Why Should Campaigns With Different Marketing Objectives be Separated into Different Performance Planner Plans?

If you are trying to figure out how to organize your various PPC campaigns, consider lumping them by advertising goals. There is a good chance that you have multiple campaigns to help you meet the same end. Organizing Google Ads campaigns by marketing objectives lets you better forecast future performance.

Google Ads has a wonderful forecasting tool called the Performance Planner. It lets you look at the future of your advertising spend and visualize how changes to your campaign affect your budget and future metrics. You are also able to create a plan for multiple campaigns at once.

To understand why should campaigns with different marketing objectives be separated into different Performance Planner plans you must know how Performance Planner works. When looking at multiple campaigns, the Performance Planner allocates your budget to campaigns that will give you the best return.

How to Set Up the Performance Planner?

Getting started with the Performance Planner is easy. It tells you how your campaigns will perform going forward, and it gives suggestions for improving your campaigns. You can also use Performance Planner to compare expected performance to past performances.

Just follow these steps to set up the Performance Planner:

1. Log into your Google Ads account and click on the tools icon in the upper right corner (it looks like a wrench)
2. Select “Performance Planner” and click “+.” If this is your first time creating a plan, click “Create a plan”
3. Now add your campaigns. If running multiple campaigns, try not to include those with differing goals
4. Enter the date range and metrics for your forecast
5. Optionally, you can enter targets for your metrics

Why Should Campaigns with Different Marketing Objectives Be Separated into Different Performance Planner Plans?

The Performance Planner optimizes your budget for return on investment. That means it might allocate fewer funds to a campaign with a lower-value objective.

Google Ads might assign different values to your goals than you would, so you could see fewer funds going towards campaigns with goals that are important to you.

As an example, the Performance Planner could optimize your budget for campaigns that focus on conversions. Conversions are great, but you might also want to build brand awareness. It is better to make different plans for different goals.

Making Sense of Your Draft Plan Page

Once you create your plan you are taken to a draft plan page that gives you an overview of your forecast. This is where you can look at all of your campaigns, tweak settings, and check out individual campaigns.

Forecast Graph

The forecast graph is a key part of the Performance Planner. Here you can click around to change your overall spend, seeing how it affects your campaigns’ performances. Here lies another answer to “why should campaigns with different marketing objectives be separated into different Performance Planner plans?”

If all campaigns on one plan have the same goal, your forecast graph is essentially a predictor of how well you will meet that goal. When you change your overall spending, you are saying how much you want to pay for a specific objective.

Individual Campaign Forecast Table

There is a table underneath the forecast graph that shows you predictions for individual campaigns. If you sort your plans by marketing goals, this table shows which campaigns best achieve them.

The table will forecast each campaign’s spend, conversion rate, and average CPA (cost per acquisition or cost per conversion). It will also show the expected amount for each. The expected amount means the predicted metric if you do not change anything.

The table also shows the planned amount for each metric, meaning what it expects will happen if you use the Performance Planner’s suggestions. Finally, the table shows you the difference between the expected and planned amount for each metric.

The Individual Campaign Forecast table lets you see which campaigns are driving you towards your goals and which campaigns might need adjusting. You can also click on each campaign to pull up a side panel.

Campaign Side Panel

The Campaign Side Panel shows a miniature Performance Plan for each campaign within the overall plan. You can view a forecast graph for specific campaigns here and adjust specific campaign settings to see how it affects your overall portfolio.

Sometimes, a campaign appears to not be working toward a given goal. In this case, it might be time to rethink the campaign. It could also just need keyword adjustments or new ad partners. The Campaign Side Panel helps you find the culprit.

The Campaign Side Panel highlights another answer to “why should campaigns with different marketing objectives be separated into different Performance Planner plan?” By measuring against marketing objectives, you know that variability in your plan’s campaigns comes down to the adjustable settings.

Compare

Comparing is the last part of the Performance Planner: There is a “Compare” button at the top of the draft plan page.

You can compare your forecast to different performance periods in your campaign. You might want to see how your campaigns stack against a period when they did really well. You can also use “Compare” to see seasonal variability in your campaigns.

Another reason why should campaigns with different marketing objectives be separated into different Performance Planner plans is accurate comparisons. You can see how adjusting your campaigns improves or worsens your ability to meet your goals this way.

No doubt, performance planner is a good tool to explore. But you must not ignore some other tools as well such as PPC Signal, this tool can highlight both, the abnormalities and best scenarios, happening in your campaigns. You need to explore the signals regularly and make changes in your campaign according to meet your goal about high ROI.

FAQs:

Why Should Campaigns With Different Marketing Objectives be Separated into Different Performance Planner Plans?

Answer: Campaigns with different marketing objectives should be separated into different Performance Planner plans so that spend is not reallocated between two different marketing objectives.

Wrap Up

The Performance Planner is an indispensable tool for any digital advertiser, but you must know how to use it. The best way to use it is as a broad marketing goal planner. To do so, you set it up with campaigns with the same marketing objectives. That allows the Performance Planner to budget and forecast for your specific goals.

Partitioning your campaigns into broad, objective-based groups will do wonders for your budgeting. You can plan for your advertisements to do exactly what you want.

You can learn here about how to find anomalies in your PPC campaigns.