5 Tips on How to Run a Successful International AdWords Campaign

The size of your businesses service and/or delivery reach can play a huge role in determining how your marketing campaigns should be planned and implemented, and this is no difference when it comes to Google’s PPC (Pay-Per-Click) platform, AdWords.

When planning an internationally targeted AdWords campaign (or any online marketing campaign for that matter) vs. a more locally targeted campaign, there are certain questions you need to ask yourself in order to ensure that you’ve set yourself up for success. For example, will your audience respond to the same ad messaging around the world? Are there certain language barriers you need to overcome? Are your offers the same worldwide? No matter what the answer to these questions are, AdWords has a diverse set of targetting options you can take advantage of to ensure your campaign is set up in the best way possible for your audience.

Below are some tips to help you correctly plan & structure your AdWords campaign for an international audience:

1) Create separate campaigns for each country.

When running an international AdWords campaign, it’s extremely likely that particular countries will perform better than others. Because of this, it’s important to ensure that you have specific budgets set for each country so that you can put focus on the areas that convert best. To do this, you’ll need to create separate campaigns for each country within your AdWords account.

2) Make use of language targeting.

Some countries you target will most likely have a variety of different languages being used by its occupants, and Google users will have their language preference set in place when they’re using the search engine. This allows AdWords to give you the option of language targetting, meaning you can target users based on the language they speak. It’s extremely important to ensure you’ve got the correct languages targetted with your campaign to avoid unnecessarily low CTRs that are caused by ads being shown to people who cannot even read the language in which the ads have been created in. This setting is available at the campaign level, giving us another reason to create a campaign for each country.

(The image above shows the language targetting option within the “Settings” tab)

3) Ensure your ad text is correctly targeted to each country.

To ensure that your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is as high as possible, it’s important to create highly targetted ad text for each country that you’re targetting with your campaign. For example if you’re selling a product, avoid creating adverts that simply state “delivery worldwide”, and create ads that target each country  specifically with this message (e.g. “Delivery Australia Wide”, “Delivery US Wide” etc.). You also need to make sure that you’re not using any slang, jargon or abbreviations within your ads that may be unknown or uncommon in countries other than your own. If your audience does not relate to, or even worse doesn’t understand your ad message, your performance will be impacted.

4) Create country-specific landing pages.

The key to connecting with your audience is ensuring that your content (both in ad text and site content) is as relevant as possible to the user and the product/service they’re looking for. Because of this, creating country-specific landing page can result in huge improvements for your AdWords campaign. Just like in point 3 where I’ve mentioned stating the each country within the content, landing page content should ideally be specific to the country in which each user is searching from.

5) Put extra time into keyword research.

Compared to a more local campaign, international AdWords campaigns will usually require extra time spent in keyword research in order to get the best results. People from particular countries may use completely different terminology compared to others when making a search, so your keyword focus may be entirely different for each country. You can use tools such as the ‘Google Keyword Tool’ to look at keyword search volumes for each country to make this task much easier.

Hopefully this article has given you some handy information to use for your international AdWords campaign! What other strategies do you use when putting together an international campaign? Leave a comment!