Google Ads has quietly made a change that will matter more to some advertisers than others. Performance Planner no longer supports planning for Display and Video campaigns, and plans built around impression share, top impression share or absolute top impression share have gone as well.
That will not ruin every account in Bath, Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset, Bristol or Gloucestershire overnight. But it is a useful sign of where Google is pushing advertisers. The platform is getting less interested in helping you model awareness activity through impression-based planning, and more interested in conversion-led campaign types and automation.
For businesses already using Google Ads management in Bath, the practical question is fairly simple. If part of your paid strategy still depends on Display, Video or impression-share forecasting inside Google’s own planner, you now need a calmer, more manual way to judge what those campaigns are doing.
What changed in Performance Planner
Google’s own help page now states that, effective from 9 March 2026, Performance Planner no longer supports planning for Display and Video campaigns, or any plans that use impression-share-based metrics as the primary measure.
In plain English, that means two things.
First, you can no longer use the tool to build or adjust plans for those campaign types. Second, older plans that relied on those formats or metrics are no longer viewable or editable in the same way.
Search Engine Land framed this as another sign that Google is narrowing the tool towards campaign types that are easier to optimise around conversions and automated forecasting. That feels like a fair reading. Performance Planner still supports areas such as Search, Shopping, App, Demand Gen, Local and Performance Max, but it is clearly a less useful home now for classic top-of-funnel planning.
Why this matters for local and regional advertisers
For plenty of smaller and mid-sized organisations around the South West, this will not be a major drama. Many local businesses are not pouring large budgets into standalone Display or Video forecasting every week. A Bath solicitor, a Wiltshire accountancy firm or a Dorset trades business is often more interested in leads, calls and booked work than in modelling impression share charts.
Still, the change matters because it affects how advertisers think about visibility and measurement.
If Google makes it harder to plan awareness activity in its native forecasting tool, some businesses may gradually stop valuing upper-funnel work at all. That would be a mistake. Display and Video can still help in the right circumstances, especially for regional brands, events, attractions, hospitality groups, recruitment pushes or businesses with longer buying cycles.
The real issue is not that awareness activity has become pointless. It is that Google is making it less convenient to assess inside one familiar planning interface.
That means businesses and in-house teams may need a more joined-up search marketing view, where paid search, broader brand activity and website behaviour are looked at together rather than expecting one Google tool to do all the thinking for them.
What Bath and South West businesses should check now
If you run Display or Video campaigns, start by checking whether Performance Planner was actually part of your workflow or just something you glanced at occasionally. If nobody relied on it, this may be more of a nudge than a crisis.
If you did use it properly, look at how you will replace that planning gap. That might mean leaning more on historic account data, seasonal patterns, campaign benchmarks, CRM feedback and proper website reporting rather than waiting for Google to produce a neat projection for you.
It is also worth checking whether your campaign objective still makes sense. Some advertisers use Display or Video because it sounds broader and more exciting, when what they really need is stronger search coverage, cleaner landing pages or more convincing service copy. If your account is already under pressure, this change is a decent excuse to ask whether the awareness spend is doing a real job.
For businesses with active lead generation campaigns, review how success is being judged. Impression share can be an interesting visibility metric, but it is rarely the final measure that a business owner actually cares about. If reporting has become too dependent on platform visibility numbers, now is a good time to reconnect it with enquiries, sales, bookings and lead quality.
And if your ads are generating attention but the website still feels vague, dated or thin, fix that as well. Better forecasting will not rescue a page that leaves visitors unsure what to do next. Clear website content writing and editing still carries a lot of the real commercial weight.
Should most businesses worry?
Probably not in an especially dramatic way.
For many local organisations, this is more of a strategic clue than an operational disaster. Google is continuing to reward campaign types and reporting models that point towards conversions, machine learning and automated decision-making. That is worth noticing, even if your own account never touched Performance Planner much.
The businesses that should pay closest attention are those with a more mature paid media setup, especially brands using YouTube, Display remarketing, regional awareness campaigns or impression-share goals as part of a wider funnel.
For everyone else, the sensible response is boring but useful. Check whether this affects any live planning process. If it does, replace that missing forecast with clearer business-led reporting. If it does not, take it as another reminder that Google’s tools are built around Google’s priorities, not always yours.
The practical takeaway
Google has not said Display and Video no longer matter. But it has made them less central inside one of its key planning tools, and that says plenty on its own.
For advertisers in Bath and the wider South West, the best response is not panic. It is to be a bit more deliberate. Know which campaigns are there to generate demand, which are there to capture it, and how each one is being judged. If a planning feature disappears, your strategy should still make sense without it.
That tends to be the difference between an account that follows the platform’s mood and an account that is actually managed around the business.
