How to scale your Google Ads marketing internationally

We have done Google Ads advertising in several different languages and found that many different factors influence the success of advertising in different markets. On the other hand, different countries and markets also allow for a great deal. In the United States, for example, there are already many Google Ads advertising settings and ad formats that, here in Finland, we will certainly have to wait for a long time to come.

Let me now introduce the top 5 factors to consider when doing Google Ads advertising for B2B companies in different countries.

1. Budget

If you are doing Google Ads advertising in different countries, you may need to increase your media budget, especially if you are targeting a region of the United States or other major market players, for example. There are different budget counters for budget evaluation. On the other hand, you can also start off by testing advertising on a small budget in two different countries, and then scale the advertising based on the results to a wider area. When assessing your budget, you should also consider the price level of the keywords and clicks. In the United States, in our experience, the ad click prices are probably much higher than in Finland, but on the other hand, this is also entirely sectoral and depends on, for example, keyword search volumes.

2. Audiences

Of course, large markets also mean large audiences. For example, in the United States it is possible to utilise audiences at a completely different level than in smaller countries. In Finland, the number of website visitors to which many B2B companies can e.g. remarket is so small that remarketing can only take advantage of everyone who has visited the site, and not necessarily filter out more accurate and short-term audiences. If your business is completely new, it is also worth remembering that it takes time to gather audiences for remarketing.

3. Account structure and settings

If you want to do Google Ads advertising in different languages in multiple countries, it may be wisest to make an Ads account for each country so that the account structure does not become too confusing and complicated. You might as well run individual campaigns or tests in different countries from the same Google Ads account. In this case, you should carefully name campaigns from different countries so that you can filter the campaigns in a particular country only if necessary.

In the United States, Google Ads advertising also uses far more different settings and features than in Finland. For example, calls made via Google Ads ads can track the duration of calls and use. For instance, the august 2019 gallery ads, where search ads can be used to display image carousel of the company’s products.

4. Restrictions on advertising

Google Ads advertising must always be in line with Google’s practices. However, even if your company’s product or service is in no way illegal, the provisions on its marketing may also vary from country to country. e.g. the Finnish word “image” is a medicine in the United States, so if your product’s brand name would be “Image”, the ads would very likely be rejected.

For example, there are a lot of different regulations associated with the financial sector and the pharmaceutical industry, e.g. advertising cryptocurrencies is currently only allowed on Google services in the United States and Japan. You can read more on Google’s support page.

5. Website and ad language

If your site has already been translated into English, I recommend that you make Google Ads ads in English to different countries, at least in Europe. If your ad and landing page are made in different languages, it immediately affects the advertising quality points. The target groups of your product or service also have an intrinsic effect on the language selection. For example, if you advertise 3D modelling of industrial plants, your target audience is very likely to speak English well.

If the destination country that is important to you is located outside of Europe, I recommend betting on a high-quality translation of the site, after which the ads can also be done in that language. It is worth remembering, however, that e.g. Russia and China use their own search engines instead of Google. Therefore, as a rule, in these countries Google Ads advertising is not successful.

With advertising in a foreign language, the language of the advertisements used must also be taken into account. For example, in English the terms can differ between those from the United States and those from the United Kingdom. It is also worth noting the different stylistic considerations. In the United States and other English-speaking countries, the individial words in advertisements are usually capitalized.

Summary – Google Ads on the international market

A variety of factors contribute to the success of Google Ads advertising across markets. It is important to plan the budget that you want to use, as well as the structure of your ad account, and the spelling and grammar of your ads and website should be considered carefully. On the other hand, in the United States, for example, you can use many features of Google Ads advertising that are not yet in use in Finland. You will probably be able to use audiences much more diversely as well.