If you head to Tools → Planning in Google Ads, chances are you’re clicking into Keyword Planner. Most advertisers stop there.
But two other planners sit in the same menu — often overlooked — that can directly influence how you forecast budgets, model performance shifts, and scale campaigns. Performance Planner and Reach Planner offer deeper insight into how spend changes affect your key metrics across channels.
Here’s a practical breakdown of how each tool works and when to use them to forecast growth more accurately.
Why Performance Planner matters for scaling search and display
Performance Planner helps you model how metrics could change if you adjust ad spend across Search or Display.
Instead of reacting to performance, you can forecast how budget shifts may influence conversions, CPA, and overall spend before you make changes.
Performance Planner can be especially useful if you’re looking to forecast data or scale an account. It provides projections for existing campaigns based on prospective budget changes.
These forecasts are typically refreshed daily and are based on the last 7-10 days of data.
A more recent addition to the Performance Planner home screen is Suggested plans. Google indicates the potential impact of raising specific budgets or bids without requiring you to build a full plan.
How to create a new performance plan
To create a new plan, click Create new plan at the bottom of the page.
From there, a pop-up screen allows you to set the timeframe, dates, and channel. If multiple channels are represented in your account, you’ll see more than one option.
You can also select key metrics, including specific conversion goals, as well as a CPA, conversion, or ad spend target. Finally, choose the campaigns you want included in the plan.
Only eligible campaigns will appear. Google may propose a $0 budget for certain campaigns if it determines they aren’t efficient enough to justify continued spend.
Before building a plan, it’s important to understand which campaigns qualify.
Campaign eligibility and limitations to know
Eligibility criteria vary based on the channel a campaign runs on. Here are some of the requirements for Search and Shopping campaigns.
Search campaigns
- Bid strategy: Uses manual cost-per-click (CPC), enhanced CPC, max clicks, max conversions, max conversion value, target return on ad spend (ROAS), target cost-per-action (CPA) bidding strategies, or target impression share bidding strategies. Have not changed bid strategies in the last 7 days.
- Run time: Have been running for at least 72 hours.
- Recent clicks: Have received at least 3 clicks in the last 7 days.
- Conversion minimum: Have received at least 3 conversions in the last 7 days.
- Budget: Have a Search lost IS (budget) of less than 5% over the last 10 days (target impression share campaigns only).
Shopping campaigns (Standard)
- Bid strategy: Campaign isn’t part of a portfolio bid strategy.
- Run time: Have been active each day with a minimum spend of $10 USD or more in the last 10 days.
- Impression minimum: Have received at least 100 impressions in the last 7 days.
- Conversion minimum: Have received at least 10 conversions and/or conversion values in the last 10 days.
- Budget: Campaign doesn’t have a status of “Limited by Budget.” Target ROAS standard shopping campaigns (only) have a Search lost IS (budget) of less than 5% over the last 10 days. A campaign with a shared budget is eligible only if all campaigns in the shared budget use a single Merchant Center account.
This is an example of what a Performance Planner plan looks like.
Performance Planner is especially effective for advertisers with existing campaigns who want KPI projections. If you’d like to learn more, visit Google’s support documentation.
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Why Reach Planner is different from Performance Planner
As a complement to Performance Planner, Reach Planner is designed to estimate reach, views, and conversions across video campaigns.
It’s updated weekly based on “Google’s Unique Reach Methodology.” This means Google uses modeled third-party data to estimate the potential reach and scale of video campaigns.
Reach Planner is useful for account managers forecasting how a video campaign may perform at scale. It projects three primary metrics: unique reach, views, and conversions.
These forecasts can help determine how to allocate YouTube ad spend across campaigns. Reach Planner also provides detailed reach, demographic, and device insights when planning new video initiatives.
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How to build a Reach Planner forecast
As with the other planners, you’ll find Reach Planner under Tools → Planning. If you’re unable to access it, you may need to contact your Google account manager.
When creating a new campaign plan, you’ll be asked to select your location, currency, and whether you want to build a plan for YouTube or YouTube and Linear TV.
Next, select your dates, demographics, sublocations, audiences, devices, and frequency caps.
You can choose In-Market, Affinity, Remarketing, Custom, and Lookalike segments while building your plan.
The next step is selecting the type of YouTube campaign you want to include.
A newer Reach Planner feature provides forecasts for a mix of video campaign types, called advanced plans.
This is an example of what a completed plan may look like after selections are made:
Reach Planner is extremely useful and often underutilized when planning current or future video ad spend.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can complete the Reach Planner learning modules on Skillshop.
When to use each planner in your workflow
The Performance Planner and Reach Planner are powerful, often underutilized tools in Google Ads for account managers managing budgets and scaling performance.
Performance Planner forecasts the impact of budget changes across Search and Display, while Reach Planner provides audience and performance projections for YouTube video campaigns.
Used together, they help advertisers move beyond basic keyword planning and make more data-driven decisions about budget allocation and growth.
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