On this page
- Suggested YouTube campaigns
- Homepage suggestion cards
- Frequency suggestions on the Plan page
- Audience suggestions on the Plan page
- How to share your saved plans in Reach Planner
Suggested YouTube campaigns
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.
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.
Homepage suggestion cards
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.
- TV shift: Identifies opportunities to optimize reach and efficiency when comparing Linear TV to YouTube campaign data (where data is available). These suggestions feature 3 key insights based on past Linear TV and YouTube campaign data:
- Cost per 1,000 reach insight: Find out how YouTube drove a lower cost per 1,000 reach compared to your past Linear TV campaigns.
- Frequency insight: Find out how YouTube reached more of your target audience while effectively balancing ad frequency.
- Incremental reach insight: Find out how your YouTube campaigns unlocked additional, incremental reach beyond your Linear TV footprint.
- 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.
How to use suggestion cards
- Go to Reach Planner under Planning within the Tools menu
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- 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.
Frequency suggestions on the Plan page
As of October 2026, you can review average weekly frequency suggestions and adjust your media plan to meet recommended frequency benchmarks directly on the Reach Planner plan page.
Reach measures how many unique people view your ad, and frequency tracks how often it appears to them—two core levers that directly drive ROI when balanced at an optimal exposure level, such as 2.7 times per week on average on YouTube. Incorporating reach and frequency into Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) instead of raw impressions helps differentiate between reaching new people and repeated exposures, giving you more accurate ROI measurement and frequency recommendations. Learn more about this research in the whitepaper here.
Suggestions combine your account's industry vertical data with forecast modeling, using your Customer ID to infer your vertical. Recommendations appear on the plan page when your media plan’s forecasted frequency falls below your vertical's weekly benchmark. Average weekly frequency is calculated across your plan’s total reach (all exposed users across a 7-day period) rather than only your demographic on-target reach. This feature is available across all ad formats and campaign types in Reach Planner, with the exception of Target Frequency and Demand Gen.
There are 2 ways to adjust frequency on the plan page:
- Suggestion Card: Automatically applies vertical-level weekly frequency guidance tailored to your Customer ID and account. Select Apply on the card to update your plan metrics in real time.
- If your Customer ID doesn’t map to a vertical, an average global suggestion will appear.
- If your plan already meets the target, no suggestion will show.
- Manual Target Input: Enter a custom target in the “Avg. weekly frequency” box under the “Adjust your plan” section in the right sidebar to dynamically adjust your forecast along the reach curve.
There are a few instances when and Avg Weekly suggestion won't appear:
- Campaign Types: Target Frequency and Demand Gen campaigns are currently not supported.
- Campaign Settings: If an individual line item flight date is updated, the suggestion won't appear.
Once applied, review your updated metrics in the topline scorecard (plan-level weekly frequency) and the campaign line items table (campaign-level weekly frequency). You can then save, share, compare, or export your plan to Google Slides or CSV.
Audience suggestions on the Plan page
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.
