This is a guest post by Gangandeep Singh, a freelance writer.
Most business owners use PPC campaigns to attract customers from all over the world, but managing an international campaign properly can be a challenge due to differences in language, culture and behavior. Local advertisers have advantages in terms of knowing the culture and communicating properly. Implementing the proper strategy can help turn your international PPC campaign into a profitable one. Here are some tips:
- Writing Ads – Running the same ad in all countries may not be communicating your benefits properly. Write your ad copy in the native language for each country where you are going to promote your product.
- Selecting Keywords – Select your keywords according to the native language. People from different countries usually search for the same type of information but use different keywords due to phonetic and semantic differences. For example, people from one country may prefer to search using “promotional items” instead of “promotional products” for the same information. Keywords in one language may not convert well in another. Do some native language keyword research before starting your campaign.
- Check Spelling – Always try to write your ad copy in local spelling. For example, “airplane” may become “aeroplane”, “color” becomes “colour”, etc. Ads which do not use the local spelling will not get as many conversions.
- Analyze Local Competitors – Take a look at the ad copies and landing pages of your local competitors. Evaluate how your product is being advertised in local media. What features of the product are most popular? What are your competitors offering? What do your competitors have in common? Use this information to create a customized ppc campaign strategy for each specific location.
- Use Geo-Targeting – Geo-targeting allows you to set in which parts of the world an ad will show. Unfortunately, Google allows geo-targeting at the campaign level only. Create separate campaigns for each location and then target them to their respective locations. Your ads will only appear when a user of the target location searches for a keyword in your ad group. You can run up to 25 campaigns from one account at the same time.
- Relevant Landing Pages – For every targeted language & country, have a separate landing page. Customers will be confused by landing pages that are not in their native language.
- Country-Specific Domains – While not very important, it may be a good idea to have a country-specific domain for each country in which you’re advertising. For example, if you’re advertising in Japan, you’d have a .ja domain name instead of .com for the US.
- Keep on Testing – Calculate the conversion rate of each campaign/location separately to get more accurate information. You’ll be able to identify which locations are not performing as well, so you can focus your efforts to improve them.
(photo by Jayel Aheram @ Flickr CC)
Gagandeep Singh is a freelance writer who loves to write about landing page optimization, affiliate marketing, PPC, Web 2.0 and conversion rate optimization.