Comments on: Best Practices for Multilingual PPC

By: Gordon Choi

Gordon Choi — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:50:48 +0000

I have been managing multilingual search campaigns and managing teams that are managing multilingual search campaigns for years. My experience is that:

1. Human translation is accurate but can be very expensive.
2. Tool translation is quick but can be inaccurate (depending on the specific languages and the tools). e.g. Google Translator may be a great tool, but it still needs to improve on accuracy and local slang.
3. Keyword research on the specific languages is not optional. Simply translating everything, you may be missing a lot of search volume. e.g. For Chinese language, use both Google’s keyword tool and Baidu’s keyword tool:

http://www.gordonchoi.com/baidu-keyword-research-tool-20091004

By: Vijaya

Vijaya — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:08:05 +0000

Hi,

These are surely great tips. Also wanted to know that will it help if the accounts are made country specific?

By: Tait

Tait — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:35:45 +0000

We run Chinese PPC campaigns. Usually for clients that already do English PPC. We create the Chinese campaign from the ground up. There isn’t much translation involved. We’ll use data from the English PPC campaigns and search queries to lead us in the right direction though.

By: Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:30:57 +0000

Hi Carrie,

Good tips – and the advice to never rely on online translation tools is definitely got to be the golden rule.

The only thing I’d say is that by following your method, might you be missing out on some potentially valuable keywords? The majority of your keywords seem to be based on translations from your English ones, which might leave you missing out on common synonymns in the target language.

Not to mention that if you didn’t have an English campaign, you’d be a bit stumped…

The only way that we’ve found to work is to have a native speaker be trained up on keyword research themselves, so that they can do the research from scratch in the same way as we’d do in in English – although as you suggest, I would use the English campaign structure as a basis (if available).