Reach Planner is a Google Ads campaign planning tool designed to accurately plan for reach, views, and conversions based video campaigns across YouTube and video partners sites and apps. It helps users accurately create media plans centered around Unique Reach, Views, and Conversions.
Reach Planner’s data is based on Google's Unique Reach methodology, validated with third parties and consistent with actual reach and bids reported. Reach Planner is updated weekly to use the most up-to-date data available.
Note:
- As of 2024, Reach Planner accounts for geographic modeling.
- As of May 2022, Reach Planner accounts for co-viewing.
- Reach Planner forecasts reach, frequency, views, and conversions estimates for your media plan, but doesn’t guarantee performance or outcomes. Actual campaign performance depends on other factors such as ad quality, ad relevance, and campaign settings.
On this page
Benefits
You can use Reach Planner to:
- Plan the performance and spend of your new ad campaigns across YouTube and Google video partners. You can let Reach Planner choose ad formats and budget allocations for you, or create a custom media plan.
- Create and compare the effectiveness of different mixes of campaign types.
- Read detailed reach, demographic, and device insights for your selected media plan. Reach Planner provides detailed line items for each ad format included in your media plan. You can quickly adjust the settings for each ad format (such as the budget, location, targeting, and more) and generate a new forecast for your media plan.
- Forecasts are available for Reach, Frequency, Views, Conversions, and Impressions based metrics.
How it works
Reach Planner is designed for media planners who plan future brand or video campaigns, and strategy planners who want to incorporate digital video into their media plans.
Reach Planner provides a forecast for how your media plan might perform, based on your desired audience, budget, and other settings such as geographic location and ad formats (“product mix”). Forecasts are modeled on trends in the ad market and the historical performance of similar campaigns run in the past. They’re also based on Google Ads policies that are included in your Reach Planner settings.
For subtitles in your language, turn on YouTube captions. Select the settings icon at the bottom of the video player, then select "Subtitles/CC" and choose your language.
Note:
- In 2024, we updated how our first-party reach works for geographic modeling to account for user movement and viewership between sub-locations through both physical and virtual (VPN). Learn more about How Google calculates reach.
- As of late 2023, conversion metrics are available in Reach Planner for most campaign types. Reach Planner will leverage the user-provider conversion rate (CvR) for Action-based campaigns to help determine the CvR for Awareness and Consideration campaigns, such as Video reach campaigns (VRC) and Video views campaigns (VVC). For plans without Action-based campaigns, Google will provide a default CvR based on inventory-wide medians for each campaign type.
- As of May 2022, co-viewing metrics are available in Reach Planner. Forecasts will include data on additional impressions and reach gained from multiple people watching ads together on connected TV devices. Learn more About forecasts in Reach Planner.
- Your forecast may reflect seasonal changes if your media plan includes auction ad formats such as YouTube in-stream ads. The overall cost of winning the ad auction may be different depending on the time of year when you plan to run your ads (for example, during the holiday season).
To capture recent trends, forecasts are based on the most recent data available from a time period equal in length to your campaign’s planned dates, up to 92 days. For example, if your campaign is set to run for a 5-day period that includes weekdays and weekend days, your forecast will be modeled on the previous 5-day period that includes weekdays and weekend days.
Customize your ideal audience to accurately plan the performance and spend of your ads by using the metrics detailed below. Note that on-target reach, on-target percentage reach, average frequency, target rating point (TRP), and on-target Impression metrics are also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing. Co-viewing occurs when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
- On-target reach: The number of people you could reach within your campaign’s target audience, given effective frequency. This is an estimated percent of people in your target audience that your plan is expected to reach without additional reach from co-viewers on connected TVs. This percent includes all people in or recently in a location, including visitors.
- Note: On-target reach can be higher than the census population because it includes all people in a location, including visitors.
- Additional Reach: An estimate of the additional reach you could get from connected TV viewing in group settings. Co-viewers are people watching together.
- On-target percentage reach: An estimated percent of people in your target audience that your plan is expected to reach without additional reach from co-viewers or connected TVs. This percent includes all people in or recently in a location, including visitors.
- Average frequency: The average number of times you can expect someone to view your ad during your forecast period, calculated as on-target impressions divided by on-target reach, which includes visitors.
- On-target frequency: the average number of times you can expect someone to view your ad during your forecast period, calculated as on-target impressions divided by on-target reach, which includes visitors.
- Views: The number of times your target audience views a larger portion or the entirety of your ad.
- Total CPM: The cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions across your plan’s total reach, and not just within your target demographic (on-target reach).
- On-target CPM: The cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions within your target audience (on-target reach).
- Conversion rate (CvR): Conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of ad interactions such as view, clicks or minimum of 10 second viewership (or the duration if it’s shorter), during the same time period.
- Conversions: The number of times your target audience completes an action after interacting with your ad. Conversions is equal to the number of ad engagements such as view, click or minimum 10 second viewership (or the duration if it’s shorter) multiplied by the conversion rate.
Note: Reach Planner will forecast the number of interactions based on your overall plan settings, but will use the conversion rate you provide to calculate the total number of conversions.
- Average CPA: Average cost-per-action (CPA) is the average amount you pay for a conversion (for example, sales, lead or website clicks).
- Avg. CPA = cost of conversions-contributing formats / all plan conversions
- Average CPV: Average cost-per-view (CPV) is the average amount you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video (or the duration if it’s shorter) or engages with your video, whichever comes first.
- Avg. CPV = cost of views-contributing formats / all plan views
- Target rating point (TRP): This is also known as on-target Gross Rating Points (GRP). TRP is calculated as the on-target reach percentage times the average frequency. For example, if your media plan reaches 10 percent of your target audience at a frequency of 1, your TRP is 10. This is calculated differently than GRPs because you’re basing it on the people in your target audience, not everyone in that geographic location.
- Cost per reach: The total forecasted cost-per-reach across your plan’s on-target reach demographic. This is calculated as Forecasted media cost divided by on-target reach, which includes visitors, and the values impacted by connected TV viewing in group settings.
- Cost per target rating point (CPP): The amount of money spent to achieve a single TRP in a campaign. The CPP is calculated as the total cost divided by the TRP.
- On-Target Impressions: The total number of exposures to your ad to people within your campaign's defined age, gender, and geographic location (also known as “target audience”) that your plan is expected to reach.
- Additional Impressions: People often watch together. Additional impressions provide an estimate of the extra impressions you could get from connected TV viewing in group settings.
- Total Billable Units: The forecasted number of units you'll be charged for, given your chosen campaign duration and audience targeting. Each unit could represent an impression or a view depending on which product you've chosen.
- Census population: The total number of people in your target demographics and location based on census data.
- Digital population: The total number of people in your target demographics and location who reported using the internet in the last 30 days.
- TV population: The total number of people in your target demographics and location who reported watching TV in the last 30 days.
- YouTube population: The total number of people in your target demographic that can be reached by ads on YouTube during an average 30-day period. Population isn’t shown for sub-locations or audiences.
Populations are only used to calculate metrics like reach percentage and target rating points. Your plan's total reach could be greater than a select population size.
Availability
Reach Planner is available in the following countries:
- Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, the United States, Venezuela
- Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Ukraine
- Asia-Pacific: Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
Supported ad formats and devices
For YouTube-only campaigns, you can select your own mix of ad formats and the budget for each ad format, or let Reach Planner recommend ad formats based on your goals and creatives. “Standard plans” suggest ad formats based on campaign goals like reach, completions, views, and conversions. “Advanced plans” suggest ad formats based on a combination of campaign goals and CPA and non-CPA formats. Learn more about full funnel plans here. You can “Create your own ad mix” under the Advanced plans section to customize your plan page view and ad format mix from scratch.
For YouTube and TV campaigns, ad format availability is based on the pricing option that you choose. Keep in mind that you can edit and add more ad formats to the media plan later. Not all ad formats may support co-viewing forecasts. In that case, “Additional Reach” and “Additional Impressions” will not be included in the forecast.
| Bid strategy | Ad formats | Supported in TV in Reach Planner |
|---|---|---|
| Per 1000 impressions (CPM) |
|
Yes |
| Per view (CPV) |
|
Yes |
| Video ad sequencing (VAS) |
|
Yes |
| Per action (CPA) |
|
Yes |
| Reservation (YouTube Select) |
|
Only bumper ads and non-skippable in-stream ads |
| Reservation (Other) |
|
Yes |
Video Reach campaigns (VRC) optimize for reach across skippable and non-skippable in-stream, in-feed, and YouTube Shorts inventory. Video View campaigns (VVC) optimize for views across skippable in-stream, in-feed, and YouTube Shorts inventory. Demand Gen campaigns optimize for conversions across skippable in-stream, in-feed video ads, Shorts, Discover feed, and Gmail inventory.
Reach Planner measures mobile, desktop, tablet, and connected TV usage for all countries where YouTube is available.
Note: YouTube Select ad formats are available for reservation only. If you’re interested in learning more about using YouTube Select ad formats, contact your Google account representative.
For video ad sequencing, only a single ad format sequence is currently supported. Ad formats cannot be mixed. Sequence steps support 2-5 steps for frequency building.
Surfaces
As of September 2024, Reach Planner supports Surface-level forecasting on the Efficient reach campaign type. If a combination of the below Surfaces isn't supported, the interface won't allow you to select and forecast for those ad formats.
- In-stream (bumper)
- In-stream (skippable)
- In-feed
- Shorts
On the plan setup page, select the pencil icon next to “Surfaces” beneath the ad format to change where your campaign will forecast. On the plan page, select “Edit” next to the campaign line item to adjust your Surfaces for the forecast.
Pricing
Reach Planner allows you to choose a pricing option when creating your media plan. Depending on your goal and your creatives, you can choose from one of the following pricing options:
- Auction: You bid on ads with a target CPM, CPA, or CPV.
- Reservation: You buy a targeted number of impressions for a fixed CPM. Instant Reserve is only available for YouTube campaigns that use bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, or non-skippable in-stream ads on a CPM basis.
- Rate-card: You get pre-set prices for special ad formats (such as Masthead) or YouTube Select placements.
Supported audience types
You can add demographics like age and gender, and audience segments to campaign forecasts to reach people based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching, or how they've interacted with your business. Search or browse in the “Audiences” section in Reach Planner, which looks similar to how you implement audiences in Google Ads campaign construction. Learn more about audience segments here.
| Audience type | Segment |
| Demographics |
|
| What users interests and habits are | |
| What users are actively researching or planning |
|
| How users interact with your business |
|
| Custom segments |
|
| Other |
|
Custom audiences are based on keywords (interest or behaviors), URLs (people who browse similar sites), and Apps (people who use similar apps).
- The list should be at least 10 days old.
- The membership lifespan should be equal to or greater than 30 days (This refers to the minimum amount of time a cookie will stay on the list after bring added).
- The list should have been between 10,000 to 700,000 users on display or video each.
Audience suggestions
As of July 2024, select users can view relevant Affinity and In-Market audience suggestions to expand reach of a plan. Click “View Suggestions” or the light bulb icon atop the Reach Planner plan page to access the feature.
Audience suggestions are determined by combining Insights Finder data with forecast data. Insights Finder data looks at the people in your plan’s audiences, and finds other audiences with similar people that you should consider targeting. Recommendations will only show if there is an audience that can improve your plan’s metrics. Relevance is determined by looking at the overlap between the people in the suggested audience, and the people in your plan’s audience. The higher the overlap is, the higher the relevance is.
This feature is available for Awareness, Consideration, and Action metrics and plans, and only available for Affinity and In-Market audiences. You can only add one suggestion to a plan at this time.
Best practices
Allocating budget across campaigns and ad groups
When generating a forecast, Reach Planner assumes that each campaign has one ad group and one ad format. Be sure to create a separate campaign for each format when you implement your plan. When you create a new campaign in Google Ads, select “Create a campaign without a goal's guidance”. If you set up a campaign that’s different from the Reach Planner plan, the metrics in your reporting may be different than in your forecast.
Target ages
Reach Planner doesn’t support targeting minors or the 13–17 age bracket. All age targeting must be 18 years or older. If you want to understand the overall reach of your campaign while not using age targeting, you can select “All people” in your media plan’s settings.
Reach curve
Reach Planner models the expected reach of your media plan by showing a curve. Reach Planner takes several factors into account when determining the length of your reach curve (for example, how much inventory we have high confidence of being available for your media plan). The reach curve doesn't represent the total YouTube population or available spend for your campaign. The last point of the curve shows the estimated reach of the campaign and not the total reach universe.
The maximum reach point shouldn’t be confused with editorial reach (the total number of people viewing YouTube content), which is often shown by other industry solutions. Editorial reach is even greater than commercial or total monetizable reach and thus may significantly exceed the maximum reach of a single campaign.
Views curve
Reach Planner models the expected views of your media plan by showing a curve. Generally, the relationship between Views and budget is more linear (for example, why the curve is a straight line) compared to reach curves which flatten as budget increases since you begin to build more frequency instead of incremental reach (for example, the relationship between budget and reach is nonlinear). As long as you can spend your budget, we may forecast that your views will continue to increase in a linear way.
Conversions curve
The relationship between Conversions forecasts and budget may look different from a typical Reach curve. Your conversion rate won’t be automatically adjusted based on your budget or settings. The CvR value you provide is applied across the length of the curve. You can adjust the conversion rate manually at any time in the settings panel.
There are two fixed conversion rates for High and Low provided as suggestions. Similar to what you can plan for in Reach Planner, Action-based campaigns have a conversion rate between those bounds. There’s also a historical suggested conversion rate if you’re planning on a Customer ID with enough conversion data.
Lineups
Lineups are designed to find the ideal mix of content for your audience and brand sentiment. Adding a lineup and an audience to the same campaign generates a forecast based on the overlap between the two. To avoid restricting your inventory, create 2 separate campaigns within a plan.
Lineup campaigns that target both YouTube lineups and Google video partners are eligible to serve on the specific YouTube lineups and all of Google video partners. To target just your selected lineups, remove Google video partners from your campaigns on the plan page.
You have the option to add lineups by ID using the lineups picker. Your Google representative can help you identify specific lineup IDs.
Third-party planning tools
Google is committed to helping improve the data accuracy of independent industry tools and is working closely with them to enable more holistic and accurate planning of YouTube. If you use other planning tools, you may notice a discrepancy between their data and the data from Reach Planner. This may happen because the methodology for Reach Planner is different from the methodology of other tools, leading to potential discrepancies. Many industry tools plan for editorial reach (often including inventory that isn’t monetizable) while Reach Planner plans for commercial reach (the reach that’s addressable by ads). Directionally, the results should be similar.
Average frequency and frequency cap
People may notice that the average frequency of their campaign is higher than the frequency cap they have set. YouTube currently supports frequency caps on cookies. For example, each cookie can be capped to 3 impressions to account for people that browse YouTube on multiple devices. The model takes this cross-device exposure into account, and may sometimes account for more than 3 impressions per user. Reach Planner also applies a frequency cap per plan line item, so the reach of the campaign overall can be larger than the frequency cap.
Effective frequency
Some advertisers consider a minimum number of exposures of their ad to their target audience in order for their campaign to be the most effective. The minimum volume of exposures or impressions is called “minimum effective frequency”. You can learn how many people are reached at that "minimum effective frequency" by adjusting the “1+ On-target reach” drop-down menu in Reach Planner. The number you choose (from “1+” to “10+”) indicates the number of people who have been served the ad that number of times.
Missing reach percentage or total population of a plan
The total population and reach percentage (reach %) by extension are removed if non-demographic targeting layers are included (such as parental status, affinities, and in-market segments).
Reach percentage is expressed as a function of a target over a demographic population. When you add additional targeting, Google Ads can no longer match your reach to a widely accepted denominator. Since there’s no consensus on the number of people considered “Luxury Shoppers” and because the number of people “in-market for appliances” constantly changes, Google Ads is left to highlight your absolute reach instead of your reach percentage of that population.
Don’t make changes to the campaign after going live
After you set up your campaign with the settings specified in Reach Planner, making changes to the campaign after it goes live may cause more differences between the reported data and the forecasted data.
About forecasts in Reach Planner
Reach Planner provides a forecast for how your media plan might perform, based on your desired audience, budget, and other settings such as geographic location and ad formats (“product mix”). Forecasts are modeled on trends in the ad market and the historical performance of similar campaigns run in the past. They’re also based on Google Ads policies that are included in your Reach Planner settings.
How forecasting works in Reach Planner
For subtitles in your language, turn on YouTube captions. Select the settings icon at the bottom of the video player, then select "Subtitles/CC" and choose your language.
- In 2024, we updated how our first-party reach works for geographic modeling to account for user movement and viewership between sub-locations through both physical and virtual (VPN). Learn more about How Google calculates reach.
- As of late 2023, conversion metrics are available in Reach Planner for most campaign types. Reach Planner will leverage the user-provided conversion rate (CvR) for Action-based campaigns to help determine the CvR for Awareness and Consideration campaigns, such as Video reach campaigns (VRC) and Video view campaigns (VVC). For plans without Action-based campaigns, Google will provide a default CvR based on inventory-wide medians for each campaign type.
- As of May 2022, co-viewing metrics are available in Reach Planner. Forecasts will include data on additional impressions and reach gained from multiple people watching ads together on connected TV devices. Learn more About forecasts in Reach Planner.
To capture recent trends, forecasts are based on the most recent data available from a time period equal in length to your campaign’s planned dates, up to 92 days. For example, if your campaign is set to run for a 5-day period that includes weekdays and weekend days, your forecast will be modeled on the previous 5-day period that includes weekdays and weekend days.
Your forecast may reflect seasonal changes if your media plan includes auction ad formats such as YouTube in-stream ads. The overall cost of winning the ad auction may be different depending on the time of year when you plan to run your ads (for example, during the holiday season).
Updates to our unique reach models
Google uses samples from historical advertising data to generate forecasts in our forecasting tools such as Reach Planner, regularly adjusting estimates based on the most recent available data.
Effective July 2022, we improved our underlying reach and demographic model with updated census, digital, and YouTube population data sources.
In the future we’ll continue to monitor these various populations and will continue to support biannual refreshes.
These updates to the census, digital, and YouTube populations improve the overall accuracy and consistency of our forecasting tools and will be reflected in planning tools like Reach Planner. Overall, this model update better represents YouTube’s user community, and will help you to more accurately plan your campaigns.
Because of this update, you may notice changes in census, digital, and YouTube population sizes, along with demographic distribution shifts in some countries. Certain metrics, such as on-target % reach, target rating points (TRPs), and cost per target rating point (CPPs), are calculated using these numbers. These may contribute to differences when comparing similar forecasts generated prior to this update.
As of May 2022, we’ve improved our unique reach models to account for co-viewing, which occurs when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices. Unique reach models now provide data on additional impressions and reach gained from co-viewing. When you create a media plan, Reach Planner uses the outputs of this unique reach model to forecast additional co-viewing impressions based on country-level co-viewing and co-viewer demographics. This launch gives planners the opportunity to have a more accurate view of their campaigns and familiarize themselves with co-viewing. We periodically validate the quality of these forecasts by comparing them to campaign reports and adjusting our models.
You can use Reach Planner to forecast your impressions, reach, and conversion-based metrics in your new Video action campaigns (VAC). Performance Planner is suitable for existing VAC campaigns' performance based on their historical data. Use Reach Planner for new VAC campaigns. It can operate without signals about your specific creatives, landing page, conversion type, or how well they resonate with your targeted audiences and content. Reach Planner also offers the ability to forecast metrics that aren't conversion-based, such as Reach and Frequency.
Updates to conversion forecasts
For Action-based campaigns, Reach Planner uses Google's Unique Reach methodology and conversion rates to determine its conversion-based forecasts. Conversions are given by conversion rate (CvR) times interactions with an ad, for example, Conversions = “conversion_rate” x “interactions”.
For CPA campaigns, conversion rate is the user input CvR. For non-CPA campaigns, such as CPM and CPV video ad formats, conversion rate is modeled per ad format type. If a CPA CvR is provided in the plan, we factor that into the non-CPA CvRs for higher accuracy. If not, the CvR is based on historical YouTube Inventory per ad format.
Input conversion rates should be appropriate to each campaign budget and can be customized in the settings panel for each campaign or line items listed at the bottom of the Reach Planner forecast page.
Reach Planner supports dynamic conversion rate modeling, where the provided conversion rate is anchored to the provided campaign budget. The conversion rate will change as the budget changes along the conversion curve, which will make conversion curves look “smoother” and account for diminishing returns when investment levels increase. Since the conversion rate will differ as budget changes, we advise users to input the CvR at the desired budget amount.
Update to full funnel forecasts
When two or more reach and frequency-based Awareness (CPM), view-based Brand Consideration (CPV), and click and conversion-based Action video campaigns (CPA) are included in a plan, Reach Planner will take into account both unique reach and conversion-based modeling into the forecast. Learn more About full funnel in Reach Planner.
Related links
- Create a YouTube media plan in Reach Planner
- About recommended plans in Reach Planner
- Advance Your Video Ads Expertise(Skillshop Online Training)
