Question For Spanish Ads

[jcmoon]

We have created translated landing pages for some of our ads. We'd like to run these ads in Spanish speaking countries, which is easy.

However, how do we run these ads for Spanish speaking people in America? We have the same part numbers (keywords) in our English ads. Will this cause a conflict?

I understand those who speak Spanish in America should set their Google setting to Spanish, but if they don't - I guess they'll never see our Spanish ads in America...

Thoughts?

[Alcoholico]

Hispanic population in the US usually use an English browser, that’s a fact and there’s little you can do about that, don’t blame them, the reason is simple, usually they use an OS sold in the US and many times it can be hard (or impossible) to find a Spanish OS in the US market, and IF they install, for instance, Firefox, Firefox website will detect they’re using an English OS or come from an English speaking IP and will give them primarily the option to download their English version, most people won’t search further and this version will do for them, and they will not be changing settings since they usually don’t need to, they’re in an English speaking country, even if they can not communicate properly in English they do understand and can read many words. Google will not know they’re Spanish speaking and will show by default its English interface. It is the same issue in Europe in areas like Belgium where there’s more than one language spoken. A solution, not very good, in fact, would be to display the ads in English but adding “Hablamos Español” at the end of the ad, most Hispanic users will understand your ad, provided you use plain English, also Google has a rather good detection system also and will try and show these ads when it “thinks” the user is searching for a Spanish word. Also, try using some specifically Spanish keywords, I say specifically since nowadays there are many similar words in both languages and google could handle them as a misspelling.

Sorry, I guess this does not help very much.

[phaeberle]

Your best shot would be by IP. You can get an IP database and once somebody clicks on an ad you could compare it to your IP database and depending on how big the spanish speaking comunity is you can decide what language you show.
You can learn from the US Census how big a spanish comunity is in regards to a Zip code.
However always keep in mind the quotation below

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
John Wanamaker