What Google Actually Removed
Performance Planner — Google's built-in forecasting tool — quietly dropped support for Display and Video campaigns in March 2026. Any existing plans that included those campaign types can no longer be viewed or edited. Also removed: the ability to build plans using impression share, top impression share, or absolute top impression share as target metrics.
The campaigns that still work in Performance Planner are Search, Shopping, App, Demand Gen, Local, and Performance Max. The common thread is obvious: all of them are conversion-focused. This wasn't an accident — it's a signal about where Google thinks planning should happen.
Why Google Did This (And Why It Matters)
Google has been deprioritizing impression-based metrics for years. Removing them from Performance Planner is a hard stop — not a nudge. The tool is now exclusively for conversion-driven campaign types, and if your planning workflow relies on forecasting Display reach or Video impression volume inside Google's native tools, you no longer have a native option for that.
For most DTC brands, this matters less than it sounds. The reality is that Display and Video campaigns rarely show clean, attribution-friendly conversion data in Google Ads anyway. Most DTC brands at the $5K–$100K/month spend level run Display either as a retargeting layer or because an agency set it up years ago and never turned it off. Neither use case requires sophisticated forward-looking forecasting.
The practical flag: If you're using Performance Planner to build quarterly budget cases for upper-funnel campaigns — whether for a CFO, a board, or internal planning — you'll need to move that process outside of Google Ads. Third-party tools, media mix models, or even a well-built spreadsheet are now your options for Display and Video forecasting.
What This Changes for DTC Google Ads Accounts
A few specific scenarios where this will bite teams that aren't paying attention:
- Agency-managed accounts with YouTube campaigns: If your agency has been including YouTube in Performance Planner reports to show projected impact, those reports will now error out or be incomplete. Ask them how they're forecasting YouTube spend going forward.
- Impression share targets on Search: If you've been running Search campaigns with impression share goals rather than conversion goals, those campaigns can no longer be included in a Performance Planner forecast. This is Google's way of telling you to switch to tROAS or tCPA bidding — or at minimum, Max Conversions.
- New DTC brands building media plans: If you're planning a Google Ads launch and trying to estimate reach and awareness impact before committing budget, Performance Planner won't help with Display or YouTube anymore. Use Google's Reach Planner (a separate tool) for YouTube awareness forecasting instead.
What Still Works — and What to Use Instead
Performance Planner remains genuinely useful for what's still supported. If you're running Search, Shopping, or PMax campaigns, it's still the best native option for budget scenario planning — forecasting what happens to conversions and ROAS if you increase spend by 20% or 50%. Use it for that.
For Display and Video forecasting, Google's Reach Planner is the right tool for YouTube and video campaign planning. It's built for awareness metrics — impressions, reach, frequency — and handles YouTube-specific inventory. It's a separate tool from Performance Planner, accessible under Tools in the Google Ads interface.
For Display specifically, there's no clean native replacement. Most DTC brands are better off treating Display retargeting as a fixed percentage of total spend (typically 5–10%) rather than forecasting it independently — it simplifies planning and avoids over-engineering a channel that rarely drives incremental volume at scale.
The Bigger Picture
This change is part of a consistent pattern in 2026: Google is tightening its native tooling around conversion-driven workflows and letting impression-based planning fall away. Performance Max, Demand Gen, and AI-powered bidding are the direction Google is investing in. Display and Video, as standalone planning categories, are being treated as legacy.
For DTC brands, the right response is to align your planning and reporting around the same metrics Google's tools now support: conversions, ROAS, revenue. If your internal reporting still leans heavily on impressions or reach metrics to justify Google Ads spend, this is a good moment to revisit that framework.