Using Adwords with foreign languages

4 replies
  • PPC/SEM
  • |
Hi Warriors,

I hope someone can help. I am going for a job interview tomorrow and they want me to come up with some ideas on how to promote their new product online - but in Italy!

Naturally one of my suggestions would be a well targeted adwords campaign. However I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys could answer.

1. How would you translate your ad text? The adwords translator toolkit or using a translator of a freelance website?

2.I'll set the campaign to only show in Italy and for my target language to be italian, but what do I do about keywords. Do I enter them in English or Italian? If I use italian and the keyword planner comes up with some good keyword ideas am I going to have to keep flicking between a translator tool to find out what they mean in English?

Thanks!
#adwords #foreign #languages
  • Profile picture of the author reln
    Hi Chrisv24,

    I was a adwords account manager for a company with a very large budget and we ran multiple campaigns in 10 different countries including campaigns in Arabic.

    We had a sales team with reps from each country. If this company is promoting campaigns in Italy, do they have an Italian sales personnel? If so get the sales rep to translate ads for you. If not then you need to go to a freelancer.

    Before you go to a freelancer you will need to have a bout 5-10 ads in English that you want them to translate. Also, you will need to make sure that when they translate your ads the Italian ad doesnt exceed the adwords character limit. This often happens when ads get translated. Therefore what I suggest you do is create an excel spreadsheet with the LEN function to count the number of characters in the cell to make sure they dont go over. You could read how to use this function here: Use the LEN function to get a cell's character count - Office Blogs

    As for keywords, you could use both english and italian keywords. Create separate ad groups for each language. You also might want to run separate campaigns for each language depending on the amount of keywords. So it would look something like this:
    Campaign Name
    Italy_IT
    Italy_EN

    Now for the translator option, there are really good chrome and firefox extensions that we used to translate the keywords (especially the search terms) on the page itself. You double click on the word or right click to translate. For chrome you could use ImTranslator or Instant Translate. Just do a search for translator plugins / extensions for chrome or firefox.

    Hope I helped.
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    • Profile picture of the author chrisv24
      Originally Posted by reln View Post

      Hi Chrisv24,

      I was a adwords account manager for a company with a very large budget and we ran multiple campaigns in 10 different countries including campaigns in Arabic.

      We had a sales team with reps from each country. If this company is promoting campaigns in Italy, do they have an Italian sales personnel? If so get the sales rep to translate ads for you. If not then you need to go to a freelancer.

      Before you go to a freelancer you will need to have a bout 5-10 ads in English that you want them to translate. Also, you will need to make sure that when they translate your ads the Italian ad doesnt exceed the adwords character limit. This often happens when ads get translated. Therefore what I suggest you do is create an excel spreadsheet with the LEN function to count the number of characters in the cell to make sure they dont go over. You could read how to use this function here: Use the LEN function to get a cell's character count - Office Blogs

      As for keywords, you could use both english and italian keywords. Create separate ad groups for each language. You also might want to run separate campaigns for each language depending on the amount of keywords. So it would look something like this:
      Campaign Name
      Italy_IT
      Italy_EN

      Now for the translator option, there are really good chrome and firefox extensions that we used to translate the keywords (especially the search terms) on the page itself. You double click on the word or right click to translate. For chrome you could use ImTranslator or Instant Translate. Just do a search for translator plugins / extensions for chrome or firefox.

      Hope I helped.
      That's perfect! Thank you very much
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  • Directly translating from one language to another does not necessarily work. First, I would not use software to do so. Get a native speaker of the target language. That person should know the nuances of the language and preferably of the country. An example in English is the UK lift vs US elevator as well as spelling differences.

    The translator will also have to be educated on PPC. They have to know for example that you have character limits on titles and description lines. Just having someone translate, even your best English ads, doesn't mean they will be good and work in Italian or that the words will fit in the alloted space. Remember that English is usually more concise and takes less characters.

    The keywords of course should be in the target language. That's where your human translator can help too but he needs to understand PPC concepts as well. Best of course is a PPC manager who speaks the target language.
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  • Profile picture of the author karenfisher252
    Really cool. Great piece of advice.
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