Have you ever wanted to expand your reach and grow your business internationally?
The internet is a global marketplace. It’s not uncommon for an American company to sell products overseas, and it’s also common for companies in other countries to advertise their products on websites like Google Ads.
But running PPC ads on Google’s international websites is a great way to grow your business internationally. The process of setting up, managing, and measuring those campaigns can be daunting, but I’ve put together this guide with some tips and tricks for making the most of the opportunity.
Read on!
What Are International PPC Ads?
International PPC ads allow you to show your ads outside your country, which can help bring in additional clicks and traffic for those countries.
Setting up an international PPC ads campaign is as easy as creating a new campaign inside Google Ads and defining the network territory. Once you do all the setup, Google optimizes it for all locations within the selected geographical custom parameter.
These ads seem like a great idea because they give your company access to more potential clients while still maintaining the amount of traffic you are getting from other geographic locations.
The cost for these ads is set by this advertiser, effectively giving them control over their pricing considerations when it comes to advertising in other areas around the world. These ads are known as “geotargets,” which means that they offer readers information about products or services at prices that may vary based on where they live within a particular country, state, or province within a region, or may even change depending on what time zone they’re in when looking at these ads.
Also read: 11 Critical Google Ads Metrics To Track In 2021
7 Tips & Tricks For Running International Google Ads
Google Ads lets you target your ads to people worldwide, which is excellent if you want to sell a product or service on an International scale.
However, International PPC campaigns can get tricky, and you must understand how International Google Ads work before diving in and creating a campaign.
Running International Google Ads is a lot trickier than running ads in one specific country. International businesses face the added challenge of optimizing for each country you want to target and ensuring that your campaign adheres to their local culture and laws.
Following are 7 Tips & Tricks that will help you run International Google Ads effectively.
Shortlist Countries You Want To Target
Google provides excellent tools like Keyword Planner and Ad Preview & Diagnosis Check, but many advertisers do not use them properly. One such tool is “Targeting,” which lets you view where your ads show up and where your ads don’t. You can use this tool to create a list of countries you want to target, and the tool will do the rest for you.
For using this, you can make a list of all countries where your business is making revenue, or you think it will be beneficial to run ads. Then find out which one among them has the most potential.
Also read: 7 Top Google Ads Best Practices To Skyrocket Your Sales
Create Country-Based Ad Campaigns
Back in 2015, Google officially announced that advertisers would be able to run country-specific ad campaigns. If your audience is spread out across various countries, but you want all your ads to appear on Google Search and Display Network, creating a land-based campaign may be the best way to go about it.
So don’t try to manage everything in a single campaign. It would help if you had separate campaigns because they have different languages, cultural values, and even currencies. For instance, if you sell cakes online, Germany is most likely to respond well to advertisements that convey the sweet taste. In contrast, Italy will prefer ads that show their flavors beautifully presented on plates with Italian music in the background, etc. So, create separate campaigns for each target country accordingly.
Create Ad Campaign Keeping In Mind Their Local Culture
To run effective international Google In ads, advertisers must understand the culture of each targeted country and accordingly build ad campaigns keeping that behavior in mind. Every culture differs in some or other aspects, not just when we talk about geographical boundaries, but also online behavior such as shopping. Some ad campaigns may work in one country but not in another.
If you’re targeting the US and UK, then both of them have different cultures and preferences. For example, in the UK, anyone can use swear words on top of Ad without getting into any trouble because it is not considered offensive. But the same would not be acceptable in America, so try to use creative ads that follow local norms.
Optimize The Budget Of Campaign Country By Country
Running a global campaign with a fixed budget is like throwing money in the ocean, hoping to reach your target audience all over the world. Instead of letting this happen, you should optimize your budget by splitting it up into different campaigns and ad sets for individual countries, and then move on to analyze performance reports regularly.
The budget you set for each country should reflect their economy or purchasing power, which decides how much they can afford to pay for your product/service. So depending on this factor, adjust your budget accordingly and keep regular track of ROI and conversion rate for every campaign and country separately.
Use Local Domain Extension For Effective Targeting
You can’t always rely on a keyword planner when finding new keywords specific to certain geographical regions because you can’t manually add keywords in this tool. However, if you know local domain extensions like .xx (for example, co. uk), you can develop ad campaigns targeting specific regions by simply adding these extensions to your keywords.
Use country-specific top-level domains (TLDs) to target specific countries. These are not just custom domain extensions, but they’re made to point towards particular nations. For instance, you want to target Australian traffic.
You can either create separate ad campaigns for Australia or use the .com.au extension in your primary campaign targeting other countries, so when people visit your site from .com.au, it goes directly to the ‘Australia’ landing page of your website, whereas someone calling from com.au would land on the home page of your site which has content related to Australia only like government policies, etc., this will make visitors stick with your website longer and increase chances of conversion since most people do convert when they find the content they were looking for.
Use Google Translate To Maintain Language Consistency
Different countries have different languages, and if you run an international Google Ads campaign, you should maintain language consistency across all of them because it will make your message clear to everyone. So, apart from using different domain extensions, use Google Translate (or similar apps like DeepL, etc.) and localize your ads and landing pages where people can find their preferred language, which helps improve conversions dramatically.
Google automatically detects and translates ads in different languages when they appear on international Google Ads campaigns. Still, you should make it a point to keep an eye on them and check for language consistency because sometimes auto-translation results in mistranslation, which may affect the performance of your ad campaign.
Use “Observation” Mode In Search Campaigns
To manage multiple campaigns at once, especially those with separate budgets, it is recommended that you use the ‘observation’ mode in search campaigns so that your budget isn’t spent on countries that are not doing well for your ads. This setting is handy for the last moment changes that you need to do on your international campaigns, such as using a new keyword or switching between different languages.
For instance, if you’re running two campaigns with separate budgets, both campaigns are set to run in the observation mode. It will allow Google Ads to show your ad only when one of them is performing well (in terms of conversions) and the other campaign is not showing any results, even after spending massive amounts. So stop creating new campaigns for all-time low converting countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. If they don’t convert even after spending X amount, then why waste more money on them?
Create a new campaign for this country and put it into ‘observation’ mode instead so that you can give extra time to those who are still responding well before closing down the entire campaign just because you lost some money.
Summing Up!
To succeed in the global marketplace, you need a solid international PPC ads campaign. These ads are a difficult thing to do, even for the most seasoned digital marketers. You must follow these seven tips and tricks when running an international campaign to avoid wasting money on campaigns that aren’t performing well or don’t make any sense at all.
If you need help with your international ad campaign, contact me. I am a Google Ads Specialist and know what it takes to provide exceptional ROI from your marketing dollars spent online!
What do you think? Do any of these tips sound familiar? Let me know! With my expertise, we can quickly identify what is working (or not) for your company’s advertising strategy so that it drives more revenue without wasting time or resources on ineffective tactics.