How to Scale Your Brand Internationally with Google Ads

Hitting a ceiling with your Google Ads growth? 

In this Google Ads Unleashed episode, host Jeremy breaks down how to scale internationally without wasting ad spend or tanking ROAS. Learn how to structure accounts, manage domains, handle multiple currencies, and localise your feeds and landing pages for sustainable growth. 

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Most ecom brands at some point with Google ads will hit a ceiling in their market, either they've tried everything and there's just not much more you can do. Or when they try to expand actually with Google Ads internationally, they either see no traction or they overspend, and it's not working the way it should be. That is why, in this episode, I'm going to run you through different setups, things to consider when you want to scale internationally without wasting budget or euro ass on Google ads. Welcome back to Google ads and niche guys. This is Jeremy, your host with another episode back this Monday, despite a challenge that I'm facing today, as you can maybe hear from my voice, I am not 100% fit, but of course, I can't not give you guys a weekly episode sharing my knowledge and sharing what we go through as an agency on our journey in order to help you with your Google ads. So and today, I'm going to help you with something, or let me talk about a quite a complex and interesting topic, and that is to go international with Google ads. So typically speaking, when you want to grow on Google ads, there's only seven a few ways of doing it right. So either you do more of what you're already doing right, or you improve your conversion rate, aovs, right, so on site, or you start exploring more channels, search, go into advertorials, demand, Gen, all that sort of stuff. Or you find new search volume that you can target with products and services. Or the last one is go simply horizontal, go international, right? And a lot of stores very often choose the international route because it is supposedly a low hanging fruit. Spoiler alert, it is not because there's quite a lot of things that you have to think about before going international. Can your products be internationalized? Is there even demand? There? Do you have fulfillment abroad? Can you do your margins allow for it? Right? Only a few episodes ago, I had a client who expanded to Austria, and then we saw performance crash there, and it turns out that shipping is like three times as expensive to Austria, and his conversion rate is thus worse, because he has to charge more shipping costs, right? So you need to really think, Am I ready for this. And then start with your Google ads, advertising abroad. And what I always found when we start going abroad is that you will have to think about several things that you want to align in order to get and maintain a structure with your ad accounts set up that is sustainable, easy to manage and actually fits with like the logistics and the structure of your business. Typically, you will see that there are three issues that you need to align and challenges. First of all, domains. You may have just one domain, let's say, and then several sub domains. Let's say, for us, us, dot, whatever. Or you may have, you know, uk.ca, dot, etc, etc. Or you may have different domains for all different areas, okay, you may have several or just one Shopify store, right? You may have several Shopify stores with just all different domains and keeping it every everything completely different. Or you may just have one store, but then, depending on where you are in the world, the URL changes, right? So that's something you have to navigate. And then the last thing is currency that you have to navigate as well. And I can tell you why this is very important. So typically it is important because you have to decide what is if you have, let's say, several Shopify stores, what is like the feed structure that you want to use in order to get the right feeds into the right merchant centers. Then, in terms of domains, you want to decide what your setup is, because if you have several domains, you will need several merchant centers, as each Merchant Center can only have one domain. And then in terms of currency, you will want to decide, how do I set up my Google Ads accounts? Because the issue that you have here is you can only choose one currency per Google Ads account, so it makes no sense to run ads, and ideally ads in British Pound when you target in the United States, right? Because the conversion value of that is reported is then in US dollars, which. Screws up your your calculations with with conversion rates, right? But let's start at the absolute beginning. So I will just go through all of the different scenarios that could exist and let you know what I think the best setup is. Let's start with the fact that you have one Shopify store, but it may have several domains. So a client of ours is currently encountering this, right? They have one Shopify store, but depending whether you're in Italy or in Spain or in Austria and Jeremy, you have several domains. So for instance, it's the company name.de, company name.it, company name.es, in this case, what you will need straight away is several merchant centers. Okay, you will have to probably even sign up potentially with different email addresses. And there's not really another way around this. You can, I believe, have a manager account Merchant Center, like a multi account Merchant Center, and then make several sub merchant centers per location as well. But typically this is a better solution for another scenario, which I'm going to be talking about now in a second. But typically you will need one merchant center per domain. Is not really a way around this, and you will then, of course, have to register them do all the stuff that you would typically do within your merchant center as well. What you typically then will find is that in the Shopify back end, you will have some form of translation, or different kind of app that generates the different translations for the various areas wherever the ads are shown, right? So the Italian will turn the original source language into Italian, the Spanish location will turn it into Spanish, etc, etc. We use an app for here, which is called multi feeds by Woody tech. Multi feeds by Woody Tech is a fantastic, fantastic app that allows you to take those translations, for instance, from title and descriptions, and with that, actually generate language specific feeds, which you can then pop into the specific merchant centers. You can even like adapt, sort of the URL that it generates a little bit in order to make it fit for the various merchant centers. But that is typically the way to go, and the way I would handle a situation where you have one Shopify store, but different URLs, right? Several merchant centers, multi feeds by wooly tech. And through that, you have then a solid feed setup, then with the ad account. It depends a little bit. For instance, in this instance, I would then just remain with one ad account and pool the learning and the conversion tracking in just one ad account. There's no need for Manager account with several sub accounts, right in this instance, typically, that is because all of the like all of the conversion values in euro, the ad account is in euros, in this instance, where we have Germany, Austria and Italy and Spain. So it's quite easy to just run the ad account, quite compact within within one ad account, but split all of the various regions, of course, on campaign level, and create all of the assets, for instance, on campaign level instead of an account level. So you can very easily split up all the different regions and still maintain the same currency within the ad account and also pull the learning from the
from from the conversion tracking. Of course, you can also connect several merchant centers quite easily to one Google Ads account. So this is an ideal solution, right? The second situation that you may encounter slightly different here is that you have one Shopify store, but you will have several sub domains, right? So you have one main domain for your main language, but then for the other languages you will have, for instance, like a US, dot brand name.com, UK, dot brand name.com, etc, etc. In this instance, instead of having several merchant centers, what we recommend here is to have a multi account setup with Merchant Center. So very similar to a manager account of Google ads, you can actually have a like a master Merchant Center, just Google it. I think it's called, actually, don't know what's called off about I think it's called just managing merch. I don't know something like that. You'll find it 100% when googling. But typically what this allows you to do is on the absolute top account level of the master level to claim your main donor. Domain, right? So your base domain and then create a sub account, a sub Merchant Center, if you like, for each sub domain that you are targeting, okay. So very similar here. This is the only difference here, really is, is that you can very easily generate multiple feeds with multiple sub domains, right? And have the sub domain on in each own merchant center, if you like, with different shipping rules, etc, etc. And it just keeps it a bit cleaner, right? So we have this with one account of ours where it's set up this way. And to be honest, it's much, much easier, plus all of those. In this instance, we have an account with several Shopify stores. We can quite easily just use the Google and YouTube app with each sort of sub domain Merchant Center. But this is not needed. Let's say you just have one Shopify store. Now here with several sub domains, right? You can just, again, use the wooly tech app for each location, and then in the sub account Merchant Center, simply put in the XML files, for instance, and generate the feeds this way. Again, in the same way, it depends a little bit if you have then just several languages. They all share the same currency like in Europe, then I would choose just one account. But with this particular account that we're looking after, we actually have a situation where we have a UK under us and a German account, right? So we have three different currencies, three different nations, three different sub domains. So what we do here is we have created one manager account for our client, and then added all of his different ad accounts, one created in euros in German, one created in British pounds for the for the UK website, and then one in US dollars for the US website. And have several sub accounts linked to it. Now this has the advantage that, of course, you can quite easily keep all of the bills and so on separate as well if you have, for instance, separate businesses. But it just makes it much more manageable, because every account has its own learning environment, its own thing. You will, of course, have to have a clever way of setting up conversion tracking. Then, for instance, you can create conversion tracking, then through GTM right and fire different rules based on the currencies as relatively straightforward, or you get an expert involved, or you can even, for instance, it depends a little bit how you would do it, but I believe you could quite easily even set up conversion tracking on the manager account level and have all of the sub accounts actually fire that information back onto The sub accounts, right? So you can create conversion tracking on account level, and all the sub accounts use that level of conversion tracking. That's not a problem at all. So again, little bit slightly different setup. But the takeaway here is, if you have one Shopify store with sub domains, create a manager merchant center and then the sub Merchant Center for each sub domain. Then you can claim the domain on manager level. And sub domain, you can simply claim the normal sub domains. And then you have multi feeds by wooly tech quite easily. With that, you can generate all the different feeds, and then in terms of AD account, if it's all in the same currency, just keep it consolidated. Make campaign level assets for all of the various locations, and that way you can quite easily split everything through throughout. Okay? The only difference is, if you have, let's say, different currency accounts, then it's always a good idea to create a manager account and then sub accounts in the various currencies. Okay, then we've had a situation where we had exactly the same issue several but with the difference is that we had several Shopify stores, so we have like, 567, Shopify stores, but they all have this a sub domain, right of the main domain. But same situation, the only difference is that we use a different feed up there, right? So we don't necessarily use multi feeds. We just use the Google and YouTube app with each location, and we're able to collect that with the sub merchant centers. So little bit technically challenging here, but as you can tell, is there's a solution for everything here. I think the only thing that's now left to really think about is if you have several sort of like languages and if you have several currencies. So typically, what I would do. Is, let's say you go international from Jeremy to Austria, which share both the same currency and language. Just consolidate the campaigns, right? I would never have separate Austrian campaigns. It's just too much of a small country. I would just add it to the mixer. But if you have it in the same ad account, then definitely split it out by by country, right? So let's say you have France and German in an ad account, then just make that's okay in one ad account, but then just split out the languages by campaign, of course. But if you definitely have different currencies, make sure that you make that right step at the beginning by creating a manager account and creating a completely new sub account for the account, well, for the currency in question, right? Like US dollars. Other things to think about, which which are quite important is that you definitely so maybe there's a few common mistakes that I would really want to sort of highlight here.
Just always, always, always, and please, never do this when, when you set up account structures, never mix languages for some reason, right? And locations that never works. Never try to run English language campaigns in, for instance, countries where they don't speak English, like in Italy, France, just for the sake of it, because that's never going to work. And also always have a localized feed, right? So that is something that I see that a lot of people like get wrong. So either they mix in the ad account, they mix the languages right, which is, which is bizarre, or they don't have a clear separation and assets. For instance, they may have account assets in English account level, and then several campaigns in French, Italian, and then suddenly these have English assets with them, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever, okay? And like I said, what a lot of people make, or where a lot of people go wrong, they're trying to run English campaigns in countries where they don't speak English, because think about the quality score and about relevance, right? If you are up in against an advertiser who, first of all, someone searches in the local language, let's say Italian, and there's an advertiser advertising in Italian, they will always beat your English ad because yours is less relevant, right? So you're never gonna win. And it's the same with feeds. If you have a feed in the wrong language, it'll get disapproved anyway. But if you, for instance, use the wrong currency, or if you don't have the localized language in certain parts of the description, etc, that is always going to produce terrible results. So that's something that you'd really have to get into. Okay? And then lastly, on page. So that's something I see a lot of people go wrong. I think a lot of people think that you can just take a shortcut here. When it comes to ad copy, when it comes to localization, don't just translate your page, localize it right? Make sure that you hit the culture of the country that you're targeting right. For instance, in France, a lot of people don't really like online or, actually, I don't know which way around it was, sorry in this instance, but there's something about, I think French people don't like online shop in a more offline shop. And right? So maybe there's something you can do around that, or there's certain payment methods that certain countries use, like, I'm very sure of this that the Germans don't not many of them actually have credit cards, right? So you have to have something like supportive advising, so direct bank transactions as a payment method, etc, etc. So you just have to be really, really aware of how good your website has to be in order to be competitive with people in the same niche you've been there for longer, okay? And then lastly, reporting, right? So something that you'd really want to be then on top with is, how well is your expansion working? Okay? Am I sort of, is there something wrong with the add to cart rate? There's probably something wrong with the translation over the page. Is the shipping maybe too expensive, and that causes lower conversion rates, stuff like that. So that's just something that you really want to be aware of. So to sum it up, three things you need to think about, domain, currency and number of stores that you have. The reason is, you can only have one merchant center per domain, right? If you have several domains, you will need several merchant centers. If you have one domain, but with a lot of sub domains, then you can have one manager Merchant Center with several sub accounts. That's not a problem at all. If you. One Shopify store, go for the multi feeds by wooly tech app. It is by far the best. If you have several Shopify stores, it depends a little bit what you like to use and process on the normal Google and YouTube app. But multi feeds, of course, is fine as well. And then if you have one currency only, you can consolidate. That's absolutely fine, but make sure that when you run then campaigns for different locations, that they are on campaign level, and that the assets on campaign level, and that there's nothing on account level. But if you have several currencies, you will need one manager account and a few sub accounts. Conversion Tracking here is then, of course, a little bit trickier. This is something that you will have to probably figure out. Okay? And then few things to think about, does it all does the math? Math, right? It's really calculated beforehand, with your fulfillment, etc. Does this actually work? Don't skimp on localization and translation, it is ridiculously important avoid the common mistakes of trying to go English in countries that don't speak English, having the wrong language feeds, which is never going to work, and mix In too many countries into one campaign, which is never going to work. Okay, so this, these are the main takeaways from today, and of course, there's some legal implications you'll always have to be aware of, right? You can't just like, start selling into country without actually knowing what is going on before want. All right? If that's been helpful, then please like and subscribe. Or if you have questions on how to go about this, best send me an email at Jeremy young and digital marketing, or a message at Jeremy young Google ads on LinkedIn, I'd be look, I'd love to hear from you any question that you may have, right? I want to do maybe a section where I start reading out questions from listeners, and maybe I can clear up a few things that you have there, this has been Jeremy young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.