I often see companies taking advantage of how easy Google AdWords makes it to advertise worldwide, but at the same time failing to localise their advertisements. Search engine advertising is a fabulous opportunity to be able to say “I want to advertise this product in the UK, Australia and New Zealand” or whatever, without having to deal with the media in all those countries. But don’t then think that a one-size-fits-all advertisement campaign is going to suffice.
For a start, there’s the different terminology used in different countries. But more important is the advertisement copy. One client of ours is market leader in the UK and had already been running a Google AdWords campaign in the USA when they came to us. I enquired as to why they weren’t majoring on their UK market leadership in the ads, and was told that the US distributor didn’t feel it was a selling point. I’m sure that was a reasonable point of view, but why not run different ads in the UK and the USA? The answer was because they’d bundled all of their advertising, worldwide, into a single campaign which had the same ad copy.
When we run separate campaigns in different countries, we often find that the most effective keywords and ads vary extensively between them. As ever, it’s all about measuring the results and seeing what they tell us. But breaking up your advertising on geographical criteria is a very logical first step. It could even work on an ultra-local basis.