Limited by budget? If you utilize Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), go ahead and make room for another tool – the Performance Planner. Google’s new planner, announced at this year’s Google Marketing Live, provides a safe space for advertisers to forecast performance without making adjustments to current campaigns.
Google claims this tool can drive 43% more conversions for advertisers by identifying ideal campaign spend. This is particularly useful for small or emerging brokerages that can’t always afford to compete at the same scale as larger brands when it comes to ad spend. Yes, the tool will probably advise advertisers to raise budgets. But the planner is accounting for billions of search queries, updated daily and uses machine learning to tweak its forecasts.
The planner can now be found in the “tools” menu of your Google Ads account. To use it, campaigns must have been running for at least 72 hours, received at least 3 clicks in the last 7 days or received at least one conversion. This forecasting tool only applies to search campaigns.
Using clicks or conversions as a key metric, the planner recommends how to distribute your monthly budget across campaigns to maximize conversions. The fun doesn’t stop there! The tool allows you to click around and see the number of conversions you could get if you raised your monthly budget even more. By selecting a date range, you can also compare your planned forecast with past performance.
And while using the keyword planner is essential during campaign set-up, you don’t need to turn to it for tweaks and adjustments. Within the planner is the ability to try out new keywords and see how they might affect conversions (don’t forget to try match types other than “broad”).
For those with limited budgets and/or manpower, this tool can save a lot of time and help eliminate a lot of guesswork. It provides deeper, data-driven insights to advertisers looking to optimize their campaigns. And at the very least, if you choose not to implement any changes based on the outcome of the forecast, you will have a concrete reason to blame a lackluster campaign on scarcity of funds.
Needless to say, Google doesn’t guarantee performance. A disclaimer at the bottom provides a friendly reminder that the responsibility of your campaign performance is of course, yours and yours alone.
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