International pay-per-click advertising campaigns

If your business has an international customer base you may want to explore the options for using global pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. In addition, you may want to ensure full coverage of the UK market by using some of the US-based PPC tools, although this can have potential disadvantages.

Last month we looked at some of the smaller UK PPC tools. However, another issue to consider if you are running a UK-targeted PPC campaign through tools like Google Ads (AdWords) and Overture UK, is that you could potentially be missing a section of the UK market that use US search tools like MSN.com, or do not see UK listings through IP address targeting (we explain more about this below).

In these cases, you can extend your PPC advertising to the US or global market to ensure complete coverage of English-language searchers. Google Ads (AdWords) allows you to target different countries or searches from around the globe just through changing the account settings. Overture’s US version covers a similar range of search engines to its UK counterpart (including the .com versions of Yahoo and MSN), which together are responsible for around 50% of US search traffic and an additional account needs to be set up for this tool.

One benefit of doing this is to reach UK users that may have a US-based dial-up account (such as AOL) that won’t therefore recognise them as UK searchers and so not display those PPC listings that are determined by IP location. The potential disadvantage with this approach is that your listings will be opened up to the US/global audience and although you can include ‘UK’ within the advert wording, they are likely to significantly increase the traffic and costs, without necessarily improving the conversion rates.

If you want to target the US or wider global market, then Google Ads (AdWords) and Overture remain the main options to use. In addition, FindWhat has the third largest PPC network in the US and provides results to Search.com, Excite, Webcrawler, MetaCrawler and Dogpile. There is a minimum set up cost of $25 (which is refunded against advertising fees) but no minimum monthly spend and the minimum cost per click is 5c.

Last year FindWhat acquired the UK/European PPC provider Espotting to create a global network, although the setup and interface that the two businesses use are currently very different. This could change over the coming months as this group tries to extend its share of the PPC market.

FindWhat have also recently introduced a ‘pay-per-call’ feature that allows advertisers to only pay for each telephone call they receive as a result of search advertising. Adverts can include telephone numbers and the scheme is tracked through the use of an ’800′ number. This is likely to appeal mostly to small or localised businesses and if this scheme proves to be successful it is expected that many of the other PPC providers will roll out similar schemes, both in the US and internationally.

If you want to consider a new PPC campaign with these tools, or to extend your current activity, we would always encourage a test to see how effective they can be. Please contact us for more details of how we can help.

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