Google Performance Planner adds support for ineligible campaigns, secondary metrics, ‘Suggested changes,’ specific time ranges

Google has added four new features to its Performance Planner forecasting tool, including options for previously ineligible campaigns, “suggested changes,” and more, the company announced Tuesday.

Performance Planner’s new features. The updates include:

• The ability to add previously ineligible campaigns by using past performance or adding manual forecasts to plan across your entire account.
• The “Suggested changes” column, which displays budget and bid recommendations for a specific campaign.
• The ability to add secondary metrics to a performance plan, which may help advertisers understand impacts on performance beyond their most important metrics. “For example, if you create a plan to maximize conversions, you can now also add a column that shows the changes to clicks as well,” Dean Chen, product manager at Google Ads, wrote.
• The ability to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate. This enables advertisers to use a historical conversion rate that may be closer to what they’re expecting for their plan’s date range.

Why we care. These new features expand Performance Planner’s flexibility, making it potentially more useful for advertisers in more situations.

Now, advertisers can add campaigns that may have been previously ineligible, enabling them to generate forecasts for those campaigns. Suggested changes may help improve campaign efficiency and secondary metrics can help you anticipate the impact of changes on metrics that are important but aren’t your key metrics. And, being able to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate may help advertisers get more accurate predictions, which may be especially useful since the pandemic has shifted consumer behavior and introduced supply chain challenges.