Overview
PPC (pay per click) is one of the most important tools in a digital marketers toolbox, with marketers having spent over 144 billion USD on ad campaigns in 2021 alone. PPC traffic also converts 50% better than organic, and 75% of consumers say that paid ads make it easier for them to find what they need.
However, as an industry, we have a problem. Most people see PPC ad copy as something you just need to translate, without realizing that there’s so much more to things that first meets the eye.
PPC takes many forms, and the likes of Facebook and Twitter ads fall under the PPC umbrella, but it’s most famously associated with search engines, and making sure your ads show at the top of search results. And as we’ve already mentioned before, there are plenty of search engines out there, especially when you’re looking globally, but to make sure we’re not throwing you in at the deep end, we’re going be looking at Google Ads in this e-book.
So, let’s take a dive into the world of PPC and discover Google’s search ads are much more than just a bit of ad localization.
What’s the Difference Between SEO & PPC?
You’re right in thinking that SEO and PPC are similar concepts, but there’s a fundamental difference. With PPC, you’re paying to be at the top of search results. Whereas, with SEO, you’re of course investing in your SEO team and strategy, but you’re not actually paying a search engine to be shown at the top of the SERP (search engine results page). This is why traffic from PPC ads is classed as paid, and SEO is known as organic.
Here you can see the difference between the two, with PPC results appearing up the top with Ad written next to the URL.
They also take up a lot more room! These are called Search Ads, and are what we’re going to be focusing on in this ebook.
Whereas here, you can see organic results, which take up a lot less room and don’t have ad next to them.
Types of Google Ads
Those of you who are familiar with Google have probably seen a number of different types of ads.
First of all, let’s look at display ads. These are creative ads which show up on different websites as you’re surfing the net.
If you’ve ever looked at a product online and seen it follow you around the internet for weeks, this is exactly the type of ad we’re looking at.
They’re great for reminding you of a purchase you might have forgot to make, or for showcasing different products/services in a more creative way.
Then there’s what are called shopping ads. These are perfect for showcasing what products you’re selling, allowing consumers to simply click on the ad and make a purchase.
Having reviews, pricing and sales also helps to attract the buyer’s attention.
And next, we have video ads. These are the type of videos that pop up in the middle of Youtube videos, and allow companies to tell a story that wouldn’t be possible in a short text or display ad.
How Do Google Ads Actually Work?
When it comes to search ads, there’s a lot more to it than simply paying to be at the top of the SERP. Google really cares about search experience, so they want to make sure that ads are actually meeting a searchers search query, and giving them relevant results. This is why CPC (cost-per-click), how much you’re willing to pay for someone to click on your ad, is only one part of the puzzle.
The rest is down to what’s called quality score. Quality score is a metric that’s make up of:
- Your expected CTR (click through rate)
- The relevance of your keywords
- Landing page quality and relevance
- Relevance of your ad text
- Historical account performance
How it works is that an ad auction takes place every time someone makes a search, and Google combines quality score, potential CTR and CPC together to decide which ad to show.
Google Ads Quality Score: User experience + Relevance to keyword + Expected CTR = Quality Score
The great thing is the higher your quality score, the lower your CPC will be and the higher your rankings will be!
Keyword Research
Keyword research is most commonly associated with SEO, but it’s not just an SEO thing. In order to make sure your ads are relevant, you need to be choosing the right keywords. Plus, it’s these keywords which will actually trigger your ads when someone makes a search. This is why it’s so important to use a keyword research tool and research keywords for every single language you’re writing ads in.
Unlike SEO, though, there are a number of different keyword types. These types of keywords determine when an ad will actually show, or not show in the case of negative keywords.
These matches give you more control over who will actually see your ads, and allow you to target a really specific audience.
You can tell which type of keyword match you’re going for by choosing specific symbols at the start of each work, as illustrated below.
Targeting
Another great thing about PPC campaigns is that you can choose who your ads are targeting. You can break targeting down into specific countries or locations, and even choose which languages you’d like to target, e.g. Spanish speakers in the US. The deeper you go, you can also choose to target people based on their demographics and interests, too.
Setting Up Search Ads
Search ads are created and managed in Google Ads. And there’s a specific structure your ads need to take to be successful.
From the theoretical standpoint, they all need to follow the following structure to ensure that your campaigns, ads and landing page are as relevant as possible.
- Campaign 1
- Ad Group 1A: Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Ad A, Ad B, Landing Page 1A
- Ad Group 1B: Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Ad A, Ad B, Landing Page 1B
- Campaign 2
- Ad Group 2A: Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Ad A, Ad B, Landing Page 2A
- Ad Group 2B: Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Ad A, Ad B, Landing Page 2B
Account
This is your main, overall company ad account, so there’s nothing you really need to do here.
Campaign
This is where the hard work starts! You need to break your products/services into relevant campaigns. An example would be having a campaign for women’s shoes, and one for men’s shoes, rather than just targeting all types of shoes in a single campaign.
Ad Groups
This is where the hard work starts! You need to break your products/services into relevant campaigns. An example would be having a campaign for women’s shoes, and one for men’s shoes, rather than just targeting all types of shoes in a single campaign.
Keywords
Now you need to choose around 10 carefully researched keywords for your ad groups. This is where you need to make sure that they’re all relevant to women’s sport shoes.
Ads
The next step to creating great campaigns is creating ads. You need to remember they need to be relevant to your keywords and have quality score in mind.
Landing Pages
Finally, you need to choose a landing page for each of your ads. Make sure that the landing page is relevant to the product or service you are selling. Using our women’s shoes example, your women’s sports shoes ad needs to take you to a sneaker page, not a sandals landing page.
Setting Up Your Campaigns in Google Ads
Now that you know about the structure you need to be following your ads, it’s time to set them up in Google Ads.
When you log into your Google Ads account, you’ll see a page that looks a little bit like this. Here you can see an overview of your campaigns and some important metrics like CPC, Impressions, and Interactions which will help you understand how well your ads are performing.
*Please note, Google Ads does update from time to time so this walkthrough is correct as of December 2022.
Then, to create a new campaign you have to click on the campaign button, and new campaign.
Then you need to click on the type of campaign you want to go out with, which for the purpose of this eBook, is search.
Then it’s time to include your websites URL and name your campaign.
Then you need to set up your bidding, but we’re not going to cover that for now as we’ll be here forever!
And moving onto the interesting bit, we can choose our targeting. We get to choose a physical location and languages, too.
Next, we’ll enter our carefully researched keywords and choose their match types, too.
Then it’s on to actually creating your ads. First of all, you’ll need to add the final URL. It doesn’t matter if the URL is really long, because you can shorten it using the URL path. We’d recommend adding keywords here to make it relevant to your searchers, but just be careful you can only have 15 characters of text per path.
Then, you can create your headlines. These need to be a maximum of 30 characters, and include keywords and enticing text to make sure people decide to click on them.
Then, you need to create your descriptions. You have 90 characters per description, and you need to make sure that they’re nice and catchy (we’ll cover copywriting tips later!).
Next you can go in and set up your extensions, which are what makes the ads appear longer and more expanded than organic SERP results.
You can also set up what are called site-link extensions so that you can you can link your ads to more pages on your website.
And callout extensions, too.
So once you’re done, you should have an ad that looks a bit like this!
- Headlines
- Display URL
- Ad Description
- Snippets
- Sitelinks
- Sitelink Description
- Locations
Campaign Maintenance
Once you’ve set up your ads, unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as clicking start and leaving your ads to run. What you need to do is make sure that you’re constantly testing and improving your ads, otherwise you risk throwing money away on something that’s not working.
- Make sure that you’re logging into Google Ads and checking in on your ads at least every 2 weeks
- Always A/B test different ad options
- Adjust copy and budgets that aren’t working ASAP
Keywords
Now that we’ve looked at the theory behind the keywords, it’s important to make sure you’re following best practices when you’re researching your keywords for PPC.
Set Your Campaign Goals
When you’re setting your campaign goals, it’s you need to think about what action you want people to take when they click on your ads. Do you want people to sign up for demo? Or buy a product? Actions are unique to every company and campaign, so it’s important that you take time to think that makes the most sense for you.
You also need to consider that your goals will probably have to vary between markets. This is because your products/services may be less well known in certain markets, so you’ll need to be realistic about what you can achieve. Also, some markets have much smaller populations, so you can’t have the same KPIs for Belgium, for example, as you would for the USA.
Think About Search Intent
Search intent is really important for PPC, just as it is for SEO.
You need to think about why people are making that search in the first place, and make sure your ads meet that search intent. Depending on if you’re targeting people who have never heard of your brand before, you can start with top of the funnel keywords, but if you want people to actually make a purchase, you need to make sure you’re using specific bottom of the funnel keywords.
Use a Tool to Research Your Keywords
Just like you do with SEO, you need to check what people are actually searching for, and not base your keyword choices on what you think people are searching for. And this needs to do be done for every single language, using a tool so that you have data to back up your choices.
Just remember, though, that when you’re choosing a keyword research tool, not all tools have very good results for “rarer” languages like Turkish or Ukrainian, for example, so make sure you choose a tool that gives you good results in all of your markets.
Check Metrics Like CPC
When you’re researching your keywords in a tool, it’s important that you’re not just looking at search volumes. With PPC, you need to be looking at competition and cost per click, because that could determine if you can actually afford to target that keyword or not. If you are on a limited budget, this is why sometimes it’s better to go for more specific long-tail keywords with a lower CPC than really general keywords that cost a lot more and are targeting too broad of a searcher.
Looking at this in practice you can see here there are three similar keywords, but the CPC ranges from just under 8 dollars to nearly 22 dollars which is a massive difference. And you can see that the competition varies too. This is why you need to go in with your budget in mind and decide if you can afford more expensive keywords, and if they’ll be worth all that money.
And from an international point of view you can see three keywords meaning very similar things: translations, translation agency and translation services. You can see that the CPC is much lower than the US because the Czech Republic is much smaller, and that some of the search volumes are much smaller too. Don’t be put off though, because 320 and 110 isn’t a bad search volume for such a small market. So again, look at your budgets, look at the competition, and see which keywords make the most sense for you.
Troubleshooting
Based on experience, there are a couple of things that could potentially throw you off guard when you’re researching your keywords. If you’re looking for keywords related to a specific ad group, there might be times when the keywords don’t exist or aren’t very relevant for the target market. If this happens, adapt the ad group or change it so that it works in the target market.
Also, don’t forget to research your negative keywords for all of your markets, too!
Setting Up Your Search Ads
We wrote about the structure of search ads earlier in our e-book, but how does that work in practice? Let’s take a walk through adapting your ads multilingually.
Account
When it comes to your account, luckily it isn’t something you need to touch, as all of your ads, regardless of language, should be handled to from the same Google Ads account. Otherwise it’ll get very complicated managing 10 different accounts for 10 different markets!
Campaigns
This is where you need to start adapting. So here you can see we have broken down our service offering into two campaigns – translation & interpreting. What we’ve done is adapted that into Czech, also meaning translation and interpreting.
If you have different products or services available in different markets, it is important that you adapt your campaigns so that it’s relevance to your target audience. So if interpreting wasn’t a service we did in the Czech Republic, we could change interpreting to DTP.
- Translations, Interpreting
- Překlady, Tlumočení
Ad Groups
Next, you need to break down your campaigns into ad groups, making sure that each ad group is relevant to the campaign. So what you can see here is that we’ve got 2 ad groups for technical translations and website translations as part of the translation campaign, and conference and court interpreting under the interpreting campaign. For the Czech version, we’ve got exactly the same, apart from conference interpreting. This is because simultaneous interpreting has better search volumes and is more relevant to a Czech audience, so we’ve swapped out conference interpreting for simultaneous interpreting.
- Translations: Technical Translations, Website Translations
- Interpreting: Conference Interpreting, Court Interpreting
- Překlady: Technické překlady, Překlad webu
- Tlumočení: Simultánní tlumočení, Soudní tlumočení
Keywords
Next, you need to look at keywords for each ad group. So, what we’ve done here is find a number of keywords using the best practices that we’ve described above, making sure that the keywords are relevant to each ad group.
You can see that the Czech keywords aren’t a carbon copy of the English, as they represent what people are searching for locally. Plus, for the ad group simultaneous interpreting Czech keywords related to simultaneous translations have been provided, not conference interpreting ones as tney don’t match the ad group. Adapting is really important because federal courts, for example, wouldn’t be relevant in the UK.
- Technical Translations: Technical Translations, German technical translations, Spanish technical translations
- Website Translations: Web translation agency, Translation for websites, Professional website translations
- Conference Interpreting: Conference interpreting services, Conference interpreting equipment, Conference interpreting agencies
- Court Interpreting: Court interpreting, Federal court interpreting, Court interpreter
- Technické překlady: technické překlady ceník, technické překlady z angličtiny, technické překlady angličtina
- Překlad webu: překlad webové stránky, překlad webových stránek do češtiny
- Simultánní tlumočení: simultánní tlumočení cena, Simultánní tlumočení angličtiny
- Soudní tlumočení: Komora soudních tlumočníků, soudní tlumočník ukrajinština
Landing Pages
Once you’ve done your keywords, don’t forget that you need to have relevant landing pages. All of the languages need to match, and you need to make sure that the content isn’t just a translation of your English landing page as you’ll probably have to create landing pages for different international ad groups, like simultaneous interpreting in Czech.
Targeting
Using our English and Czech campaigns as an example, it’s also really important that you get your targeting right. Here you need to make sure that your English/US campaign is targeting English speakers in the US, and your Czech campaign is targeting Czech speakers in the Czech Republic. It’s also better to be specific with your targeting, so make sure you’re not using 1 set of English campaigns to target everywhere that speaks English, and that you’re not using Czech ads to target say Slovakia, as they speak a different language and need different ads.
You can also make sure that you name your campaigns Translations – EN and Translations – CZ so that anyone can go in and see which ads are which, without having to try and work out what překlady means in Czech.
Best Practices for Ad Creation
Most people assume that because PPC ads are so short, it’s just a case of writing some snappy keyword-filled text and you’re good to go. But in reality, search ads need to be highly creative and showcase your brand’s personality as you only have one chance to make a first impression.
This is why it’s better to write your ads from scratch and not translate them so that they are treated like a highly creative text. And as we’ve already mentioned before, you need to make sure you’re thinking about quality score from the get go.
Keywords & Quality Score
One way to help your quality score is to make sure that you’ve researched your keywords properly. This all comes down to relevance so you need to make sure you’ve got relevant keywords for each ad group, they’re grouped by theme, and that you’ve researched keywords properly for each of your markets.
Relevant Ads & Quality Score
Again, you need to make sure that the ads you write are relevant to your keywords and that they link to a relevant landing page. You also need to remember that historical performance matters, but that shouldn’t put you off as it’s never too late to start managing your ads in the perfect way!
Writing Quality Ads
When it comes to actually writing quality ads, here are a few steps you can take to ensure that they really work:
- Think about the user and what they want to achieve
- Include numbers in your ads, if possible
- Use emotional triggers like limited time offers
- Make sure that you have keywords in your ads
- Preemptively respond to common objections your brand/services commonly get
- Focus on benefits
Make Sure That You Use Extensions
As you can see, expanded text ads with lots of lovely extensions get a much better click through rate, so make sure that you’re making the most of extensions in all of your different languages, not just English.
Really Great Ads
Here you can see an example of a great PPC ad. You can see that they’re targeting a competitor and focusing on main pain points. They’ve really shown their personality and talked about the benefits of their product.
A Not So Great Example
And here you can see an example of what not to do with a PPC ad. You can see here that they’ve targeted 4 different languages in one ad, which doesn’t really speak to anyone at all. Plus, the targeting is far too broad as they’re targeting people outside Poland who don’t speak any of the languages in the ads.
Campaign Maintenance
When it comes to search ads, it’s not just a case of uploading them and hoping for the best for six months, you need to make sure that you’re keeping an eye on your ads and checking on them at least every 2 weeks. This can be tricky though because:
- How can monolingual teams maintain multilingual PPC ads?
- How can someone A/B test ads if they don’t speak the language?
- Would it be OK to just send changes for translation?
For the last point, sending every single change would be very costly and time consuming as there’s no guarantee they’d work. Plus you’d probably end up paying minimum fees with your translation provider to translate a couple of sentences.
But what you can do, is use a multilingual PPC agency for your international PPC. Not only will it reduce your translation costs as you won’t have to keep sending your ads for translation as they’ll be writing your ads from scratch and managing keyword research, etc. Plus, the money you’re sending on an agency will be offset by the increase of ROI you’re seeing internationally.
Search Ad Checklist
Let’s finish things off with a handy checklist that you can use when you’re managing your PPC ads.
If You’re a Marketing Manager, Here’s What You Should Be Giving Your Localization Manager
- Budgets
- Keywords for your current campaign
- Keywords broken down into match type
- Goals/success metrics
- Campaign structure, including chosen keywords per adgroup, ads per adgroup, etc.
- A list of countries they want to target
If You’re a Localization Manager, Here’s What You Need to Be Handing Back
- Keywords for each specific market
- Keywords broken down into match type
- Recommended CPCs
- Goals/success metrics for each market
- Target campaign structure, including chosen keywords per adgroup, ads per adgroup, etc.
- Targeting suggestions
Final Thoughts
As you can see, PPC is a lot more complex than you probably first thought, especially when it comes to multilingual ads. If you need support, this is where the team at Argos Multilingual can help you.
