Most of what’s written about paid search assumes two things: that everyone searches on Google, and that they do it in English. Step outside those and a lot of the received wisdom stops being useful. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last year running campaigns in markets where neither holds, most of it for Arabic-speaking clients, and it’s taught me a lot, usually the hard way.
Start with the search engine. In Russia you’re mostly not on Google, you’re on Yandex, and it behaves differently enough that you can’t just port your account across. China is Baidu, with its own rules and its own approvals process. Japan is the one that surprises people: Yahoo still commands an enormous share of search there, so a serious Japanese campaign means learning Yahoo’s Sponsored Search as well as AdWords, on an interface that assumes you already read Japanese.
What actually eats my afternoons, though, is nothing so grand. Arabic runs right to left, and the moment you’re editing an ad with Arabic and English in the same box, the cursor develops a mind of its own. Try to copy and paste a phrase and the selection leaps around the screen, the punctuation ends up on the wrong side, and a two-minute edit turns into a ten-minute wrestling match with a text box that’s been flipped backwards. Nobody puts that in the guide to international PPC, and it eats more of your afternoon than any of the clever stuff.
Then there’s the language itself. You’re choosing keywords and writing ad copy in a script you can’t read, and the temptation is to reach for Google Translate and have done with it. Don’t. It’s fine for the gist of an email; it is nowhere near good enough for a two-line advert that has to be idiomatic, match how real people phrase a search, and fit a strict character count. I’ve seen back-translations that looked perfect and meant nothing to a native speaker, or worse, meant something faintly ridiculous.
So we always work with native speakers, for the inflection as much as the meaning. For one language we hadn’t touched before, we ended up running three translators against each other: each one translated the same piece of copy, then scored the other two’s versions and had to justify the scoring. It sounds like overkill, and it was, but it’s the only time I’ve felt genuinely sure about copy I couldn’t read a word of.
Even when everyone’s speaking English, the words don’t carry the same weight. Most of my Arabic clients speak better English than I do, and I’ve still got habits to unlearn. “That’s a shame” is a throwaway line over here; in their world it lands far heavier, nearer to something shameful or dishonourable, so I’ve learned to say “that’s unfortunate” instead. And when you’re chasing a late invoice and the reply comes back “Inshallah”, God willing, you learn to read it for what it usually is: a completely sincere, rather warm way of telling you not to hold your breath.
A few smaller things catch you out too, none of them about language:
- Currency and value. A cost-per-click that looks cheap reads quite differently once you’ve done the maths, and what a customer is worth shifts market to market. You have to reset your sense of “expensive” for each one.
- Local competitors you’ve never heard of. The global brands might be absent, and instead you’re up against a domestic player who owns the market and the words people use to search for it.
- Timing. Weekends, working weeks and public holidays don’t line up. Running to English office hours is an easy way to pour budget down the drain.
None of this is complicated, exactly. It’s that the job won’t let you do what digital marketing usually lets you do, which is sit behind one desk, in one language, and get the whole thing done yourself. You end up trusting other people with the parts you’ll never be able to check, and getting comfortable with that took me longer than any of the technical stuff did.
