1.

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:

1. Understand the future spend potential of current Google Ads campaigns to help drive budget
decisions

2. Take advantage of seasonality to capture incremental opportunities

 
3. Set optimal bids and budgets across your campaigns to help ensure that ROI performance is
maximized

4. Find new opportunities to grow your sales volumes with Google Ads

Tip
Performance Planner is our newest tool in Google Ads to help you answer the questions above and
determine the advertising budget required to help reach your marketing goals.

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 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.

How does Performance Planner forecast campaign

performance?
Performance Planner uses a combination of account history and machine learning to power forecasts. In
Google Ads tools, forecasts must meet a certain level of accuracy. As a result, the confidence interval of
these forecasts is likely greater than that of other available forecast tools.

 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.

Note
Performance Planner is different from the Recommendations page. On the Recommendations page, you
can apply optimization suggestions to help improve your campaigns. Whereas Performance Planner is
your go-to tool for deciding the budget required to help reach your marketing goals.

Why use Performance Planner in Google Ads over

traditional forecasting methods?
Performance Planner highlights growth opportunities for your Google Ads always-on campaigns. Having
the optimal budgets and bids is crucial to making the most of your marketing budget and growing your
business with Google Ads. 

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. 

2. How to use Performance Planner

In this module, you’ll learn how to describe the steps of the budget planning process, use Performance
Planner to help maximize your return on investment, and explore forecasts of budget scenarios.

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.

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) 

Conversions are 
represented on the y-axis. 

Spend 
is represented on the x-axis.

Tip
Based on 250 random Google Ads Customer IDs*, Performance Planner highlighted how to find an
average 43% increase in conversions — for the same investment — by reallocating bids and budgets
between campaigns. It's also been seen to highlight how to grow conversions by 80% for the same CPA
(no diminishing returns).

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.

Best practices
Create separate plans for each marketing objective.

Don't add all brand and generic campaigns into the same plan. That's because different campaigns
often have different marketing objectives. Incremental conversions are achieved by creating separate
plans for each marketing objective.
 Set bids and budgets using non-last click conversions.

By default, Performance Planner will forecast conversions based on what's included in the
Conversions column in your Google Ads front end. To allocate budgets that drive incremental
conversions, set bids and budgets using non-last click conversions in your Conversions column.

Regularly check your plan.

Forecasts improve when plans are generated closer to the actual run date. Make sure to regularly
check back on your plan before implementing it.

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.

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

Note
Performance Planner is a planning tool and does not optimize in the Google Ads front end toward
forecasted KPIs. Unpredictable external factors in a dynamic auction environment can mean Performance
Planner forecasts may have discrepancies, so it's important to continually monitor performance and
optimize toward performance targets.
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.

Performance Planner Best Practices

Use non-last click attribution conversions

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. 

Create multiple plans for campaigns that have different marketing objectives

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.

Use the performance targets feature

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.

Use optimization score in the Recommendations page to improve your

campaigns

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”

Here are some additional factors that you should check

while budget planning:

Repeat the planning process monthly to find growth opportunities in Google Ads and optimize for your
target metrics.

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.