I’ve Finally Got Around to Trying Performance Planner

I recently updated my Google Ads Search Assessment, and lo and behold, the questions and possible answers are still very ambiguous and confusing. Although the questions were mainly around automation and AI, there were noticeably a few questions around the use of Performance Planner. I’ll admit I’ve never used Performance Planner, or even hovered over the link to even glance at what it beholds, so I thought I’d take some time to see what it’s all about.

What is Performance Planner?

Google Ads' Performance Planner is a basic forecasting tool that helps advertisers predict and optimise the performance of their campaigns. Here are the key features and benefits of using Performance Planner:

1. Forecasting - Performance Planner provides forecasts for your Google Ads campaigns, allowing you to predict potential outcomes based on various budget scenarios. This includes estimates for metrics like clicks, conversions, and conversion value.

2. Comparison - The ‘Compare performance’ tab allows you to see the difference in results compares to a custom date range, a forecast of the existing settings, and the planned settings.

3. Budget Allocation - The tool offers recommendations on how to allocate your budget across campaigns to achieve your goals - typically ‘maintain daily budget’ or ‘change daily budget to X’.

4. Seasonality Adjustments - Performance Planner takes into account seasonal trends and historical data based on data from campaigns in locations and target markets similar to yours. So, the forecast may not reflect seasonal spikes and dips in traffic which are unique to your own account

5. Scenario Planning - Performance Planner allows you to create multiple plan scenarios. This feature is particularly useful for comparing different strategies and deciding on the best course of action for your advertising goals.

6. Adjusted Conversion Rate - Performance Planner uses an average conversion rate to work out the forecasts, however this can be changed if you are expecting a change in conversion rate. The three other adjusted conversion rates are:

   • ‘historical’, which is a collective conversion rate of a date range you select.

   • ‘custom’, which is a static conversion rate you decide and applies to all campaigns.

   • ‘scaled’, which is a percentage difference applied to all campaigns, which can be an increase or decrease.

My Opinion on Performance Planner So Far…

• Performance Planner only works when your campaigns have a significant amount of historical data - the more data you have, the more you can trust the forecasts. I created a plan for a campaign which has little conversion data, and the tool went a bit mental.

• The tool actually feels quite realistic; there are boundaries to your targets based on what the system thinks it can achieve. For example, I inputted a rogue target ROAS of 20, but as that is apparently unachievable, the tool automatically reduced it to 13.24 - presumably the limit of success for the time being!

• The suggested changes the tool gives you for each campaign are exclusively around budget changes and bidding strategy changes, so actions that can be done within a few minutes - this doesn’t seem to change between different targets, but it is relative to the bidding strategies currently applied to the campaigns.

• The tool is much more simple than I expected, and is more of an amalgamation of features that already exist in the platform, like the budget strategy tool and other little forecasting tools available.

I’ll be testing some of Performance Planner’s suggestions out, and will report back on my findings.