Google Ads Performance Planner

Key Takeaways

google ads performance planner is a free tool that will look at your daily spend and then assess if specific campaign changes will affect key metrics like conversions cpa clicks and more you can then compare a few different types of forecasts to see if you want to implement those changes to reach specific campaign goals we'll go over the benefits a performance planner how it exactly works and then we'll walk through a few examples so you get a better understanding of how the tool actually looks within google ads before we happen to google ads i want to talk about why you may want to consider using performance planner and then i also want to go over how it works so first sticking with benefits with performance planner you can get monthly and quarterly projections for eligible campaigns this is beneficial we get clients asking us for projections for google ads all the time and while we always take a projection with a grain of salt because there's a lot of factors that could change that projection this still gives us a good baseline and as you can see i stress eligible when we actually hop into the tool in google ads i'll show you the requirements needed so a campaign can be allowed to use in performance planner next you will get suggestions that you may want to consider to improve the performance of those campaigns i already did a video on google's recommendations and you can check that one out here and it's kind of similar it's always good to review the suggestions that google offers doesn't mean that you have to implement every single one of those suggestions and then one of the cooler features is that you can see how your spend and performance could potentially change if you update certain settings within your campaign so now how does performance planner work think about all the different search queries that are done on google every single day they have billions to consider and everything in their database they say is updated about every 24 hours so performance planner is going to look at relevant ad auctions over the last seven to 10 days along with the historical information of all the search queries that they have the tool is going to take into consideration certain things like seasonality historical landing page performance maybe you have certain competitors that show up more within your auction insights on certain months or certain times of the year and less during others after a few simulations are run performance plan is going to collect some data performance planner can look at what they projected versus the actual performance and then they're going to use machine learning to kind of fill in the gap to better tune your forecast over time and when we're looking at conversion performance that is going to be taken from the conversion column within the google ads reports it also ties in to how you have your campaign set up are you using just an overall account wide conversion action or are you using campaign level conversions if you are getting a little bit more specific and using campaign level conversions then for each campaign you select within performance planner it's only going to use the conversions that you have assigned for each particular campaign now we have that out of the way let's go into google ads and look at one example of how you can use performance planner i'm already in the performance planner in a particular account but no matter where you are in google ads it can easily be found by going up to your tools and settings and then it's already highlighted the first one under planning we're already there this account has never run a forecast with performance planner before so i have nothing else here so the only option i have is to create a new plan you see right in the middle of the screen you can click on this create new plan box but after you already have a forecast within the account you can go up to the blue plus button and then we can start creating some new plans sorry i have to blur out some of the campaigns this is an actual client account but there's a few things within this view that i want to talk about so i'm glad i chose this account while i have all the campaign names blurred out you can see the check boxes next to them off to the left so yes you can click on multiple campaigns and group them together within the same forecast but as you see in the text up here where my mouse is moving google's telling you for the best results make sure that you're using campaigns with similar goals that goes exactly back to the how performance planner works slide i talked about closer to the intro that it's going to use whatever conversions you have set up for the main conversions column this particular account is easy it's set at the account level and they're all pretty much the same in terms of the goals of the campaigns so i can click on all these eligible campaigns and group them together so consider that if you are using campaign level conversions i would create a different forecast for each of the different conversion groupings for your campaigns another thing you might notice in this gray bar right here is that nine campaigns aren't eligible to forecast and how is this possible well to better explain this i'm going to jump into the help section about performance planner there are specific requirements for each campaign type available in google ads to see if a campaign is eligible to use performance planner just looking at the first option for search campaigns i'm not going to read every single one of these bullet points because i'm sharing the link on the screen right now where you can find these requirements but depending on the campaign type there's usually some set minimums that the campaign needs to reach whether it needs to be running for at least a couple days it needs to have a certain amount of impressions in the past week it needs to have a certain amount of clicks within the past week those sort of things you can see for display you can't change your bids within the last seven days app campaigns it goes up to 10 days and so on and so on so feel free to use the link to review the campaign eligibilities before using performance planner it could save you some time or if you're just wondering why your campaign is not showing up in performance planner odds are the answer is going to be on this page and then if you look at the very bottom section for ineligible campaigns anything that you have deleted or you made changes anything that's in a draft campaign or an experiment those aren't going to be eligible so let's go back into google ads and i'm just going to pick a few campaigns that do meet the requirements just to make it easy i'm going to stick with search campaigns and then pick just these three very similar in terms of the keywords that we're targeting fairly close in spend within the past 90 days definitely have the same conversion actions being tracked they're just focused on different industries so i chose those campaigns now i'm going to click continue first you can choose the date range that you'd like to see the results for i'm recording this at the very beginning of june of 2022 and google by default is giving me the next three full months it's giving me a custom option to select my own date range you can choose the next week there it is i can choose the next month or i can choose the next quarter which if you notice is the same as the custom option that they gave me after you've chosen the forecast period you will need to select the forecast metric this account is purely gen we have different ways that we assess the value of it we don't import it back into google ads we also don't have app installs and there's a few other ones but the main one i'm going to want to see is conversions and then you can choose if you want to add a target as you can see the target portion of the plan is optional so the default option is no target but since i'm looking at metrics i want to look at a particular conversion metric and already it's helping me come up with an ideal target number looking at the previous three months those campaigns i selected had 60 conversions the same time last year they only had 13. so we've already seen some improvement but i want a little more i'm not going to get too aggressive let's just bump it up to 80. and then we'll see how that plays into the forecast now let's go and create the plan and here's what we initially see first i can name my plan i'm going to just leave it as is but if it's something i want to save and review later it'll be back in that main screen when we first went into performance planner here if i go to campaigns it has the few that i selected believe there were three total yep if i click on the pencil button it's going to take me back to that screen so i can edit my campaigns choose different ones remove a few add a few different ones whatever i'm going to leave it as is we can change the date range and i can change the key metric and target first dropping down below we see we can explore the forecast this forecast is looking at my average conversion rate and i believe on the previous screen it was saying it was looking at the past seven day conversion rate now i know i said my target was 80 conversions it's kind of showing it right down here that's where these two dots are meeting so looking at my existing settings you can see it's the gray dot you're spending about k to get 37 conversions for an average cpa of almost 146 bucks now the blue line their plan settings spend is a little bit higher but it's saying you can get a 79 conversions very close to my 80 target for an average cpa of 68.46 and then i can click on the chart to update the spent if i go up here saying the conversion rates are based on a forecasted conversion rate and there it is the last seven days of conversion rate data we can go down to historical conversion rate and there you can choose a particular custom date range that you would want to look at for that forecast you can create a custom conversion rate maybe you know you're making landing page improvements and say if i can get my conversion rate up to six percent apply that one and there we see how that forecasted work could be helpful if you are doing any cro or landing page testing i'm just going to reset it back to the original one and then we see a scaled conversion rate and that scaled conversion rate is going to look at all campaigns not just the ones that we have selected if we go back over the blue line is the planned settings the gray dotted line is going to maintain my target but it's kind of showing me as i spend more and that spend number goes up it's showing me what it would take to get these certain amount of conversions let's go all the way to the top let's get crazy yeah it's a notably higher spend if i want to hit 500 conversions this account doesn't have that budget but if you get that unrealistic client request of haka we don't have this many conversions you could potentially go back and say well this is what it's going to have to take you're going to have to find more budget or you need to work on your website or your landing pages to improve the conversion rate to make it easier to hit that goal if i go over to the other tab of compare performance we get to look at the graphs in a different way now while the date range looks the same here we can see that it is last year so showing us past performance if i hover over a different one we can see the existing settings forecasting so year over year it's looking a lot better but there we see the difference between the existing settings and the plan settings so the blue plan settings is again if you implement the suggested changes for the plan if i scroll down here they already give us a few metrics spend conversions remember this is the target stuff i want to hit but you can add a little bit more to the forecast i want to look at clicks cpc again most of the stuff doesn't apply to the campaigns got to go down and hit okay and there we get a little bit more information if the client or your boss does request it so let me go down to the actual campaign suggestion so in this particular plan google is recommending that i pause the bottom two campaigns and give all the budget to this top one here assuming my average conversion rate stays the same as the past seven days the cpa for this particular campaign will increase but the overall with the three combined will get me closer to what i need to hit the 80 goals while that would get me there this second one i have here is extremely important to the client and this is where you have to take some of these forecasts and the recommendations with a grain of salt because what we have set up as a conversion in this account is a higher funnel lead form lead form that is on the client's website not a lead form extension and even though the cpa for this middle campaign is much higher than most of the other campaigns in the account when we look internally we see leads that come from this account with a very high cpa have by far the highest close rate they are the most valuable lead while we get more conversions from here and i'm talking about the top row it's about 50 50. so yes we're growing our overall conversions and that will lead to more close conversions however it's not necessarily all the conversions that we want let me go and do a different account to see what other types of recommendations we may have here's another account i pulled up this one i just picked a few display campaigns their display campaigns convert fairly well i added in a target of 500. i had one ineligible because it did have two little conversions for this particular forecast but here we see the suggested changes to hit the forecast that i wanted to it's actually telling me to decrease my bids and increase my budget that is because i have a lower conversion rate and i'm being pretty aggressive with my conversions so lowering the cbc bids would help yes this one is using manual but it's also telling me from a budget standpoint what i would need for these campaigns this one below is remarketing so i don't have a ton of room to grow unless i'm really driving a lot of traffic via other means that's going to have an impact on it how much traffic i'm getting there's not much i can do there from the budget standpoint but they are telling me to lower my bids this one is peer display definitely have much more room to grow more room to expand my reach still telling me to lower my bids but i do have to increase my budget if my conversion rate does not improve so you can see there's a lot of things that you can play around here look at adjusting your budgets looking at adjusting the conversion rate maybe you need to adjust your campaigns and play around to see what it would take to hit the goals that you're looking to achieve we can look at downloading the information if you want to share it with somebody else but i'm going to hop back over here and go back into the performance planner main view as you see there was no save button think of it as like anything on google drive sheets or docs as you're making updates to your forecasts it's going to automatically save for you so i could click on this box delete the plan if i want to look at some of the sharing stats if we go back in it and then you can make a few adjustments to change anything that you want to make one thing i realized i did forget to go through was actually clicking on one of the campaigns can't believe i missed that it's kind of a big deal so here you can get an individual forecast for each of the campaign if i want to play around with the spend i can adjust that number there we see the year-over-year conversion rate the previous period of conversion rate again it's based off of that forecast run so it's going to give me an estimated forecast rate but again i can change it if i want to and they're showing me some campaign changes it was hard for me to show some examples because every account is going to be different and the recommendations are going to be different google says on depending what campaign type the campaign is you may see different recommendations more than just spends and bids from the search you could get something like add particular keywords add the search partners those types of things but there's a lot of information that you can use i know it could be easy just to pass this off especially since we saw recommendations where of yeah you need to increase your budget that's fine but as we can see how much the conversion rate impacts those decisions the onus isn't always on google if your campaigns or your website has a pretty low conversion rate that's on the brand or the advertiser to work to try to fix that then run those forecasts again compare those plans which you can see we can do and then a lot of those times you won't need to raise your budgets or raise your bids see what it's going to take to have you reach that goal again use this as some sort of baseline to visualize what performance could be using recent historical information if you have any other questions about performance planner i'll try to answer them as best as possible it's a little bit tough with this one because each account and each campaign is going to be unique it's hard to say without seeing the information but we'll do the best we can to answer those questions within the comments thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe you