Google Ads Reach Planner

There’s no way for me to describe Google Ads reach planner without using the name in the definition. So reach planner is a campaign planning tool for reach-based video campaigns across YouTube and video partner sites.

Now, this tool isn’t available for every single account, you do have to go to a specific link which we will share in the description to request access to it. While this tool doesn’t guarantee performance, it can give you great insights on reach, frequency, and budget planning. So we’ll hop into this tool because we do have access, so you can learn more to see if it would be better for your video planning.

I am in the paid media pros demo account, and the first thing I want to do is show you where reach planner lives within Google Ads. So let’s go up to our tools and settings, and then all the way to the left, we see planning, and there we see reach planner.

Since it was our demo account, pretty much don’t run ads, we just use it to create videos, we don’t have a strong enough account to have automatic access to reach planner. So if you don’t have access yet, this is what your screen will look like when you try to enter the tool.

Google saying the quickest way to get access is to reach out to your Google rep, but if you don’t have one you’re going to have to click on this link to request access. Once you do click on the link, you will get to this form. I also said in the intro that I would share the link for this specific form.

So not only is it in the video description, you see it on the screen right now as well. Even though one of the fields is for your Google account rep, it’s not a mandatory field. So when I actually go through the demo of reach planner, I’m going to be hopping into one of my client accounts.

We still got access without having a dedicated Google rep. So it is possible, don’t be deterred from that field. Let’s hop into that other account, so if you do have access to the tool, you know how to use it, and even if you don’t, you’ll get a better understanding of what the tool can do to see if it’s worth filling out this form.

Now, I’m in an account that has access to reach planner, and to get there, it was the same thing we did in the paid media pros demo account. Just went to tools and settings, clicked on reach planner, and we got this view instead. Once we have a few plans created, we’ll be able to see them down here. But this is our first time we need to create a new plan.

So now let’s get started with our forecast. First, you need to choose a forecast goal, is it going to be awareness or consideration? You see under the goal title; it tells you what the main focus of that goal is.

For awareness, it’s going to try to push for more reach, and consideration is going to try to push for more expected video views. We say expected video views because reach planner is a planning tool, it’s not going to guarantee performance. These are going to be estimates, we always have to keep that in mind.

Next, look at what channels you are planning for, is it YouTube or YouTube plus connected TVs? I’m going to try to keep it a little bit more comfortable if you’re new to the tool, so I’m just going to stick with only YouTube.

After you have your channel selected, you can see that a variety of different media plan settings appeared on the screen. The first is going to be location, and the important part for this is going to be this wording off to the right-hand side your location will show ads to people located in or show interest in a geographic location.

We have another video on location targeting, you can watch that one here. But in location targeting, typically for our search ad campaigns, you can click on the advanced location targeting options and choose to only show your ads to people who are in or recently in a specific location.

But you see from the reach planner forecast, we are going to get only the default setting of people who also show interest in a geographic location, not just people within it. So it will expand our reach more than what you would expect from the regions that you are targeting.

By default, it’s choosing the country or region that I am in, but we could go deeper to specific sub-locations. At the time of this video, not all countries will have the sub-location drop-down menu. But within the U.S, we see I can break it down further by specific states or DMA regions.

Depending on what country you choose, for you could be broken down by certain provinces, cities, you’ll just have to see once you choose the specific region. Then also under location is the currency, makes sense it defaults to the proper one, so I’m going to leave that as is.

Next, we can go down to demographics, the default is all people, but you can choose specific ages and genders. Reach planner does not support minor targeting, so the minimum age range starts at 18. From there, we see where the ranges start. You can’t choose every single age like Facebook, because Google Ads has range targeting, we can’t create our own custom range depending on any age, and you can see that from the closing age range as well.

Then besides age, you can select if you want to choose between the male or female genders. I’m going to leave mine as all, and then we can head down to audiences. So I’m scrolling down a little bit, you can then choose the audiences where you would want to show your ads, and for reach planner, we can use the following audiences. Affinity audiences, in-market audiences, life events, and custom audience segments.

If you’re not familiar with custom segments, formerly known as custom audiences, formerly known as custom intent audiences even before that, we have a video that I recently released, you could watch that one here. But I’m going to go in, select a few options, in this case, I’m going to keep it to just the in-market and life events targeting.

Once my audiences are set, I can go down to lineups. This is another form of placement targeting, but not as specific as you might think. We do briefly talk about it in our placement targeting options video, another one you can watch. But it’s pretty much grouping placements into themes, and as I highlight this little section, the more you add the more it’s going to narrow your targeting.

If we stuck with just the audience’s selections right up above, we’re going to target users who fall within those audiences no matter what the YouTube placements are. Adding this additional layer of lineups is going to narrow our, focus because now we’re only targeting people within those audiences when they’re watching video content that falls within these lineups. So if I try to search for a few options. Since my in-market and life events options that I chose up above were business-focused, I try to look for business lineups, and there we see one within the U.S. I can go down, see a few more options but I’m just going to stick with what I have.

So I’m only targeting business-focused audiences on a business lineup. So in theory, if someone’s trying to watch comedy videos, music videos, even though they fall under my business audience, they won’t see my ad because I’m trying to keep it all business-focused with my lineup placements.

Next, I’m going to scroll down to dates, since I’m recording this in November of 2021, it’s looking at next month since I’m planning ahead. If I go and click on the dates to change them, let’s say I want to start out at the beginning of the new year, and I really want to go far out.

I did that one on purpose because even in the Google Ads help section for this, they call out that your range must be between 1 and 92 days. So I’m going to head back and maybe just choose the first two months out of the year, click apply and now I’m fine again.

So next, let’s go down and look at our ad preferences. First, Google’s assuming that you need help finding the right product mix, that’s Google recommending the ad formats to use, the pricing options all that fun stuff. I’m not saying it’s a bad way to go, just know that you have the option to choose your own product mix, start clean.

I think it’s easy to use this option anyway, because hopefully you already know what type of ad creative and what ad formats you’re going to use. Everything I go when selecting my own product mix will be available if you choose the option of get help finding it, because you’ll be able to edit those options. So sticking with this one first I want to choose my ad format, which option do I prefer to go with? Probably the most common one will be a CPV, skippable in-stream.

But I already see a few options for bumper ads if you want to do skippable in-stream on the CPM model, as well as non-skippable ads, out-stream, and then the masthead ads which you have to reserve. That’s a whole nother beast, I’m assuming most people watching this video won’t use that option, so again, I’m going to stick with the most common one, skippable in-stream.

Next, since I’m doing the cost per view model, our only option is auction and then you want to choose your budget. Luckily, my client is investing in YouTube, we get a hundred grand a month, I’m planning for two months in 2022, so that’s our budget. Then we see our product mix in the right-hand side has updated, showing me my ad format and my budget.

Now, let’s say we want to mix it up a little bit. I can add another row, select a different ad format in this case let’s choose a non-skippable in-stream. Choose my pricing model, auction, or instant reserve, I’m going to continue with auction, and this one I’m going to split out. 200K is my total, I don’t get that for just one ad format, so I’m going to switch that budget up, 100k each.

So now it’s showing both ad formats, I’m splitting the budget up and the percentage of that budget compared to the total. If I scroll down a little bit, with an ad preference, I’m pretty much done and now I can view forecasts. Here, we see the initial plan, recapping everything in the top, we have our locations, there’s our selected date range.

I could go and add a frequency cap if I want to I’m going to leave it as is. Confirming my target demographics, there are the audiences I have selected, you see I can go in, enter more if I wanted to, I’m going to leave it as is and same thing with my lineups, there’s a chance for me to edit it if I need to.

From there, Google’s telling me I can reach 14.3 million people with the 200k budget that I put in, and it is showing me this forecast is as of today, that’s the date I’m recording this video. That is something that is important to call out, because these numbers can change.

All of the forecasts that we see within reach planner are from the most recent data available. From the time period equal to the length of your campaign’s planned dates, so let’s look at the example I chose. I chose to do two full months. Google’s forecast will be modeled based on the previous two months.

What it’s showing me as a forecast could be different than what you may expect to get. So we can’t take everything literally from what we see within the forecast. There, we come back and we see reach information, not only up here, as well as down below in this initial graph.

Another thing I think it’s important to call out is that reach planner data is using Google’s unique reach. it’s going to take into consideration different devices, different sites, apps, and networks that are part of Google’s network. So someone sees the ad on one device on YouTube, and then they see it on a different device, maybe included within a partner network.

Unique reach has a better way of showing you that it reached one user, it’s not going to count it multiple times. But besides reach, we do have demographics, I did select all people, all age ranges. There we see it’s color-coded by the genders available, and then we see devices, where we think it’s going to be broken out.

So we scroll down a little bit, we see the two product mixes right here, you remember my two options were the CPV, skippable in-stream, and the CPM, non-skippable in-stream. Seeing the main components up above, as well as some additional columns. At any point before I save it, I can trash one of these, I don’t want to do that.

But I can also edit my mix, and I’m doing that on purpose because when I do this, we see additional settings options that weren’t in our initial creation. So we have the general settings. If I want to go down and customize my CPV, I can do that. It’s giving me a warning, but I have the option.

Next, we’ll look at pricing, that’s staying the same. Our networks, here is where I can turn off video partners and the display network. If I want to keep it just on YouTube, I can do that. Going down to location and demographics, I can edit it here pretty much the same as above, so I don’t need to touch that. I can look to override my plan settings, update the dates. But we could do that on the previous screen.

Audiences and lineups, same thing, I could edit them here but I could also do that on the previous screen. But here’s another new one, parental status, and even further, devices we can look at editing. Then one more, our content exclusions and ad policies.

It says in the first blue box that the forecasts include the account level exclusions, so I’m going to leave it as all inventory because we already have content exclusions in place within the account. It’s good for me to go back and circle back to make sure what we have in place. Don’t need to make any changes here, so I’m going to cancel it.

If we go up to the top right corner, I can save my plan, give it a name and save it. Once we close out of it, head back to reach planner, we’ll show you where it lives. But besides saving it, I could go up download it to a csv, show you what it looks like. As I pop it open, we do get the reach curve, which is in the graph. Pretty unappealing, it’s not the prettiest thing to look at. I’ll be honest, I never use this.

But if you have a way to export it, and create some own internal dashboards based upon that information, I totally see how this could be helpful. Then I’m going to go back up, because there was one more option, I’m going to skip to the bottom, I can remove the plan, trash it if I want to and be a waste of time, or I could make a copy.

I can then save this copy, go back in, edit it how I want to potentially see a few different plans, and compare those numbers together. It’s a lot easier than having to start from scratch and create a new plan every single time if you just want to make little tweaks. So I’m going to cancel out of here, I don’t need to re-save the plan, I didn’t make any changes since the last time I saved it, so I’m just going to x out, and there we see our plan.

This is pretty much the same view that we would get if we would go back up to the tools and settings, and then get back into reach planner. We lost that introductory screen, so if you wanted to create a new one, we don’t get the new plan button in the middle, you’ll just have to create on the blue plus-circle, and that is how you’d start all the way over again.

What else really can I say about reach planner? The name of the tool is perfect for exactly what it does. It’s a forecast on how your video media plan might perform, based upon the audiences you selected, as well as the ad formats, your product mix. I do believe that one of the most useful features here is the duplicate option I just talked about towards the end of the demo.

Comparing the same audience potentially with different ad formats. Maybe it’s looking at testing out different goals, ones we have right here with awareness versus consideration. Maybe you know you only have a certain set of ad formats, and you just want to see the potential of reach for different targeting options.

It’s really easy to create a variety of different plans, and try to get some sort of understanding. We constantly get clients asking for forecasting estimates, you’ve probably run into that too whether it’s your client or your boss if you’re in-house.

Well, ever since Google got rid of display planner years ago, this has pretty much been the next best thing. I also love that the reach planner doesn’t talk about conversions, because we do see the true value of YouTube is getting the reach out there, getting in front of users who could be interested in what you are trying to sell. So the reach planner focuses on the main benefit of YouTube, getting eyeballs on your videos, getting eyeballs on your brand.

So if you think reach planner is still going to be good for you, and you don’t have access to it in your account yet, we have the form in the video description. Hopefully, you can get access to it soon, play around with it no matter what budget you have.

I know I gave bigger numbers within this video, but we do use it for other accounts as well with much smaller budgets. When you do have access, you’re playing around with it if you have any questions on how we like to use reach planner on more than what I could show in this video, please ask us in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez