Beyond translation: the power of localisation for Google Ad campaigns

Beyond translation: make it local

When you are setting your sights on a new market, assume your potential customers there behave and communicate differently than you might expect. This hypothesis is not an end in itself, it is the starting point. From there, you can begin to figure out what these differences are and how they can be used to your advantage. Bear in mind that these differences are not just based in language and behavior, they also come from the local environment and its markets. If you are not vigilant, you may run into surprises. An example of something you might encounter occurred during a recent mandate here at the agency. We were running a campaign that had the word “orange,” among its main keywords. The translation is straightforward, so no problem there. It is used the same way in English as in French. When we designed the French language campaign, however, we had to factor in the leading phone operating company Orange Telecom. This meant we had to rethink our keyword strategy to work around Orange’s imposing presence in the ad space. In practice, there are dozens of small tweaks like this which need to be made for every localised campaign. A campaign may succeed in translated form in any language, but going the extra distance to restructure the campaign’s foundation for each language individually, tailoring each version to the local markets and culture it will be entering is a strategy that will undoubtedly pay off in the long run.

A/B testing the value of localisation

We recently had a client that was reluctant to put the necessary resources to localise a campaign that we were launching in over ten different languages. The campaign was created in English and then translated into the target languages. Overall, it did very well, but we felt that several of the largest target markets were underperforming. After running a series of basic checks which did not yield any anomalies, we decided to run some more ambitious and creative tests in order to obtain concrete data on the effect of localisation. We created three additional campaigns, each with a different strategy, as follows:

1. In the first campaign, we replaced the content with new ads written from scratch by native speakers. This gave the CTR a slight boost, but did not radically improve the campaign’s overall performance.
2. In the second campaign, we added a number of culturally-specific ad groups related to our client’s industry. While these custom-made groups did perform well, the effect did not radiate through the rest of the campaign and therefore did not significantly alter the overall performance.
3. We completely restructured the third campaign, choosing new keywords and redesigning the landing pages to reflect local cultural realities in the target markets and their languages. While we expected better results, the numbers were astounding. In two months, we saw a +140% increase in impressions, +408% ROAS, and a conversion value increase of +347%.