What does a performance planner automatically do? It is the question that most people who are new to Google Ads are asking. If you are a business owner, you should know how crucial Google Ads are. In May 2019, Google Ads introduced a new tool named Performance Planner to make usage easier for you.

A performance planner helps advertisers gain insights into the potential performance that they can gain by making specific changes to their campaigns. You can finally create better plans for your advertising expenditure and assess how making fundamental changes can affect the overall performance of your business.

Whether you are new to the Google Ads or someone who has been using them for years, using Performance Planner can boost your productivity & ads campaigns output to a great extent. Today, we will discuss Performance Planner by Google Ads, usage metrics, requirements, benefits, and more.

So, sit back, relax, and continue to read to gain insights about this fabulous feature of Google Advertisements.

What Is The Google Ads Performance Planner?

The Performance Planner by Google Ads is a beneficial tool that allows you to create plans according to your advertising expenses.

In other words, it allows you to forecast the performance of your ad campaign based on your budget. The search queries are also taken into account. And planner updates them every 24 hours. It also gives insights into how particular changes may or may not affect the performance of your account.

In the recent data released by Google, the businesses that used Google Ads Performance Planner saw an increase in their campaign’s conversion rate by 43%. The number varies from business to business.

By using a Performance Planner, you can:

• Access the forecasts for your campaigns
• Explore the results by adjusting the settings of your campaigns
• Understand the opportunities in seasonal periods
• Manage the budgets in a better way across your different accounts & campaigns

How Does Performance Planner Work?

The performance planner lets you know how to revise your bids and budget to maximize a particular metric across your campaigns.

If you like numbers, you can understand the concept easily with the following example. If you increase your spending by a specific figure, you increase your clicks, conversions, or value by a certain number while targeting a specific metric.

After accessing all the data, you get a final recommended plan that guides you on how to spend to get the best of your performance metrics: clicks, conversions, or conversion value.

We can never tell what happens in the backend of Google. However, we do know that there are certain things it considers:

• Past Performance (Compares your account performance for similar dates in last year, last month, etc. if you still have the data)
• Existing Performance ( Your current number of the three metrics)
• Search Queries ( What people are searching for)

As soon as Google provides you with the data, Performance Planner stimulates relevant ad auctions in aggregate, including variables like:

• Competitor Activity
• Seasonality
• Landing Page

The best part is that the Performance Planner makes adjustments for the holidays & other seasonal traffic based on the data from the campaigns for the locations & markets similar to yours.

How Does A Performance Planner Work?

The online world has become an integral part of the offline world. To ensure your business keeps up with the changing world, you need all the help you can get.

Search engines like Google are one of those helping hands you need. Google is one of the most popular search engines and the creator of Google Ads & its attribute performance planner.

Every day Google works with an uncountable amount of information. Every time a person searches for something on it, all the information goes into Google’s considerations and its insights & metrics. It is helpful as this stored information is converted into valuable data for advertisers & marketers. You can see what people are looking for, what keywords they are typing, and more.

We understand that every business campaign wants to be as successful as possible, and the Performance Planner can help. Once a day, the Performance Planner updates you regarding the relevant advertisement auctions from the past 6-10 days. It considers trends in Google Search & Display and other Google platforms.

After going through such vast data and comparisons, Performance Planner can give you a customized output on how you can run your campaign as per the current trends. As machine learning is involved, the forecasts are said to be highly precise.

While this all seems smooth & well working, today times are fast changing. People’s preferences change way before the day change. So, it is better to plan your campaign weekly instead of monthly or quarterly. This way, you will be on the top of your game. You will not risk things changing drastically, making your campaign perform poorly.

The bigger the planned period of your campaign, the more difficult it will be for you to make the desired changes according to the trends. Thus, set smaller goals and move ahead by conquering them one by one.

Requirements For Using Google Ads Performance Planner

Not every business on Google is eligible for using the Google Ads Performance Planner. Your campaigns must meet a few requirements to use this unique feature.

So, you can use the performance planner for your advertisement campaign(s) if it:

• has been running for at least 72 hours
• has received at least three clicks in the last 7 days
• As received at least one conversion in the last 7 days (if it was focused on one)
• is a search campaign that uses a manual CPC, enhanced CPC, target CPA, maximize clicks, or maximize conversions bidding strategy

Furthermore, your campaign(s) is not eligible to use a performance planner if:

• your ads have been up for less than 72 hours
• your campaign(s) was deleted
• you have no clicks or conversions
• you are using a shared budget

Thus check each of these desired requirements carefully to deduce if your campaigns are eligible to use the Performance Planner or not. Doing this will save you time & effort.

What Are The Various Automatic Functions You Can Explore With Performance Planner?

As discussed before, a performance planner is software by Google that helps you boost your business ad campaigns by processing real-time data. Like other software, this program also comes with a few automatic features. It means there are a few things or operations that it will perform even if you are not aware of them or forget to focus on them.

So, the big question is, what does a performance planner automatically do? Well, the answer is short & crisp. This software or application provides you with suggestions that are data-driven to optimize your online advertisement campaigns. Every suggestion you get from the performance planner is driven by data, whether you asked for it or not.

This will benefit you as you get first-hand access to the untampered quarterly & monthly performance reports of your campaigns. You can also learn how making a few changes in your campaign can adversely affect your ad budget & performance objective.

Performance Planner is an AI-powered application. It will advise you on distributing your budget across your campaigns to get maximum conversions. This software will provide you with the expected results you can expect from the regular refinements in your forecast reports.

In addition, the performance planner also considers other critical criteria, namely cost per acquisition and ad spending levels, in its forecast report. You can quickly analyze various touchpoints by analyzing the report and estimating the projected conversion value changes.

2 Main Points Before Using A Performance Planner?

You must use it properly to ensure you get the best out of the performance planner. Someone using Google Ads for a long time will not take much time to master it.

However, if you are new to the world of Google Ads, navigating through even the most specific features is tricky. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. It is better to ask and learn than be quiet and remain a fool.

1) Campaign Requirements

The first step in using a performance planner is to ensure that your ad campaign meets its requirements. Understand that out of your multiple campaigns, some will be eligible & some won’t.

Going through every single campaign is unnecessary to check if it meets the desired requirement levels. When you are creating a plan with a performance planner, it will only let you select the “forecastable campaigns.”

So, if you can not add a campaign to the plan, it does not qualify as per the requirements.

2) Usage Guide

Now that you know which of your campaigns are eligible to be included in the plan, it is time we move forward to make it.

Below is the step-by-step guide to using the performance planner with utmost ease.

a) Choose Your Goal

• Sign in to your Google Ads account and select Performance Planner.
• Click on Create a plan option and then click continue. If you already have a plan and want to create a new one, click on the ‘+’.
• Set a goal and select the campaigns that drive towards your desired goal. Here performance planner will not choose the campaigns that don’t meet the desired requirements.
• After selecting the campaigns, click NEXT.
• You will be asked to fill in the date range and the critical metric for which you would like to lay out the results.

You can update the key metrics and date ranges even after the planner delivers the initial results. If you like, you could try multiple scenarios to see various better growth opportunities.

b) Set KPI Parameter

When you get your initial results, you will see the option “Target” on the screen. This feature lets you set a target, for example, impressions, spending, or cost per acquisition for your plan.

Although it is an optional feature, we recommend you to set it. By setting a target, the performance planner will work accordingly to help you achieve it.

c) Draft Plan Page

After the successful plan creation, you will be redirected to the “Draft Plan” page, where you will have an overview of the plan. Here you can change your spending to determine how your campaign might perform.

But remember that a performance planner only gives you the forecasts. If you want the predicted results, you will have to make the changes in your Google Ads account.

d) Check Your Forecast

Now you need to view and compare your forecast performance. You will see a table that shows the statistics disintegrating by individual campaigns.

In each row, you will find a forecast for the relevant campaign’s metrics and the suggested changes to improve its performance.

Each metric comprises three columns: planned, existing, and Diff.

• The “planned” column tells you about the potential performance of the selected campaign if you apply the suggested settings.
• The “existing” column explains the potential performance of your campaign with your existing settings.
• The “diff.” column talks about the difference between the metrics of existing and planned metrics.

e) Review & Implement Your Plan

After you have made a plan, your performance planner will offer suggestions to improve it. You can either implement these suggestions manually or via Google Ads Editor. You will find all the necessary instructions in your CSV file.

8 Thinks To Improve Your Campaign ROI With Performance Planner?

Customers today expect a seamless experience from businesses, despite their size. And this is something the Google Ads Performance Planner can help you with. The performance planner allows you to monitor the performance of your Ads account and offers recommendations based on changing market trends.

The online business market is getting furious. And the only way of survival is if the customers can rely on you. With the help of Performance Planner, you can get the best out of your advertising budget. In addition, this Google Ads tool can help you in several other ways:

A) Real-Time Campaign Optimization

Every advertiser has limited time & resources yet is expected to deliver exceptional performance. And now, you can do it with the performance planner.

The planner allows you to create, monitor, and handle bid strategies for your entire portfolio. You can combine campaigns from different accounts into one portfolio and drive more performance across those accounts.

As a result, you get more visibility into your bid strategy working via status updates, advanced performance reports, and top signals. You will get a clear picture of what causes clicks, costs, impressions, and conversions to vary to get the desired ROI.

B) Seasonality

You must adapt to seasonal trends to survive and establish a thriving business. You can not simply rely on your conversion data from the last few days or weeks.

Plan your marketing campaign in advance by analyzing your sales history. It will help you identify the variations that occur weekly, monthly, or daily. Seasonal ups & downs can be threatening. Thus, it is better to be prepared.

The Google Performance Planner gives you the forecasts based on Google’s past search queries in similar periods, locations, & categories from the previous years, along with the growth throughout the years.

C) Competition

An ad campaign is only successful if it can beat your competition. To do this, your campaign needs to have a clear vision of the market.

The Google Ads Performance Planner helps you in identifying how competitive your industry is and helps you find the most affordable & favourable areas to advertise your business.

In addition, you can check out the most popular and expensive keywords relevant to your business in a particular area.

D) Growth

Businesses, especially startups, rely on growth for survival. Generally, it is hard, but with the performance planner, you can attract & retain customers.

You can get customer feedback to learn if you are headed in the right direction or not. In addition, the performance planner can help you market your product better to boost your campaign ROI.

E) Explore New Opportunities

The consumer market is dynamic. Thus there is always room for new opportunities. However, keeping up with changes is not everyone’s forte.

But with the performance planner, you get real-time, personalized guidance that can help you adapt to the new changes and explore new opportunities for your campaigns. This tool helps you make the best use of your resources.

F) Effective Planning

As the variations in customer behaviour are increasing, several growth prospects are emerging in search. This leads to a lot of guesswork.

However, with Google Ads Planner, you get rid of the guesswork as it provides you with a performance plan with projected clicks, conversions, and conversion values based on various spend levels & ROI targets.

G) Performance Monitoring

If you want to keep your business afloat in a fluctuating market, you must keep an eye on your performance.

The Performance Planner tools make it effortless for you to track your campaign & its workings in real-time. With the help of this, you can take desired quick actions.

H) Keywords Estimations

To ensure your business is visible to the right audience, you must target the right keywords. Keeping track of keywords is challenging as the trend keeps on changing. You need to understand the value of keywords in a particular niche.

The performance planner allows you to add or remove keywords from your campaign(s) & you can see how implementing those suggestions impact your performance.

This tool can optimize your ad budget by giving you insights on when to raise or lower keywords bids based on their performance.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Just having various ad campaigns running across Google can not ensure your success. You need to have strategic plans to ensure you get the desired results. Google Ads Performance Planner can help you achieve it.

We hope you got answers to what performance planners automatically do, how it can help you enhance your business, & all the related queries.

Drop a comment if you like the read.