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 shows you the best opportunity for your spend by modeling the best budget allocation across the campaigns in a group. You can also see how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.
You can create a series of sequential plans or create a recurring plans to manage your spend.
Each plan includes the following:
- Time period covered by the plan
- Campaign group (or campaign groups) the plan applies to
- Key-metric target (conversions, conversion value, clicks)
- Target spend
- Performance targets
- Forecast and comparison charts (with or without a budget bid strategy)
- Spend allocations (automatic and custom)
- Plan summary
You can spend a specified amount in a plan 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.
This article shows you how to create a plan, enable a budget bid strategy, see performance forecasts with different targets,, and implement your plan. You'll also have the option to adjust your plan's conversion rate to see how it may impact performance.
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.
Instructions
Create a plan
Plan your advertising spend in the Bidding and Planning and see how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.
- Sign in to your Search Ads 360 experience.
- Navigate to a sub-manager account.
- From the left page menu, click Bidding and Planning.
- Click Active plans in the expanded menu.
- Click the plus button
to start creating a new plan.
- Select the date range and the key metric you’d like to see results for (for example, clicks, conversions, or conversion value).
- In the "Campaigns" section, select an existing campaign group or choose campaigns to create a new campaign group.
- Click Continue to set a budget for the campaign group and view a forecast on the "Explore Forecast" tab.