Back in October, Bing Ads announced the
launch of multiple language targeting, which helps you expand your global reach by choosing from multiple Bing Ads-supported languages to target customers at the campaign level. This means that with multiple language campaigns, you can now reach people who speak more than one language and may search in several languages.
But what are the best ways to make sure you’re serving your ads in a language that the user actually understands? Let’s work through an example to showcase a few best practices you can leverage to make sure you’re reaching the right audience with the right language.
Using campaign level settings
Let’s say you sell English music subscriptions online and want to target English speaking customers in Scandinavia:
Target user language
English speakers
Target geography
Denmark, Norway, Sweden
In Bing, the setting of campaign language determines what countries your ad can be displayed in. To target the three Scandinavian countries, we need to choose the right set of campaign languages. Refer to this Bing Ads help article to understand the mapping of language to country. Based on this mapping, Danish targets Denmark, Norwegian targets Norway and Swedish targets Sweden. Thus, we need to select these three languages in campaign language settings. Additionally, since we are targeting English speakers and our ads will be in the English language, we need to include English in campaign languages as well. (Note that Bing does not translate ads into various languages.)
It is also important to note that selecting English
only will not enable this campaign to serve for Denmark, Norway and Sweden since English language targets only to:
- United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines
Target user language
English speakers
Target geography
Denmark, Norway, Sweden
Campaign languages
Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, English
When multiple campaign languages are used, the targeted countries are the combination of the language/country mapping. In the example above, the campaign now targets the following countries:
- Denmark, Norway, Sweden, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines
Since we do not want countries other than Denmark, Norway and Sweden to be targeted, we can use
location targeting to limit our campaign to these three countries. (Alternatively, the
All language setting can be used for campaign language and appropriate location targets can be set):
Target user language
English speakers
Target geography
Denmark, Norway, Sweden
Campaign languages
Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, English
Campaign location targeting
Denmark, Norway, Sweden
Using ad group level settings
Now, you’ve set geographical targeting of the campaign correctly. In order for the ad groups to inherit the geographical targeting set at the campaign level, the language settings of the ad groups under this campaign must be set to
Use the campaign settings option. If any other language setting is used, the language targeting of this ad group will always override the campaign level settings.
While adding keywords and ads for this ad group, you need to make sure to use only English keywords and all your ads are in the English language. In cases where there’s a mismatch between the keyword and ad language, such ads may be penalised because they will not be relevant to the end user.
Keep in mind that using words (such as brand names or generically used terms like hotel, pen etc.) which are spelled the same in various languages in keywords or ads might result in the ad being shown to a user who does not understand the language the ad is written in. In this case, we recommend avoiding the use of campaigns with multiple languages or
All languages, and it’s best to create separate campaigns with the language of intended audiences.
As illustrated in this example, the right combination of campaign language settings and location targeting can help ensure that you’re targeting the right audience with your multiple language campaigns. We hope this feature helps you take better advantage of the global Bing Network and manage your campaigns more efficiently.
Let us know your thoughts
For any questions or feedback regarding these best practices, we encourage you to reach out to your Bing Ads account manager or contact
Support. You can also ping us on
Twitter, suggest a feature on the
Bing Ads Feature Suggestion Forum or send an email with your thoughts to
bingads-feedback@microsoft.com.