AdWords Language & Location Targeting

Introduction to Language and Location Targeting

Overview of language and location targeting

Whenever you create a new campaign in your AdWords account, you choose which languages and locations you want to target. Your options include:

1. Language: Target up to 40 different languages.
2. Location: Target any combination of countries, territories, regions, cities, and customized areas that you define.

All advertisers must choose a language and location to target, so it's important to understand what's right for you.

 Here are general guidelines to follow, which are further discussed in the following topics.

• Target the language spoken by the audience you're trying to reach. This should also be the language in which your ad is written.
• Target countries or territories if you want to reach a wide audience across one or more countries.
• Target regions and cities if your business serves specific geographic areas or if you want different advertising messages in different regions.
• Target customized areas to reach specific geographic areas which may not be available in region and city targeting.
• You can combine these targeting options any way you like within the same campaign.

How language and location targeting works

Language: We only show your ads to users whose Google interface language matches the language(s) that your campaign targets.

Location: The AdWords system uses several techniques to help show your ads to users located only in your targeted location(s):

1. We consider the Google domain being used (.fr, .de, .kr, etc.). For instance, if a user visits www.google.fr, the Google domain for France, she'll see ads targeted to France.
2. We analyze the search term the user submits on Google (a practice known as "query parsing"). If someone enters a search term that contains a city or region, we may show ads targeted to that city or region. For example, if someone searches for "Chicago plumbers," we may show relevant ads targeted to Chicago.
3. When possible, we determine a user's general location based on his or her computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a unique number assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to each computer connected to the Internet. For example, if someone searches for "plumbers" from a New York area IP address, we may display ads targeted to New York.

You can also use advanced target options to define when to show your ad to a particular user.

Setting and enabling language and location targeting

When you create a new campaign, there will be a point in the creation process where you can choose the languages and locations that the campaign targets. You can edit this selection at any time on your campaign's "Edit Settings" page.