Pay Per Click (PPC)

Google Language polices - are they discriminative?

Posted in Pay Per Click (PPC) by Geoff Parker on 7th of December, 2007

If you want to promote your company online around the world, you can do it using PPC advertising on 115 different languages. But will you get the same "value" for the money?
Google (as well as MSN and Yahoo) has very standard ad polices- 70 characters per ad description, 25 characters title with account limit of 50K keywords. But what it doesn’t take into consideration is that:

• Each language is completely different and the average word length may vary from 2.79 to 49 characters.
• Some languages even don’t use spaces. For example –Thai.
• Other will achieve a shorter word length by not using vowels, like Hebrew and Arabic.
• Many others are using Suffixes, Prefix, Pretext and Ending (Eastern European) or letters in words can change or change their order or type of sound which will give you a wider number of phrases to describe the same object or phenomenon.
So what’s a solution?

I think all three engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN) should look into this issue and make some sort of adjustments to accounts and ad sizes in accordance with language characteristics, at the moment there is a limit of expression for some while others have more freedom.