Google Ads Performance Planner

Performance Planner is a tool available within the Google Ads account, through which we can see both campaign performance forecasts for future periods and beneficial suggestions to improve results. It is updated every 24 hours based on a huge number of queries, so we can expect fairly accurate predictions.

The planner is designed to simulate ad auctions based on data from the last 7 to 10 days while considering seasonality, competitor activity and the selected landing page.

In the effectiveness planner, you will find:

• projections regarding the campaign
• possible effects of changes to campaign settings
• expected results by season
• estimates of results simultaneously on several accounts (e.g., within the ICC)

Conditions to be met

To ensure the accuracy of the effectiveness planner’s predictions, several criteria against the campaign must be met. These are different for each type of activity.

For example, a search network campaign that we want to analyze in this way should:

• be active for at least 72 hours
• get at least 3 clicks in the last week, and if our goal is conversions, then an analogous requirement for conversions – a minimum of 3 conversions in the last 7 days

If we are talking about a campaign with a rate-setting strategy, Target Display Share, our campaign should not have a greater loss of display share in the last 10 days due to a budget constraint than 5%.

To analyze product campaigns, they must:

• be active every day in the last 10 days
• generate at least $10 in spending in the last 10 days
• gain at least 100 impressions in the last 7 days
• Gain at least 10 conversions in the last 10 days

Analogous requirement for losing display share due to campaign budget applies only to standard product campaigns with tROAS strategy and cannot exceed 5%.

From an ad network campaign, on the other hand, the Performance Planner expects not only that it has been broadcast for at least 7 days but that its rate-setting strategy has also not changed during that time. In addition, depending on the optimization goal, it should have gained at least 5 conversions or 20 clicks in the past 7 days, and the spending should not be less than $10.

Discovery campaigns will be analyzed if the rate-setting strategy is based on the number of conversions (with both conversion and CPA maximization), and all ad groups have gained at least 1 display in the last 7 days. A week is also when Google Ads expects a Discovery campaign to be active.

Campaigns promoting apps, local, video or Performance Max campaigns also have their own list of conditions. Therefore, if for some reason we can’t select our campaign in the performance planner, it’s worth carefully reviewing the conditions for using the Performance Planner according to Google’s help. However, even after changing the campaign settings to meet the objectives, Google will still expect us to wait 10 days of display with the new settings before providing us with the tool. We also won’t check the draft and experimental versions or campaigns that have already been deleted – although the latter condition seems pretty obvious to me.

In summary, the common denominator for many types of campaigns and analyzing their effectiveness in the Effectiveness Planner is primarily a minimum of 10 days of operation (with a few exceptions), no changes to the strategy/setting during this period, and no budget limitation status (and in the case of search engine campaigns, to not exceed a 5% loss in display share).

How to use Performance Planner

The effectiveness planner can be found in the tools and settings of your Google Ads account in the Planning section. After clicking the + or Create Plan button, we will open a window for configuration. First, we select our forecast’s date range, then move to the campaigns to be analyzed. We can only analyze one type of campaign at a time, so we need to start by selecting the type of campaign, the key data for us, and then the specific campaigns already in our Google Ads account. At this point, we will also see if any of our campaigns do not meet the tool’s requirements.

The first piece of information from the Google Ads Performance Planner is a prediction of whether we can see any seasonality in the studied period.

On the graph, we can analyze any changes in the settings, which we can check, both by editing the data above the graph and by clicking on the desired place on the graph itself. With the ability to change in the various parameters above the chart, we can check the estimations with our specific business goals or top-down constraints in mind.

The chart also allows us to check the estimations with respect to our specific business goals or top-down constraints.

Following the example of the analyzed campaign, you can see that a sizable change in spending can significantly decrease the cost of CPA while maintaining a similar number of conversions. You can also see what level the daily budget should be at to achieve the estimated results.

In the next example above for, you can see that the campaign can still scale well, and its effectiveness should increase. The most important thing in analyses of this nature is the inflexion point of the graph, which directly signifies the expected decline in the rate of increase and whether the graph itself is falling or rising – most often, however, the CPA as the budget increases can increase.

In the second tab of the Performance Planner, we can compare the current settings with the planned settings, as well as the effectiveness of the campaign in the past – here, just as an example of optimization for clicks. Thanks to this procedure, we can not only compare current and planned settings, but also relate them to historical data, for example, from the same period last year, if the campaign was broadcast at that time and the Performance Planner has access to such data.

We will also preview the settings in terms of our goals for campaigns with other rate-setting strategies; for example, in the case of a campaign with a target display share strategy, we will get guidance on what the display share value and maximum rate per click should be set to achieve the expected results.

I will add that it is better to analyze longer periods than shorter ones – in the case of short periods and rounding up a small number of conversions, recommendations for new settings may not be entirely accurate.

Summary

The Efficiency Planner is definitely a tool worth considering if you are concerned about maximising your budget. In addition, our estimations can be optionally supplemented with specific values derived from our media plan at the beginning of creating the plan and when analysing it.

Our plans can be saved, and we can visit them regularly to obtain further forecasts – it’s worth doing! This way, before we eagerly proceed to increase or decrease our daily budget or other campaign parameters, we can more realistically assess how our efforts will be affected. It may turn out, for example, that scaling the budget will not translate into a corresponding scaling of results.

By default, the campaign plan we create is visible only to us. However, if necessary, we can change the sharing settings so that any given Google Ads account user can see our estimates and work on them, too. In the plans view, we will distinguish this setting by an icon of either a padlock (private plan) or two characters (shared plan).

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