expertSEM

I’ll start by stating what may be obvious for most readers—the Google interface defaults to English unless a user actively sets his/her preferences otherwise. But as the AdWords Help Center explains, “A Spanish-speaker living in the United States, for instance, may want to perform searches on Google.com but change the interface language setting to Spanish.”

So definitely English and definitely Spanish, right? Maybe.

Before it sounds like this blog is just reiterating what anyone can find in the AdWords Help Center, here’s the question— What does the difference in language targeting really look like in terms of running a Spanish PPC campaign? With search marketing in Spanish being such a nuevo niche, my colleagues and potential clients are constantly asking me for data to back up a pitch.

I’m a native English speaker who is fluent in Spanish; until I became a search marketer, changing language preferences in Google never even occurred to me. Would it occur to someone outside this industry who is more comfortable in Spanish?

Here’s one example of what the difference actually looks like. With a recent Hispanic Targeting client, we opted for a “soft launch,” selecting only Spanish language targeting to start. This was in part for budget reasons and in part so we would be completely sure we didn’t bump into our own English campaign.

After a period of ten days, the Spanish campaign was performing well—in fact, it was out-performing the English campaign from an ROI standpoint. We decided to open it up and add English to the language targeting settings. (To ensure we were not serving English and Spanish ads at the same time in a broad-match situation, we used the same display URL and added some fundamental negative keywords.)

Here’s the difference in terms of clicks:

And leads follow proportionally:

After seeing the data, here are two scenarios in which I might consider using only Spanish language targeting:

1. If the client’s budget is limited. (However, I’d almost rather target both languages and cut impressions with day-parting or with a daily budget cap.)
2. If my campaign is geo-targeted to an area with a high Hispanic population density, creating a greater likelihood of users with Spanish preferences.

Otherwise, to see the full potential for results out of your Spanish PPC campaign, it is best to set your Google language preferences to both Spanish and English. Before this recent campaign, we could only speculate on the advantages of language targeting. Now we have actual data to back up the previous guesswork.