Google Shopping Multilingual Campaigns

Customers enjoy viewing content in their native language. Translating your store's content can lead to more sales because your international customers can better understand the products and feel more comfortable buying in your online store. But how about your Google ads, which is the first impression that you can make to the customer?

It turns out that Google has provided all the facilities for showing ads in translated languages. There are two mandatory requirements that must be met:

• Translated product data. This includes the product titles and product descriptions. Product options (colors, materials) should be translated if possible.
• A landing page link that will have the language pre-selected for customers. This makes sure that a customer, or Google bots, following the ads links will see the translated language immediately.

Both of the requirements are made available to Shopify merchants using the multilingual feature. If you have had your shop data translated by one of the compatible apps, all you need to do is to create a multilingual product feed to send the translated data to Google Merchant Center.

Multiple Google Shopping feeds

The app will make it easy for you to create Shopping feeds in translated languages. All you need to do is select the country you want to target for the selected language. Behind the scene, the app get the product data in the right language, and use Google Content API to synchronize the products across to Google Merchant Center.

Besides the compatible apps, Weglot is also supported. The requirement is that one need to use the subdomain feature of Weglot. The reason behind this is that pre-selected language landing page is only possible with subdomain, and we need it to conform to the 2nd requirement above.

AdWords Implementation

Once you have everything set on the Merchant Center side, obviously, the next goal is to set up the translated language Google Shopping campaign. At this point, you will hit a bummer (at least I did). It turns out that Google Shopping campaigns don’t actually have an option to target languages. Google will give you the option of targeting a completely different country than your country of sale, but you can’t pick what language to target.

Thankfully, when AdWords introduced Google Shopping campaigns, they gave us the tools to work around this issue in Custom Labels. For this to work we need to tag the feed data with the language it was written in. This can be done with almost any feed creation app, but with Multiple Google Shopping feeds, it is possible to be done at the feed level, which save you a lot of time.

Once the changes were live in our AdWords account, we now can create separate campaigns. We used an inventory filter to make use of the custom label in the campaign settings so that each campaign only received items in the language we selected.

With only a little bit of extra work we now have campaigns targeting separate languages.

Until AdWords introduces language settings as an actual feature for Google Shopping campaigns, this work around will get you going.

This works well if you want to target different countries with different languages. It also works if you want to create campaigns in different languages for the same country. Countries that support multiple languages like Canada, HongKong, Belgium.

Do you have a multilingual store? Have you tried to show ads in multiple languages? How was your experience? Let me know!