What can the Performance Planner Recommend?

Customer behaviors, habits, and schedules are changing faster than ever. This evolution means advertisers have to come up with new ways to meet the shifting demands of consumers. That’s why Google Ads has introduced a tool called Performance Planner that focuses on planning ad spend.

What can the Performance Planner recommend? This tool helps you drive incremental conversions by recognizing the optimum spend amounts for your campaigns. How can you use Performance Planner? You can find the detail here.

Today, advertisers have more work to do than ever before, but they have less time to do it. That’s why Google is continuously introducing better tools and automated solutions to help you accomplish things quickly, respond to changes, and expand your business.

The main objective of the Performance Planner is to identify the optimal budgets for your campaigns and bring in more conversions by offering bid and budget recommendations. These recommendations highlight ways to maximize one of the three performance metrics: clicks, conversions, or conversion value.

Moreover, you can get a higher-level view of each campaign’s spend and allocate budgets accordingly. You can also add keywords and get estimates on how those extra keywords will impact your conversion performance.

Make sure changes are not automatically implemented. You can implement the changes by downloading a file and using the Google Ads Editor.

In this article, we’ll show you how the Google Ads Performance Planner tool can help you improve your return on investment (ROI). Plus, we’ll give you actionable tips on how to improve your campaign performance.

Table of Contents:

• What is Google Ads Performance Planner?
• How Does the Google Ads Performance Planner Work?
• 8 Ways to Improve Your Campaign ROI with Performance Planner
• Tips to Use Google Ads Performance Planner

What is Google Ads Performance Planner?

Google Ads Performance Planner is a tool that allows you to plan your ad spend. You can see how changes to campaigns may impact critical metrics and overall performance.

This powerful tool forecasts the effect of campaigns on conversions and clicks. Its projections are based on billions of search queries and auction data updated every 24 hours. Plus, it also identifies the ideal budget amount to spend on campaigns in order to yield incremental conversions.

Typically, Google has observed advertisers attract up to 43% more conversions using this Performance Planner tool. Through this tool, you can identify your campaign’s expected monthly and quarterly performance. You can also get recommendations that help campaigns perform better for the same amount of spend.

How Does the Google Ads Performance Planner Work?

The Performance Planner uses a large number of search queries to simulate relevant ad auctions in aggregate and usually updated after 24 hours.  It stimulates relevant ad auctions over the last 7-10 days by including variables such as seasonality, competitor activity, landing pages, etc. Next, it predicts conversions depending on the conversion types in the “Conversions” column of your Google Ads performance reports.

8 Ways to Improve Your Campaign ROI with Performance Planner

Customers today expect a seamless experience from your business. That’s where the Google Ads Performance Planner can help you. It allows you to monitor your account performance closely and provides recommendations based on the changing customer demands and market trends.

With online competition increasingly intensifying, it’s vital that your consumers can rely on your business. The Performance Planner is one way you can be there for your customers and make the most of your advertising budget. The tool works by taking into account the probability of a user converting, which decides the ideal bid. This allows you to meet customer requirements and reduce excessive spending.

You can also use this tool to forecast numerous spend levels, performance targets, and conversion goals to improve your campaign ROI.

Google Ads Performance Planner can help you in several ways, including:

1. Real-time Campaign Optimization

Nowadays, advertisers have to deliver exceptional performance while working with limited time and resources. Smart Bidding can help you balance these limitations. It allows you to automatically drive more performance out of every dollar you spend while freeing up time.

With the Google Ads performance planner, you can create, monitor, and handle your portfolio bid strategies across accounts at the manager account level. By combining campaigns from different accounts into one portfolio, you can quickly drive more performance across those accounts.

As a result, you can get more visibility into how your bid strategy works through status updates, advanced performance reports, and top signals. This makes it easier for you to understand what causes clicks, impressions, costs, and conversions to vary to get the anticipated ROI.

2. Seasonality

To establish a sustainable and thriving business, you’ll have to adapt to the seasonal trends. This is only possible by planning your marketing campaign in advance. Pay-per-click (PPC) management boosts the conversion rate of holiday season sales while avoiding overspending in a saturated market.

You can’t just bid on ads depending on your conversion data from the past 30 days. Analyzing your sales history can help you identify the variations that happen monthly, weekly, or even daily. Moreover, you may also have to micro-segment your PPC data to determine such insights to maximize your campaign ROI.

Seasonal ups and downs impact several brands. Google now considers this in the projections with its Performance Planner. Any date range you choose for a projection will also consider seasonality. This tool’s forecasts are based on Google’s past search queries in similar periods, geographic locations, and categories from previous years in addition to year-over-year growth

3. Competition

When planning an ad campaign, you must have a clear vision of what’s happening in the market. If your brand targets many locations within a single country, you should consider analyzing the potential of a local PPC strategy for your particular industry.

Google Ads Performance Planner helps you identify how competitive your industry is. It enables you to find out the most receptive and affordable areas to advertise your product or service. You can use this tool to analyze the market in detail.

You can also see the most expensive and popular keywords relevant to your brand in a selected area. You may also come across keywords that are the most expensive but not necessarily the most popular ones.

4. Growth

For startups, growth is the critical metric that decides their future. Early-stage startups on limited budgets depend on getting massive growth in a short period. Owing to the startup culture, everybody often has to use analytical, affordable, creative, and innovative ways to increase their ROI exponentially.

Google Ads Performance Planner helps brands attract and retain consumers to update your product at regular intervals. You can use it to obtain customer feedback, so you always know if you’re moving in the right direction.

At the same time, you can market your product to yield continued growth and track the outcome of those results. The Performance Planner can help you compare results with the previous periods and plan to boost your campaign ROI.

5. Explore New Opportunities in a Dynamic Market

Keeping up with the changes in customer demand in a dynamic market is especially challenging. Google Ads Performance Planner provides real-time, personalized guidance to adapt to these changes. It can help you explore new opportunities for your campaigns.

Performance Planner helps you make the best use of your resources. It can help you plan your ad spend, administer budgets across campaigns, and better understand seasonal highs and lows.

It simulates related ad auctions to provide you with an insight into your campaigns’ estimated performance and offer recommendations to help campaigns perform better for the same spend.

You can also try using shared budgets in Google Ads if you have less time to set up and monitor individual budgets. This will help you get the most clicks from your ads within a specified budget. It will automatically adjust how your budget is allocated across different campaigns to increase your ROI.

6. Effective Planning

Several new growth prospects are emerging in search because of the variations in customer behavior. Google Ads Performance Planner removes the guesswork in this process by providing you with a performance plan with projected clicks, conversions, and conversion values depending on various spend levels and ROI targets.

You can also now use this tool to plan Search Campaigns using shared budgets. It’s a great way to ensure your budgets are set at the right level to get new expansion opportunities on search.

7. Performance Monitoring

In a fluctuating market, it’s vital to keep an eye on your performance on a regular basis. The Performance Planner tool makes it easy for you to track your campaigns in real-time. It helps you to take quick action no matter where you are.

Google is addressing user feedback and continuing to invest in new features to make this tool useful. It aims to make the Performance Planner a personalized companion for your advertising efforts.

With this tool, you can:

• Explore business-wide trends and performance insights for all your accounts on the Overview page.
• Enhance performance at scale with optimization score and prioritize suggestions across all your accounts.
• Administer campaigns and compare performance across your accounts.

8. Keyword-Level Estimations

It’s a challenging process to stay updated owing to the large volume of updates and fast-moving nature of Google Ads. As a result, marketers are compelled to adapt to continuous variations so as to survive amidst competition.

To understand the potential value of keywords in a specific niche, consider doing more than just looking at the number of monthly searches.

Performance Planner allows you to add or remove keywords from a campaign and see how it impacts performance. It’s a crucial step to improve your overall PPC campaign. Start with searching for the bidding terms of your interest. This will help you determine the relevance of each search term in relation to your brands and products and services.

You may come across some keywords that aren’t producing the outcomes you’re hoping to get. Using the Performance planner, you can optimize the ad budget as it gives you a better understanding of when to raise or lower keyword bids based on their performance. This is a significant but often ignored aspect to increase your campaign ROI.

Tips to Use Google Ads Performance Planner

Google’s Performance Planner helps marketers optimize their campaigns by suggesting an optimal plan to allocate spend in the most effective way among their various campaigns. Here are a few tips to help you make the most use of this powerful tool:

• Ensure you compare campaign performance between campaigns or accounts that have similar goals and objectives.
• Consider having sufficient data for accurate predictions. Without this data, your campaigns won’t be eligible.
• Do not predict too far ahead. The closer your forecasted period is to the present date, the more precise the data will be.
• Remember, the predictions are just approximations depending on auction data, seasonality, and recent campaign history. The actual performance levels may be different.
• Your campaign won’t be eligible if it has been deleted or is using shared budgets. It also becomes ineligible if it hasn’t been running for at least seven days after being changed or if it’s not using manual CPC (cost-per-click), enhanced CPC, or target CPA (cost per acquisition) bid strategy.

FAQs:

How can the Performance Planner serve my business?

The Performance Planner can help in optimizing your ad budget for maximum growth.

I can’t see my Display, Shopping, and App campaigns in the Performance Planner?

The Performance Planner currently allows planning of Search campaigns. The planning functionality for Display, Shopping, and App campaigns will be launched soon.

What can the Performance Planner recommend?

The Performance Planner can recommend: Campaign-level Target CPA (cost-per-acquisition).

Performance Planner can recommend your target CPA at the campaign level. It can help improve ROI so you can get more conversions within your target CPA. We recommend separating campaigns with different marketing goals into different Performance Planner plans.

This will ensure that your spending isn’t reallocated between two different marketing goals. You should consider grouping campaigns by marketing objective or budget.

What’s the primary objective of the Performance Planner tool?

You can see forecasts of your campaigns, explore outcomes, understand opportunities which helps you predict and determine your budget, along with increasing your ROI.

What does the Performance Planner automatically do?

It automatically predicts how your existing campaigns will perform in the future. You can explore predictions for your future monthly, quarterly, and yearly budgets for existing campaigns, along with improving your ROI.

This tool can help you create plans for your ad spend and observe how alterations to campaigns may impact key metrics and overall performance. To offer you the most precise predictions possible, the Performance Planner considers data from a large pool of search queries. Moreover, it is typically updated every 24 hours.

How can the Performance Planner help reveal the possibilities across all your Google Ads?

There are two ways: validation and simulation. The Performance Planner uses a combination of account history and machine learning to offer predictions. In Google Ads tools, projections must meet a certain level of accuracy.

• Simulation – The forecast engine simulates relevant ad auctions with query-level variables, including seasonality, clickthrough rate (CTR), competitors, landing page, and time of day.
• Validation – Google performs forward and backward measurements of accuracy for thousands of campaign samples – across 1-, 7-, 30-, and 90-day periods to make sure it is making valid suggestions.

What is the difference between the Performance Planner and the Recommendations tab?

The recommendations tab is the Google Ads optimization tool for on-the-go campaign enhancements. Performance Planner is the Google Ads planning tool for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning to determine what budgets are needed for prospective durations of always-on campaigns.

Someone uses flood-light conversion tracking as the source of truth. Can I use the Performance Planner?

Performance Planner uses Google Ads Conversion Tracking to offer predictions.. Yet, you can use this tool as a directional prediction tool when floodlights are used for reporting.

What is the Google Ads Performance Planner methodology?

Google Ads Performance Planner uses the following methodology:

• Forecasting – Google Search ad auctions from billions of weekly searches fuels this tool’s prediction engine. It uses all data up to the previous day.
• Simulation – The prediction engine simulates relevant ad auctions with query level variables (seasonality, CTR, competitors, landing page, time of day, etc.)
• Machine Learning – It leverages machine learning to optimize predictions and to achieve a higher level of precision.
• Validation – It performs forward and backward measurements of precision for campaigns to make sure that it’s making valid suggestions.

How does the Performance Planner boost sales?

This tool determines the best spend amounts for your campaigns to bring incremental conversions. For instance, suppose you have a $60,000 monthly budget across 120 Search campaigns.

This tool will suggest how to allocate that $60,000 across those Search campaigns to maximize conversions and present outcomes from these changes in your projection.

Wrap Up

When you create a plan, Google can offer insights on three key metrics, namely Conversions, CPA, and Spend. When you increase or decrease any of these three metrics, Google will predict how it impacts your campaign performance. The key performance indicators (KPIs) vary in real-time, and Google shares the info with you before executing anything.

Google Ads Performance Planner is just one of the many powerful tools that save you from manually estimating budgets. It offers plenty of benefits. For instance, you can use this tool to see the estimated monthly and quarterly campaign performance.

You can also get recommendations on how to enhance campaign performance during this period. Moreover, you can alter campaign settings to observe how they affect spend and performance objectives.

So, what can the Performance Planner recommend?

Quite a bit, as you can see, and all of which can help guide your decision-making in your PPC campaigns, giving you a better chance of turning your investment into profit.