If there is one thing Google is good at, it’s making money. This is good news for you and me because Googles primary business is advertising, or helping businesses find and reach customers, so they invest very heavily in figuring out ways to get more people to advertise and existing advertisers to spend more money. They recently announced a whole bunch of new products within their Adwords product to help them make more money. The most significant of those was better attribution and reporting to prove to advertisers that their search engine advertising deserves credit for offline sales. In an experiment they ran with a brick and mortar retailer, using the new total estimated conversions feature they were actually able to show more than a 100% increase in conversations when factoring in attributable offline sales. This means that a)this retail advertiser can justify spending much more money and b) any retailer that does take advantage of this new found attribution can have a real significant edge over their competitors, driving much higher ROAS.
When I was researching all these new features I decided to dig a little deeper into various Google web properties around advertising. I figured there has to be a bunch of tools no one ever heard of that are designed specifically to help advertisers make more money, in turn helping them spend more money…making Google much more money.
We all know that as time goes one Google Adwords becomes more and more competitive. Due to their auction model, it is very easy to spend too much money trying to acquire customers.
One of the best tricks to achieve much cheaper clicks in Google, while somewhat obvious, is very rarely used due to the perceived belief that it takes a mastermind to execute properly.
I am referring to Global Advertising. If most advertisers in the US are only targeting The US, than the auction prices will be much higher than if you target foreign countries. Now, I know many companies don’t have the ability serve foreign markets, and others may not even realize there is a foreign market to begin with.
The truth is, advertising in a foreign market is actually very easy. The best option is to sit down with a local, who understand the local dialect and language nuances, and have them translate your ads and keywords, and of course set your targeting for that country. When I had to set up campaigns in 8 different languages for New York Film Academy, this is exactly what I did, and it was super easy. Still, not every company has access to local translators, and more importantly, many dont have any idea which markets to target to begin with.
This of course is a problem for Google, because fewer advertisers means less ad dollars. So, I think it’s safe to assume that Google would do everything in their power to get more advertisers to enter foreign markets.
Sure enough, Google has an entire website dedicated to helping advertisers service different markets.
My favorite part of this site though is the Global Market Finder Tool . You simply plug in your keywords into the tool, and choose which countries you want to analyze and it basically translates your keywords into the local language in those countries and checks the search volume and bid prices for that market.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Russia is the best market to run ads to find PPC clients. Now, since I don’t speak Russian, I probably won’t take advantage of this opportunity (although how hard is it to hire a Russian speaking salesman?!)
Look at the big prices compared to the United States. PPC expert is a $40 click, and all the keywords only translates into 1250 searches and an average click price a little over $20.
Look at Russia though. 5400 searches, or over 400% more, and average clicks prices a little over $2, 1/20th the price. To me this screams big market opportunity.
Here is Googles video explaining how the tool works.
Still, this is only half the battle. Now you know which markets to target, but you still need to translate your campaigns, ads and keywords to the local market. That can’t be easy can it? Well, leave it to Google to help out as much as possible.
On the bottom right you will see a button asking if you are ready to translate.
When you click through it brings you to Google translate which lets you upload a backup of your account from Adwords Editor and request the whole thing be translated…
This is great, now lets see what happens when I actually upload an adwords campaign into the tool and ask Google to translate it to Russian.
First you get hit with an Ad to hire a translation vendor. Wow, I didn’t even know Google had an ad product like this, but leave it to them to figure out how to make as much money as possible.
Now, $600 is not bad to reach a market with clicks a fraction of the cost and quadruple the search volume, but lets just say you are really on a shoestring…
Click no thanks, and see what happens.
As y0u can see, Google pulls the adwords backup file I uploaded into a simple to edit template. When Google finds a word that was previously translated by a Human it appears in blue. If not, it appears in red. When you click on a keyword it gives you some history and some options. Needless to say, this is pretty awesome.
You can now easily download it into an Adwords Editor file and upload it into your account. Simple as pie!
David Melamed is a Thought Leader on Search Engine Optimization and Marketing featured on Mashable, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Adotas, and Shoemoney. David writes regularly at DavidMelamed.com offering tactical tips, tricks, and startegies to find, engage, nurture, and retain customers. David Melamed is the Founder of Customer Hunter Corp. A content development and promotion agency and Tenfold Traffic a search marketing agency.
