Create a plan in Bidding and Planning to define a key metric, allocate spend across a group of campaigns, and specify performance targets.
A plan uses machine learning to model the best budget allocation across the campaigns in a group, showing you the best opportunity for your spend. You can also check how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.
This article shows you how to create a plan, enable a budget bid strategy, check performance forecasts with different targets, and implement your plan. You'll also have the option to adjust your plan's conversion rate to find how it may impact performance.
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Before you begin
During a plan, you can spend the targeted amount by manually setting individual campaign budgets, bids, and bid adjustments, or you can set up a budget bid strategy that will optimize spend by automatically adjusting daily budgets, bids, and bid adjustments in the campaigns .
The essential components of a plan include:
- Which campaigns the plan applies to
- How long the plan is going to run
- How much you want to spend on advertising
Plans include additional features to help you set up, allocate (by time segment), understand, and track spend.
Information included in a plan
You can create a series of sequential plans or create recurring plans to manage your spend.
Each plan includes the following:
- Time range: The time period to spend the budget. Plans must be at least 7 days and no more than one year.
- Campaigns: Includes the campaigns for your plan.
- Conversion value: Identifies a key metric or KPI (conversions, revenue, or clicks) that is important to your business.
- Total amount: The amount that you want to spend in the group of campaigns. The total amount is also referred to as the “target spend”.
- Charts: Enable you to compare a range of budgets with estimated rates of return for different bid-setting options that include automatically set bids (by a budget bid strategy) and manually set bids. Learn more about plan charts .
- Budget pacing graph: Before a plan starts, the graph shows estimated performance (volume and efficiency) that might yield from the budgeted amount. During a plan, you can revisit the graph to compare actual, estimated, and target amounts and determine if spending is on track. You can view the budget pacing graph on a campaign's Active plans and All plans pages as well as the Active plans page when scoped to a manager account. Learn more about the budget pacing chart
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- If a budget bid strategy is managing the spend, the budget pacing graph shows only actual and estimated spend.
Additional options for plans
To further refine your plan, you can also adjust these optional features:
- Performance benchmark: You can specify a desired efficiency or volume from the spend. The benchmark is added to the "Explore target spend" and "Compare estimate options" charts. Learn more about comparing benchmark figures for desired conversion value against the actual performance of a plan .
- Budget bid strategy: You can enable a budget bid strategy (referred to as budget automation) in a plan to optimize spend, bids, and bid adjustments for the campaigns using the plan’s conversion value. A budget bid strategy can only be set up as part of a plan. Learn more about how to automate budget allocation and spending in a plan .
- Spend allocation: You can set custom amounts if you want to spend a specific amount in a certain week or day. You’ll also find automatically calculated weekly and daily spend in this section.
- Reporting-only conversion values: Include additional metrics you want to track for reporting purposes.
Plan settings
Date range
The date range specifies the time frame for measuring performance. For example if you target ≤$2 average cost per click (CPC) and select a monthly date range, Google Ads can estimate whether your CPC for the current month is likely to average $2 or less.
You can choose a custom date range or a recurring weekly, monthly, or quarterly period. Targets with weekly, monthly, and quarterly ranges never expire until you remove the target. Each week, month, or quarter, the target resets any totals or averages it's tracking. For example, at the beginning of each month a monthly "Number of clicks" target starts counting clicks from zero. Custom date ranges can either be recurring or can start and end on specific dates.
Campaign group
A campaign group is a set of campaigns that share a key metric. Campaign groups are helpful for organizing multiple campaigns with similar goals in a plan.
Metrics
Each performance target can track a single group of metrics:
- Clicks
This group contains metrics for tracking the number and cost of clicks - Conversions
This group contains metrics for tracking the number and cost of conversions - Conversion value
This group contains metrics for tracking the value generated from conversions and the cost
Other plan components are explained in subsequent articles.
Overview of steps to create a plan
- Set dates and specify a goal/key performance indicator.
- Select or create a campaign group.
- Specify a budget.
- View a forecast and explore different targets.
- Automate bid adjustments with a budget bid strategy.
- Set additional targets.
- Review and implement plan .
