Translating Paid Search to the Multilingual Internet
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 26, 2006 | Share This
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In August, David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere showed that foreign language blogs outnumber english blogs approximately 3:2. Vnunet.com reports that next year China will have the largest Internet audience, while Multilingual Search Blog reports that Google’s turnover outside the US increased by 78% over the past year (compared to their US growth of 65%). As the Internet market abroad matures, home-grown companies are creating tough competition for the American imports. Over the past year, Baidu increased its
Chinese dominance from 38% to 50%, while in Germany, over half of the market is run by local betas. Web 2.0 startups are all over the map– just as Myspace leads in the US, Bebo reigns in the UK, Webwag in France, Orkut in Brazil, Cyworld in Korea, MIXI in Japan, Dada in Italy, and eGrupos in Spain.
For American search marketers, the maturation of international markets allows for more sophisiticated targeting to more complex demographics. But, because each country has to be selected per browser and per language, it also creates huge potential for confusion. What happens, for example, when your campaign is targeting a spanish-speaking audience in an Italian browser? Gordon Hartin,a media manager for Reprise Media, explains one such experience,
“At my previous company, I worked on a campaign that was running in Spain and Italy, in Spanish and Italian, respectively. The client, however, decided that they wanted to reach a Spanish-speaking Italian audience, so we added the country Italy and the Italian browser to our Spanish campaign. After a week, we noticed that our Italian campaign had doubled in cost. It didn’t take us long to realize that the higher bid prices in our Spanish campaign were competiting with our Italian campaign, causing the price hike. Words like ‘cambio’ in spanish were in bidding against words like “cambiar’ in Italian. Cognates and other language similarities were screwing up in broad match and causing us to become our own competition.
To remedy the situation, we continued showing ads in Italy for the Spanish campaign, but designated different browser settings for Spanish and Italian. Separating the browser language limited our audience, but gave us back control of our budget. At the end of the day, avoiding self-competition was more important than maximizing our visibility.”
Gordon’s example is one of many scenarios that can arise due to confusion between running multiple languages across multiple browsers. But, because of the maturation of the intenrational search market, its important for American companies to maintain a competitive online presence. To avoid wire-crossing in mulilingual campaigns, SEMs can keep a few best practices in mind:
- Know Your Market. This sounds obvious, but, it’s really important to know exactly what group you’re after in order to determine the scope of your campaign. Are you targeting an audience that is country specific or global? Is your audience multilingual? Can you run a campaign the English? If so, does it translate to other countries? Which brings us to…
- Know Your Language. If you’re running multiple country and langage-specific campaigns, ads have to be coordinated with landing pages for each of the different languages. French to French, Japanese to Japanese, and so on.
- Start Small Before Going Global. Test your campaign on a country-specific, language-specific, browser-specific level. Then, if applicable, open it up to all browsers, then all languages, and finally, to all countries. The only time you should start on a global level is for select international campaigns that are running in English.
- Be Aware of Bidding. It’s imperative for marketers to recognize how multiple campaigns can bid against each other to inflate prices. Cognates and similar language structures, especially between the romance languages, will compete with each other in broad match. One way to around this is to run multilingual campaigns with exact matching.
- Don’t Try to Translate Out of a Dictionary. Have a fluent, preferably native, speaker help with every foreign language campaign. A dictionary can’t pick out the proper abbreviations of words (Sprecken zie deuche? Try fitting “RECHTSSCHUTZVERSICHERUNGSGESELLSCHAFTEN” into an ad), colloquialisms, false cognates, or offensive slang.
Topics: Search: How-To |