Currently we have some international campaigns targeting all countries except the UK (we have our UK only ones separate). At the moment they only target the English language. However I am wondering if we are missing a large part of our audience because of this.
As I understand it, the language targeting works on whether the user has set a language preference and if not it defaults to the language for the google domain e.g. Google.fr would be French. The language of the search query is of no consequence.
Although we are targeting people who have a good level of English (our product is education sector), they will not normally have English as a first language, and therefore I would not think they would deliberately choose to set their default language to English.
I spoke to someone who had lived in Japan about this and she said that indeed they would just use Google Japan without changing any settings, even if they were doing searches in English.
The only downside I can think of by doing this is that perhaps our ads would get shown to people who didn't understand them, and so could reduce CTR. I also notice that Campaign Optimizer only works if you target one language only.
Anyone have any thoughts/experiences with this to share? Thanks.
