Any digital advertiser must be able to forecast the performance of their PPC campaigns. This will tell you how to modify your business plan. It can also point out opportunities for advancement. Forecasting, unfortunately, can be difficult. With the Performance Planner, Google Ads has made forecasting simple. Customer behaviors and routines are increasing, so we, as digital marketers, must stay ahead of the curve by utilizing Performance Planner. Google Ads received this helpful free tool in May 2019.
What is a Performance Planner
You should first learn about the tool to understand why your company should use Performance Planner. It can create forecast models for single or multiple campaigns simultaneously. One of its most useful applications is optimizing budgets for various movements with the same marketing goal.
Performance Planner creates models across the Search and Display networks from your and user data. The Performance Planner can simulate relevant ad auctions using data from billions of daily search queries. It also considers competitor data, seasonal changes, and landing page updates.
Performance Planner also uses machine learning to learn how to improve forecasting. It will compare its predictions to reality and learn from its errors.
The Performance Planner allows you to see forecasts for your campaign and compare them to past performance. It will also recommend optimizing your budget and tweaking individual campaign settings.
The Performance Planner is a versatile tool that constantly learning how to suit your campaigns better. You should understand some answers to the question, “Why should your company use Performance Planner?” It eliminates all guesswork from budgeting and planning.
The Performance Planner can help with the following:
- Experiment with different campaign settings to see what happens.
- Gain access to campaign forecasts, including monthly and quarterly performance.
- Changes suggested by your plan should be implemented quickly and without difficulty.
- Recognize opportunities during seasonal periods
- Budgets could be managed across accounts and campaigns.
This helpful tool has some restrictions and can only be used on the following campaign types: Search, Shopping, Display, Video, Local, and Performance Max.
There are some essential criteria that campaigns must meet to be effective:
- They must have received more than three clicks in the last seven days.
- They must employ specific bid strategies.
- They must have received at least one conversion in the last week.
- They must have been operational for at least 72 hours.
On the other hand, you will be unable to use Performance Planner if:
- If you haven’t gotten any conversions or clicks yet,
- If one of your campaigns was removed,
- If your campaigns share a budget,
- If your ads have been running for less than 72 hours,
Why should you use Performance Planner?
Implementing a change and determining how it will be carried out is difficult. We are curious to know if trying out new keywords or targeting will have a negative impact on ad performance, but we can with Performance Planner! The projected performance allows us to see the changes before implementing them, ensuring we avoid mistakes and stay on track.
To take it a step further, this removes the element of guesswork from the equation. Instead of guessing what will and will not work, a tool can now do it for you! Second, budgets can be maximized with Performance Planner, allowing us to get the most bang for our buck with our Google Ad Campaigns. This helpful tool can predict how much money you will need to spend to adjust your campaigns and whether this additional cost is worthwhile in the long run. This also works for lowering spending. The appropriate budget can be established to ensure you get the most out of your PPC campaigns.
Setting up a Performance Planner
Step 1: Log in to your Google Ads account, click the tools and settings icon in the top bar, then click Performance Planner in the Planning section.
#2: Navigate to the blue ‘create new plan’ button or click the blue plus button in the upper left-hand corner.
#3: Depending on which campaigns are available for your account, you may have to choose which campaign type to focus on.
#4: Choose which campaigns you want to include in your plan, then click next. For better budget management, Google recommends selecting campaigns with the same goal.
#5: Choose a date range and key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversions, clicks, or conversion value. There is also the option of focusing on a specific target.
#6: Click the ‘Create Plan’ button. When you click this, you will be taken to the draught plan page, where you can see an overview of your plan.
What is covered by the plan?
Forecast Graph
This graph shows how cost changes affect the performance of your campaign. You can change the proposed spending by clicking on different areas of the graph, and the forecast will adjust accordingly, allowing you to compare different spending amounts.
Separate campaign forecast table
A campaign breakdown table beneath the forecast graph includes key metric forecasts such as spend, conversions, and average CPA. To push this even further, you can filter this by looking at planned – the campaign’s performance prediction based on the suggested changes, existing – the performance if you don’t implement any changes and continue with the current campaign settings, and difference or diff. – the performance if you don’t implement changes and continue with the current campaign settings. This displays the calculated difference between the planned and existing metrics, allowing you to determine whether these changes are worthwhile in the long run.
Compare
Like the previous one, the compare section allows you to view a helpful color-coded graph of past performance against planned and existing settings. Some people respond better to seeing the impact visually – it’s also a great visual for your client to see!
Data-driven budget
As previously stated, the planner allows you to maximize your budget by allocating the best areas to spend your budget on and determining if your budget is far too high and needs to be adjusted. It shows the expected performance and outcomes based on the proposed bidding and budget amounts.