About suggestions in Reach Planner

Note: The metric previously identified as "views" will now be referred to as "TrueView views".

On this page

You can allow Reach Planner to choose ad formats and budget allocations for you and create a recommended plan. Reach Planner looks at location (country, state, province, or city), budget, and creative settings (for example, creative length) to recommend optimal ad formats for your media plan.

When you use a recommended media plan over a media plan you create, you allow Reach Planner to estimate the best combination and mix of ad formats to help you achieve your marketing goal. This reduces the need for you to understand which ad formats work with certain targeting or for certain goals. If you want to change the media plan, you still have the option to edit your mix of ad formats and individual line items on the media plan page.

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.

Recommended product mixes can be different depending on your overall media plan's goal ("Awareness", "Consideration" or “Action”). "Awareness" forecasts recommend a product mix that increases your expected reach, while "Consideration" forecasts recommend a product mix that increases your expected views. “Action” forecasts recommend a product mix that increases conversions like driving sales, leads and website traffic with a single automated video campaign. You can still select your own product mix when you set up or edit your media plan.

Note: While recommended plans provide estimates, they don't guarantee actual performance. Actual campaign performance depends on other factors (such as ad quality and ad relevance).

You can use Reach Planner to forecast your impressions, reach, and conversion-based metrics in your new Demand Gen Campaigns. Performance Planner is suitable for existing Demand Gen campaigns' performance based on their historical data. Use Reach Planner for new Demand Gen 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.

As of May 2026, select users have access to media plan suggestion cards or "starting points" on the Reach Planner homepage. These suggestions suggest a media plan across 4 specific types of suggestions, and 3 types of specific insights for the efficient reach campaigns. Depending on your account data and current market trends, you may find the following types of insight cards on your dashboard:

Available insight cards

Awareness efficient reach: Identifies opportunities to maximize your reach goals. These suggestions feature 3 key insights to help you understand your competitive positioning:
- Cost per 1,000 on-target reach insight (Peerset): Benchmark your efficiency against a custom peer group to check how competitors achieve more efficient reach.
- Percent of spend on Video Reach Campaigns (VRC) efficient reach insight (Peerset): Compare your investment against peers to check how competitors lean into fully fluid, AI-powered campaigns.
- Past campaign performance insight: Review the forecasted impact of upgrading your single format campaigns to fully fluid, AI-powered campaigns.
Seasonal occasions: Capitalize on upcoming events and holidays with tailored campaign strategies.
Brand trending down: Re-engage your audience and capture attention when search interest for your specific brand is dipping.
Category trending up: Capitalize on broader industry momentum when search interest in your business category is rising.

Suggested plan details

Marketing objective: The primary goal of the suggested campaign.
Suggested plan and impact: A summary of the recommended strategy and its expected outcome.
Key forecast metrics:
- Performance: Expected Conversions, TrueView views, On-Target Reach, or Average Frequency.
- Bidding: Cost-per-action (CPA), Cost-per-view (CPV), or Average cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).
- Budget: A recommended budget based on your historical data and default Reach Planner settings for your country.
- Audiences and Demographics: AI-generated targeting recommendations based on your brand and ads.
  - Note: Select “Edit plan” to view these applied directly on the plan page.

Note: Suggestions are based on past campaign performance and other information from your Google Ads account.

How to use suggestion cards

Go to Reach Planner under Planning within the Tools menu 👁 Tools Icon
.
In the suggestion cards, you may do the following:
- Select Edit plan to load the suggestion directly into the Reach Planner workspace, where you can further customize and refine your plan.
- Select Download Screenshot to save the suggestion card and data to your desktop.
- Click through the Insight panels on the right to learn more about why a media plan is suggested.
- Select Expand to view more settings to reveal comprehensive plan configurations, including specific budgets, flight dates, demographics, locations, audience targeting, and detailed forecasted metrics.
- Select Collapse to view less and to hide the details and return to the high-level summary view.

Important:

Use AI responsibly: Always review AI-generated suggestions to ensure they align with your brand's voice and audience, especially when planning around sensitive occasions.
Data freshness: Suggestions typically update bi-weekly. Due to live auction dynamics, metrics on the card may slightly differ from the live plan in Reach Planner. Always check the "Data as of" label.
Data usage: We use AI to analyze your historical campaigns, landing pages, and Google Trends to generate tailored forecasts and insights.
Peerset benchmarks: Insights comparing you to competitors require a privacy-safe group of 5+ similar advertisers. If your account lacks sufficient data, these specific insights won't appear.

As of July 2024, select users can view relevant Affinity and In-Market audience suggestions to expand reach of a plan. Select “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 at a time.

There are 3 types of “Suggestion signals” based on “Plan settings, Brand, or Industry” which can be filtered after opening the suggestions side panel after selecting “Suggestions based on” in blue.

Plan settings: Based on your current Reach Planner plan
Brand: Based on user input, like a brand name (for example, Pixel)
Industry: Based on user input, like a category name (for example, mobile phones)

Select “Apply” and review your plan core metrics “With the selected suggestion” compared to the original plan on the top of the side panel. Select “Apply” again to have your plan reload with the new audience added. You can view “Audiences” on the top toolbar to view your plan reflective of the changes.

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?

URL: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9427192