If you’re running a business in 2020, you’ve got an online presence. (Or, at least, we really, really hope you do.) And if you’ve got an online presence, you’re hopefully doing the work to expand that presence through organic and advertising efforts. And if your advertising includes YouTube, there’s a handy little tool that can help you make the most out of your effort there. That tool’s called Reach Planner, and it’s your friend. Here’s why.

So, what is YouTube Reach Planner?

In one sentence: It’s a Google Ads tool designed to help you accurately plan for reach-based video ad campaigns across both YouTube and video partners’ sites and apps.

What can you use it to do?

• Plan the reach, frequency, and spend of your YouTube and Google video partner site ads based on settings like desired audience, budget, geography, and more
• Create and compare the effectiveness of different campaign types working together
• See detailed reach, demographic, and device insights for your media plan

Reach Planner makes all this possible with its “Unique Reach” methodology, which can attribute impressions from multiple devices — for example, desktop versus mobile — to a single user. That way, you’ll be able to more accurately understand how many individuals are seeing an ad.

And, while Reach Planner shows you reach and frequency estimates, it doesn’t guarantee performance. That’s still up to you.

How it’s done

With Reach Planner, you can specify different audiences, settings, and ad types when creating your campaign plan.

Example of Affinity Audience Selections

For example, if you’re trying to nail down your target audience, you could specify their location and currency, age range (although targeting minors isn’t available), gender, whether they’re a parent, and more. You also have access to settings that are available for other Google display campaigns, like audiences by affinity, custom intent, and in-market segments.

Example of In-market Audience Selections

Where ad settings are concerned, you’ll specify certain things like the date range your ads will be playing (anywhere between one to 90 days), what playing frequency do you want to cap them at, what device types you want them to play on, and what networks — YouTube and Google Video partners, or just YouTube — on which they should appear.

Then, as far as ad types, you have the following choices:

• Masthead
• Video ads
• TrueView
• YouTube Select

Some of these ad choices have subtypes you’ll specify. Video ads, for example, come in your choice of either bumper ad, non-skippable in-stream ad, or outstream ad. TrueView has “discovery,” “for reach,” and “in-stream” options. And YouTube Select can be a 15 or 20 second video ad, a 60 second skippable video ad, or a bumper ad. (If you’re unfamiliar with TrueView or YouTube Select ads, you can learn about the former here, and the latter here.)

Then what?

After specifying the audience, settings, and ad types, Reach Planner can provide you with reach “forecasts” in your campaign plan. These will include a bunch of looks: on-target reach, on-target percentage reach, average frequency, total CPM, on-target CPM, and YouTube population.

Example of Campaign Forecasts

What do each of these mean?

On-target reach is the number of people within your campaign’s defined audience that your plan is expected to reach, while on-target percentage reach is, naturally, the percentage of your campaign’s defined audience that your plan is expected to reach. Average frequency is the average amount someone can be expected to view your ad during the campaign, total CPM is the cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) across your plan’s full reach, and on-target CPM is the CPM within your target audience.

Lastly, YouTube population is the total number of your target audience that can be reached by ads on YouTube and Google Video partners during an average 28 day period.

In the end, Reach Planner is a really nifty tool that better helps you project performance, giving you the insights that improve your present and future gameplan. With just a wee bit of extra effort, your YouTube campaigns can then be on track to turn out a whole lot better.