Running Adword campaigns in German

does anyone else have problems with the length?

[GerBot]

Spain, France Italy etc

The problem I have is writing ad copy that is under the Google character count.

How does everyone here get around this problem?

Do you run English copy? (I'm in the tech industry)
Does you copy end up very simplistic?

Do you write the copy and then have it translated or do your contract our to foreign copy writers?
writers?

[Rumbas]

>Do you run English copy?

Nooo, certainly not. Of course, as you mention, some tech/generel stuff is somewhat global and therefore the keywords and part of the copy is in english.

>Does you copy end up very simplistic?

No, never.

>contract out to foreign copy writers?

Yeah, sort of. We use local people we trust and have know for a long time. We tell them about the site, the english keywords and a little about the market we're targetting. They use an in-house template where we have predefined the input fields. This way we never get copy that doesn't fit the requirements.

For larger projects we use Power Posting and dynamically insert the keywords. Works very well.

[oLeon]

The best way is as Rumbas said to have one from the country you want to run ads.

As an example: we run a few ads in the eastern Europaen market, and as before we have to translate our "default" ads to Hungarian, Russian, Polish and so on.
We got a notice from the translater that he is not able to translate our ads, because some marketing words like "best offer", "bargain buy" he couldn't translate, because these kind of speech isn't available in the eastern Europe yet.

Or another example - a similar issue hit us in Spain: how do people in this country, in their culture search for partnership or friends? Do they do this at all?

You are constrained to have some help from native speakers. It's the best way to reach the aim.

[rencke]

German requires more letters than English and some other languages, so the Adwords limit is a really big problem. I don't know of any other solution than to either accept that ads in German will say less than ads in English or to hire professional copy writers to come up with really innovative solutions. That is likely to take them many expensive hours, since writing short is far more difficult than writing long.

[GerBot]

I've had the same example as you rencke

Sometimes with adwords I struggle just to fit the two word search phrase (English) into the minimum character count when written in German.

I guess I'll have to continue to pay translation services then.

[mifi601]

Very often I see German copy that is sooo bad and obviously translated - it's funny.

On the other hand some of the same funny copy from 20 years ago is now considered regular German.

Sooo, if you are not out for the quick buck and in it for the long run, you could try using machine translations and invent some creative 'new German' that way ;)

[Tor]

I guess I'll have to continue to pay translation services then.

You should always use professional copy writers, not merely translators, if you want to succeed in an other language than your own native language. That is my experience in this industry.

[ThomasB]

Being German myself and confronted with a lot of poorly translated AdWord-ads every day I have to agree that a professional translation is definetly a plus. Unless you write it that bad that it makes people already laugh. ;)