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.
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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.
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 will 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 or conversion type, and 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.
