Setting Your Ads Target Language
If you don’t speak the native language while visiting a foreign country, you might find it tough to get your message across. Similarly with AdWords, you want to make sure your advertising message shows to your customers in the right language.
This section will go over how to target the language that your customers speak, so you can be sure to reach the right audience. And if your customers speak many languages, I’ll cover how you can create separate campaigns to manage ads and keywords for each of those languages.
With the AdWords language targeting feature, your ads can appear for customers who use Google products and third-party websites in the languages that your campaign targets. This helps ensure that your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you’d like to reach.
See the full list of languages that you can target by viewing the “Languages” section of your campaign settings.
How language targeting works in AdWords
Language targeting allows you to choose the language of the sites that you’d like your ads to appear on. AdWords will show your ads to customers who use Google products (such as Search or Gmail) or visit sites on the Google Display Network (GDN) in that same language. Your ads should be written in the language that you target, because AdWords doesn’t translate ads or keywords.
Example
Let’s say you sell coffee beans online, and you want to target Spanish-speaking customers. You set up an AdWords campaign targeted to the Spanish language, with Spanish ads and keywords. As long as your customers’ Google interface language settings are set to Spanish, your coffee ads can show when your Spanish language customers search for your keywords.
Language targeting also works for ads that run on the Google Display Network, a collection of websites that partner with Google to show AdWords ads.
Example
If your coffee business has an image ad for freshly ground coffee with Spanish ad text, you can target your ads to run only on Spanish language websites.
How AdWords detects languages
Each Google domain has a default language. For example, Google.com defaults to English, Google.fr defaults to French, Google.cn defaults to Chinese, and so on.
The default language can be changed via the Preferences link on the Google homepage. A Spanish-speaker living in the United States, for instance, may want to perform searches on the U.S. domain, Google.com, but could change the interface language setting to Spanish. In that case, he would see ads targeting Spanish instead of English.
Additional ways that AdWords detects languages
While your campaign always targets searches with a matching interface language, your campaign may also target searches or Google Display Network sites that AdWords detectss are written in your target language.
Example
There are five languages that you can language target within AdWords where the alphabet of the search uniquely identifies the language of the search: Greek, Hebrew, portions of Japanese, Korean, and Thai. So if you have the keyword λουλούδια (Greek for flowers) in a campaign that targets the Greek language, your ad will be eligible to appear whenever a customer searches for λουλούδια, even if the customer’s interface language is set to English.
On the Google Display Network, AdWords may look at the language of the pages that someone is viewing or has recently viewed to determine which ads to show. This means that AdWords may detect the language from either pages that the person had viewed in the past, or the page that she is currently viewing.
Example
Maya has viewed several cooking blogs on the Google Display Network that are written in Japanese, and she sees ads from campaigns targeted to Japanese speakers. She may also see Japanese ads even when she reads other blogs on the Display Network that are written in English because of her viewing history.
Targeting ads to Persian
If you target your ads to Persian only, AdWords will show your ads to people that are located outside of Iran (based on the location they’ve detected from their IP address).
If you target your ads to Persian and other languages, and you’ve included Iran in your location targets, AdWords may show your ads to people located in Iran.
Organize campaigns by language
Language targeting settings are set at the campaign level, so if you’re targeting more than one language, AdWords recommend that you create separate campaigns for each one. Creating a separate campaign for each language helps ensure that the ad you’ve written in one language also appears on a site that’s written in the same language. This can be helpful if you’re targeting your ads to multilingual countries, such as Canada or the U.S, and you have ads in multiple languages.
If you target multiple languages in a single campaign, your ads can appear on sites that are in different languages and don’t match the language of your ad.
Remember, you’ll always want to create ads in the language that you target, because AdWords doesn’t translate ads or keywords.
Example
Let’s say that you want to target French and Italian speakers with an ad campaign for your chocolate croissants. You’ll want to create one campaign with French keywords and ads related to chocolate croissants targeted to the French language. Then, create a separate campaign with Italian keywords and ads related to chocolate croissants, and this time, target the campaign to the Italian language. Yum!
Note
To make changes to your ad’s target language, you’ll need to use one of the following campaign types:
- “Search & Display Networks – All Features”
- “Search Network only – Product Listing Ads”
- “Search Network only – Dynamic Search Ads”
- “Search Network only – All Features”
- “Display Network only – Mobile Apps”
- “Display Network only – Remarketing”
- “Display Network only – All Features”
If you use the “Search & Display Networks – Standard” or “Search Network only – Standard” campaign types, your campaign will target all languages, and you won’t be able to modify your language targeting. Learn about AdWords campaign types.
Set up language targeting
Don’t see advanced location options? This feature is accessible only for certain campaign types. You can change your campaign type at any time, but keep in mind that doing so may hide or deactivate some features that affect ad serving.
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the Campaigns tab.
- Click the name of the campaign you wish to edit to open your campaign settings.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Next to Languages, click Edit.
- Select your target language(s). In this example, I’ve selected only English.
- Click Save.