You’re using AdWords. You have a product or service which is international. This said service is targeting those who speak English. As such you want your PPC adverts to appear on the search network to English speakers in say America, Australia, Canada and Singapore – for example.
You could set this up in one big campaign, just build it, open the settings of the campaign and target English speakers in all these countries and click ‘Active’ on the campaign status. It’s working well, you’re getting lots of traffic, reasonable amount of conversions and a wide spread of keywords are beings searched on.
Problem with this setup though, is how do you know which countries are working the best for you? Which countries are spending more budget? Where is the traffic coming from? Obviously if you are getting enquiries you can see which countries are working for you, but as this is your money you’re spending you also need to know which countries are clicking on your adverts but then *not* contacting you.
It’s better practice to have them in separate campaigns, each targeting one country only. Just duplicate your first campaign, change the name so you know the area it targets and then change the location settings. Just because they all potentially have English as their main language does not mean they will all have the same search tendencies or habits. By splitting out the campaigns you can see which areas are working best. You may find America has very high traffic levels but does not convert. The user may be put off by your prices being in GBP or the thought of international postage and complicated returns. Alternatively, you may find Australia does really well for you but by having them all in one campaign, America is hogging all the budget and limiting Australia’s performance.
Another reason is, if you have built the campaign around your UK based website and have price specific adverts which refer to GBP you are immediately alienating the side of your audience which work in dollars. Relevancy is key in PPC and the wrong currency negates this.
Yet another reason why this is bad practice is because of slang and colloquial jargon. Some terms and phrases have totally different meanings in different cultures. We call them trousers, American’s call them pants. In the UK you have holidays, in Canada you have vacations. Gas V Petrol and so forth!
Don’t be lazy with your PPC build. Break them up and target them separately. This will also allow you to optimise them as separate metrics within analytics as well. Win win.
