If you speak Spanish, you’re able to review the translation of our English ad text and may decide that the Spanish text sounds pretty good. Let’s say you want to use this ad text for your Spanish campaign about skin moisturizersand after a few weeks you want to check the results. You go to the Adstab for the campaign that you’re interested in. You then click the CTR column to sort the CTRs from high to low. Once you have your ad texts infront of you, you notice that the CTR rate for the Spanish ad text is very low. Whereas the English ad text has a CTR of 7,89%, your Spanish version hovers around 0,54%. What could be happening here? Click through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions). A low CTR means that many users are seeing your ad but few of them are actually clicking the headline. You wonder if moisturizers are less popular in Spain than in English-speaking countries. However, it’s worth looking into the Spanish text in particular. The text was written by an English speaker who studied Spanish in college. When you ask a Spanish native to review the text, he hesitates at the word “complexión”. Our Spanish speaker explains that the word “tez” or “cutis” is used to refer to skin, and that “complexión” meansphysique, as in a well-built man. When a Spanish customer starts reading your ad text, he/she will get annoyed at the language mistake and may therefore think your product is not of high quality.
Let’s examine the next French example.
When we pull up the ad text report for these two ad texts, we notice that the CTR for the second ad is much higher than for the first ad. Why do French customers prefer the second ad? After checking in with a native French speaker, we understand that the French “courtier” is used much more frequently than the English loan word “broker”. Only users who are very familiar with the online trading world will use the term “broker”. Therefore, French speakers who are new to trading may not understand the meaning of the ad with the English “broker”. They may instinctively prefer a 100% French ad. Continuing with the stock exchange market, what about the next example?
When we compare and analyze the performance of these two ads, we notice that they both have a good CTR of around 6%. To our French customers, it doesn’t seem to matter too much whether the French term “bourse” or the English term “trading” is used. A French native confirms that the word “trading” is now so common in the French language that it is used by the general population. Remember that we only found out that the word “broker” is not common in France whereas the word “trading” is after consulting a local. So if in doubt about low CTRs for your translated ad texts, it may be worth checking in with a native speaker. Good luck!
Posted by Omar Abou Selman - Google AdWords MENA
Written by Hile Cremers, Google AdWords Team
