The American pay-per-click market is getting crowded. You can still keep costs down by taking a “long-tail” approach (looking for lots of little used by highly targeted search phrases for which to run ads), but with growth in paid search revenue for 2007 estimated at 27% by Merrill Lynch, it is going to get increasingly more difficult to get a leg up on your competition.
So perhaps the time is nearing when you want to take a more global approach to your PPC (if it’s relevant to your business, of course). Click prices for PPC campaigns in other countries are generally much lower than in the U.S. Yet the U.S. accounts for only 21% of the worldwide Web population. For those of you not that good in math, that leaves another 79% of the entire World Wide Web for you to market to.
One important key to being successful using paid search worldwide is segmentation. For one thing, you don’t want your ads and bids for other countries mixed in with your U.S. ads and bids. You may end up bidding more than you need to. And ads for other countries need to be written for each country specifically. So each country in which you market your services via PPC should be set up with its own campaign.
It will take some work to figure out how to write your ads for other countries. You might want to start slow with countries that are not that different from the U.S. – Canada, Australia, the U.K., etc. A next logical step might be Spanish-speaking countries, such as Mexico and Spain. Of course, when you enter the domain of advertising in foreign language markets, you will either need to be fluent in the language or able to hire someone who is.
And as with all PPC campaigns, you will want to create landing pages tailor-made for each country. Your landing page design and offer should also reflect the culture of the country.
Will it be a lot of work? Yes. But you will open yourself to 5x more prospects, to whom you can advertise for cheaper than in the U.S.
Please contact Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or info@WorkMedia.net if you need assistance planning or managing a pay-per-click campaign for your business.