8 replies to this topic

[Sarah]

I gotta good one today: An existing client wants us to set up a new PPC campaign for them in English, Russian & French.

Getting the UK campaign translated is no problem, until you consider the characters allowed in the ad text and it gets slightly disturbing! Our translators will work to the message and character spaces required for us which is cool, but apart from that...

Does anyone have any experience in translating PPC campaigns into a different language and can I get a heads up on any problems you have encountered? Apart from the ad text and culture clashes, I'm getting a little nervous now!

Thanks for any advice,

Sarah

[Jbrookins]

Biggest one I've encountered is having to pretty much redo everything. The character issue, cultural problems, and the fact that the keyphrases people search can be completely different. In my experience, you pretty much need someone fluent in both the language and PPC to pull it off right. Direct translation of english keyphrases will most likely turn up a whole bunch of goose eggs. :\

[Sarah]

Bugger.... Whilst I rethink.... Thanks Jeremy!

[adybee]

Biggest one I've encountered is having to pretty much redo everything. The character issue, cultural problems, and the fact that the keyphrases people search can be completely different. In my experience, you pretty much need someone fluent in both the language and PPC to pull it off right. Direct translation of english keyphrases will most likely turn up a whole bunch of goose eggs. :\

absolutely - buying into a nightmare with the cyrillic alphabet etc. I worked on a japanese site a few years and that was horrendous. I'd actually recommend 2 people fluent in a language - one to sense check the other. Look around for third party PPC companies that can help

[oskar]

Definetely. I work for a multilingual seo company and that is one of the issues we address on a daily basis. Translating the ads from english to other languages simply doesn't work since the grammar and cultural differences and behaviours when it comes to searching have a big impact on the search engines, not to mention the characters limitation.

[jehochman]

Does anyone have any experience in translating PPC campaigns into a different language and can I get a heads up on any problems you have encountered?

I run a lot of French ads, and the results are exceptionally good. Competition in many markets is less than in the US/UK.

Keep in mind that if you show a Russian ad, you better have a Russian landing page. You can use the Google keyword tool to extract relevant keyword phrase candidates from the page, then ship that list to the client and ask them to pick the relevant phrases. Likewise, the client should be able to translate the ads. If your client doesn't speak Russian, then I have to ask why they are advertising in Russian. How are they going to provide service to those clients who see a Russian ad and expect service in Russian?

[gaddison]

One rather unexpected problem I ran into was getting words in the ad tagged as trademarked. Words, like "avis" - pretty common word in French, but some car rental company seems to think they own it.

You definitely need someone fluent in the language to write the ads. Helps if they know marketing and your product too.

Gord

[Sarah]

Thanks all, we've briefed our translator, who seems to have a good idea of what is required. The translation agency will run the whole kaboodle past another one of the translators on their books, and so we're more confident that it will work out.

Keep in mind that if you show a Russian ad, you better have a Russian landing page.....If your client doesn't speak Russian, then I have to ask why they are advertising in Russian. How are they going to provide service to those clients who see a Russian ad and expect service in Russian?

There is going to be a Russian language landing page(which is being translated by the same guy running the PPC), which runs the same way as the UK site does: "Here is some info, you want some more, drop us a line and we'll be in touch very shortly" to be very basic. The client is advertising as they have received enquiries from a number of Russian speakers regards this (sorry gotta be careful so can't say what!) and have put measures in place to provide the service.

If it does not work out or provide any sort of feedback, we'll be back at the drawing board.

[Reliable1]

Make sure that you have a NATIVE person look at the ads first as well. Fluency in language is fine, but having a cultural and native understanding is extremely important as well. For example, "You Lucky Dog!" might be an informal way to talk to someone in the US, but do it in Africa, and if they have a gun they'll shoot you for calling them a dog.

An extreme example, but gets the point across!

Generally, if you get a native translator to go over the ads, you should be just fine!