Increase Your Pay Per Click Sessions Through Language Localisation

Last Updated On: September 10, 2019 by The Migration Translators

Pay Per Click (PPC) translation is one-way companies test out new market opportunities overseas. SEO is another strategy used, but it can amount to a lot of money being spent. PPC can also be a successful strategy, enabling the business to rise in the search engine rankings relatively quickly.

In order to be successful globally, the right keywords are required so you need to through the process of international keyword research. Some brands just translate the keywords used in the source language directly into the targeted language. This could prove to be dangerous as not all words will translate directly from one language to another and still come out with the same meaning. One example is when someone keys in the search term cheap flights. This is done maybe a million times per month.

If cheap flights are translated directly into Italian, it is voli economic. However, this isn’t the term used by Italians. They use voli low cost. So an airline wanting to attract the Italian market could lose millions of potential customers if they use voli economic. Sometimes, companies just ask bilingual staff to do their web pages, but in the end, only an experienced translation company will know how to translate keywords correctly.

PPC and Copywriting and Translating

As soon as you have decided on the best keywords for your overseas marketing campaign you will need to go on to writing some ad copy. This is seen by the user when inputting key terms into a search engine. It’s of the utmost importance to get the ad copy correct and the key messages too. This will increase the click-through numbers and raise the chance of being successful in your paid search campaigning efforts. This isn’t necessarily that easy, as all search engines limit the number of characters they allow for their ad copy. For example, on the platform for Google Adwords 3 lines of text are permitted with an URL displayed with each ad.

As an example, take Google’s Adwords. For each ad, 3 text lines and a web site reference are permitted.

The 1st text line is shown in a slightly bigger font which allows for 25 characters of text for languages which are single-width like English and other languages that are Latin-based. The 2nd and 3rd lines of text in the PPC ad and URL text allow 35 characters in total. With what’s called double width languages, which have characters that are double width, such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, the character limits are about 50% of single width languages. That’s 12 characters for the 1st line of text with 17 allowed for the following 2 lines and the URL.

Because there are character limits, it’s not always that easy to get your message noticed accurately and consistently in all your targeted languages for the paid search campaigning. A good translation company should be able to find the right keywords in the targeted languages, which ensures the PPC campaign gets the most out of the money spent with the character limitations.

PPC Landing Page, Translation and Copywriting

PPC ads aren’t able to exist on their own. Each ad needs a landing page that’s relevant and has on it details of what you have on offer and does a good job of persuading your targeted customers to do what you want and that’s to purchase your product. What is key to the success of a paid search campaign is providing highly relevant, high quality content with a call to action that’s clear. However, when marketing to a customer who doesn’t speak your company’s language you can’t just conduct a word for word translation. You will need to assign the translation task to a trusted and experienced translation company that knows how to translate your product naturally and correctly.

PPC ads and Optimising the Landing Page

Often, one ad for a number of keywords isn’t sufficient for guaranteeing success. On occasions, it’s necessary to have a separate landing page and ad for each keyword or group of keywords. There is one other way of lowering costs in the PPC campaign and that’s by increasing quality scores.

Improving a Quality Score

Google uses a quality score which is designed to rate the quality overall of the ad and landing page and compares it with competitors for the search terms provided. Google does this so users are given most times the best-paid search ad when they input a query. This, in turn, gives more money to Google. For an ad that is seen at the top of the listings that are a paid search, it’s not necessarily the highest bid for the key term that has been selected. Typically, the company will have optimised its ad and landing page so as to bring up its quality score and bring down costs too. To do all this in a foreign language the translator needs an in-depth knowledge of the language.