Bilingual Digital Marketing Inbound Marketing ppc PPC Campaigns

Breaking Into Bilingual PPC

When you run a paid search campaign, you can reach a wide variety of shoppers, but are you speaking their language? Chances are, English might not be the predominant language in your backyard, so why put all of your money into only English campaigns?

Tapping into the bilingual market could greatly benefit your business by allowing you to reach a more diverse group of shoppers in your market, resulting in more traffic coming to your website and store.

Before jumping into creating campaigns for different languages, though, there are a few things to check:

  1. Do you have a translatable landing page?

    Make sure that you can send users to a landing page in the same language as your ads. It doesn’t make sense to put money into paid advertising in a different language when you send shoppers to a page they can’t understand.

  1. Do you have staff on hand who can speak the language you would like to target?

    This is especially pertinent for businesses that are trying to drive shoppers to their businesses or phone calls from shoppers. You need to make sure that you or somebody at your business can communicate with your shoppers coming from the bilingual campaign.

  1. Does your search term report data support a need for a multilingual campaign?

    According to Google, “Asearch termis the exact word or set of words a customer enters when searching on Google.com or one of our Search Network sites.” This information is integral for finding out the potential success of a campaign in a different language.

Do you see keywords in a language other than English? If so, then there are people searching in that language in your market.

  1. Do multilingual keywords drive any traffic?

    To see if multilingual keywords generate traffic, you can pull a search volume report under the Keyword Planner tab in AdWords. This allows you to input your translated keywords into the report to see the forecasted search volume that you could get from them.

  1. Does Google Trends show market growth for a language in your targeted area?

    Google Trends lets you see how topics or keywords of different languages perform over time in certain areas. This tool will help you see if alternative languages are a good investment or if this is trending up or down over time.

  1. Does Google Analytics show multilingual traffic?

    You can see the language that a person’s browser is set to in Google Analytics. If you see a substantial amount of traffic coming from browsers set to languages other than English, then this might be another sign that a multilingual campaign is a good fit for your business. Here’s a link to deciphering the different language codes that you may encounter: www.metamodpro.com/browser-language-codes.

If you find that adding a multilingual campaign is a good option for your business, then it’s time to translate. Not every word translates to a different language, though, and some words are much longer or shorter in different languages. Work with Google’s support team or a trusted and reliable translator to make this process as streamlined as possible.

Once you have your ads and keywords translated, make sure that you have targeting set up. For language targeting, Google uses a user’s Google interface language setting to match the user with the targeted campaign. According to PPC Hero, “If your campaign only targets ‘Spanish’ for the campaign settings, then the ads will only serve to users who have designated ‘Spanish’ in their Google account. For example, a user is searching on Google.com and has their personal account settings set to Spanish, then they will see ads from Spanish-targeted campaigns. Similarly, if someone is searching on Google.fr the language default is French, etc.”

So if you find that your business can benefit from a multilingual campaign, then let us help you say hello, hola, guten tag, or bonjour to your new shoppers.

 

Stream’s Kick-Start Step

Check your Search Terms report in your Keywords tab. Do you see any different languages? If you do, then that might be a sign that your business could benefit from targeting different languages.

 

For more info about how PPC can help your business, check out Stream Companies’ eBook PPC & SEO: Understanding How They Work Together to Maximize Results.
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—Morgan Schuman is a Paid Search Strategist at Stream Companies, a full-service Philadelphia-area advertising agency.