

Seasonality, fluctuating auctions, and competitors mean that Google Ads campaigns should be planned and optimized on at least a monthly basis. Using Performance Planner every month lets you optimize your budgets and bids so you can drive more conversions for the same investment.

Here are some additional factors that you should check while budget planning:

Seasonality: Take advantage of seasonal trends throughout the year. Market Share: Get ahead of fluctuating auctions due to activity from other businesses and other external factors Growth: Use Performance Planner to compare previous periods and see a forecast of the growth possibilities you can drive using Google Ads.