Language

About language targeting

If you try to communicate with others who don’t speak the same language, you might find it tough to get your message across. Similarly, when advertising using Google Ads, you want your ads to appear to customers who can understand them. Language targeting lets you target your ads to potential customers who use Google products and third-party websites based on the languages those customers understand.

Choose your target language

Language targeting allows you to choose the language of the potential customers you’d like to reach. We’ll show your ads to customers who use Google products (such as Search or Gmail) or visit sites and apps on the Google Display Network (GDN) in that same language. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t translate ads or keywords.

Target languages on the Search Network

Google Ads on the Search Network can target one language, multiple languages, or all languages. Your ads will be eligible for queries where the keywords match and Google believes that the user understands at least one targeted language.

You might find it helpful to target all languages. By targeting all languages, you can reach people who speak more than one language and may search in several languages.

How Google Ads detects languages

• On the Search Network

Google Ads uses a variety of signals to understand which language the user knows, and attempts to serve the best ad available in a language the user understands. These signals could include query language, user settings, and other language signals as derived by our machine learning algorithms.

Example

Pat understands both English and Spanish. While her mobile browser is set to a Spanish interface, her other activity on Google strongly suggests she speaks English too; e.g., many of her queries are also in English, such as “buy shoes online.” She would therefore be eligible to see ads that target either English or Spanish, when the keywords match.

• On the Display Network

On the Google Display Network, Google Ads may detect and look at the language of pages or apps that someone is viewing or has recently viewed, to determine which ads to show. This means that we may detect the language from either pages or apps that the person had viewed in the past, or the page that she is currently viewing.

Example

Maya has viewed several cooking blogs on the Google Display Network that are written in Japanese, and she sees ads from campaigns targeted to Japanese speakers. She may also see Japanese ads even when she reads other blogs on the Display Network that are written in English because of her viewing history.

What does Google Ads campaign language mean?

If we understand what this concept really means, we won’t have any problems with setting the language in campaigns. The campaign language is actually the browser language used by our user. It is true that the Google Ads support says that the user’s language also includes the location and the language in which the user searches for information, but the language of the browser is dominant here.