Localised PPC helps with international targeting

Google may be one of the world's largest companies, but it’s getting much more local in its approach to the market of late.

Whilst it may be some time before we can all do our weekly shopping at Google Groceries, PPC account managers can benefit from the company’s increasingly local focus right away.

Last week the technology firm announced that nine more nations would be getting the advantage of city-level targeting in AdWords, which means that users in 43 countries can now benefit from this service.

For those who want to combine PPC with geo-targeting in order to broaden their pool of potential customers and expand into areas that they may not currently have the ability to reach via paid search, this is certainly something to think about.

This does mean that you will need to localise PPC in order to appeal to searchers who are based in areas that could well be outside of your native location. It is possible to set up a PPC campaign that actively takes this into account, so even if you do not have a dedicated web presence that is localised for a particular country, having a paid search result which features copy and prices in the relevant language and currency could help you to bridge this gap.

This approach might be particularly useful for companies that ship products overseas and offer global delivery, but lack the resources to set up individual sites to overcome linguistic and national barriers. Instead, a targeted PPC campaign that will help to connect people based on their location will give the illusion that a company is more local, or at least sensitive to geographically-specific requirements, in order to help increase click-through rates (CTRs) and generate sustained traffic and business.

Of course, Google's latest AdWords updates mean that you can actually be as geographically specific as you want, with targeting options allowing you to pinpoint particular cities to tackle with a PPC campaign.

You could even use such an approach to test the water overseas, because by targeting a small group of major cities using PPC you can gauge the state of the market and get a general benchmark for your ads without having to invest a lot of cash to cover the cost of paid clicks, which might occur in large numbers if an entire country was being hit with a campaign.

Businesses that have real-world outlets, as opposed to those which operate on a purely digital stage, will obviously be in a position to benefit from geo-targeting with PPC and AdWords, but the growth of this area is not limited solely to bricks-and-mortar firms.

We often hear of the world ‘getting smaller’, as countries become increasingly interconnected. But it looks as though all businesses with an online presence may need to ‘think smaller’ – and focus on local – to get bigger results.