What is the media measure representing the number of people in the target group that have seen the ad at least once in the specified time period?

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Note:

As of May 2022, Reach Planner accounts for co-viewing.

Reach Planner is a Google Ads campaign planning tool designed to accurately plan for reach-based video campaigns across YouTube and video partners sites and apps.

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:

Reach Planner shows reach and frequency estimates, but doesn’t guarantee performance. Actual campaign performance depends on other factors such as ad quality, ad relevance, and campaign settings.

Benefits

You can use Reach Planner to:

• Plan the reach, frequency, and spend of your ads across YouTube and Google video partners. You can let Reach Planner choose ad format 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.

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.

Note: 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.

Note: 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).

Customize your ideal audience to accurately plan the reach, frequency, and spend of your ads by using the following metrics:

• On-target reach: The number of people within your campaign's defined age, gender, and geographic location (also known as “target audience”) that your plan is expected to reach. Also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing, when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
  • 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: The percentage of your campaign's defined target audience that your plan is expected to reach. Also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing, when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
• Average frequency: The average number of times someone can be expected to view your ad during your campaign period. Also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing, when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
• 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).
• 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.Also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing, when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
• 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. Also calculated with values impacted by co-viewing, when multiple people watch ads together on connected TV devices.
  • Additional Impressions: People often watch together. 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, Russia, 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

Note: Depending on your country, TV and YouTube population data may not be available in your media plan forecast.

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. 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.

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.

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 or CPV.
• Instant Reserve: 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.

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 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.

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.

Note: This feature is currently available for auction pricing. Rate-card based pricing will be available later this year.

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.

Related links

• Create a YouTube media plan in Reach Planner
• About recommended plans in Reach Planner
• Advance Your Video Ads Expertise(Skillshop Online Training)

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