How multi-language ads can make an impact on your Facebook campaign results

The internet and e-commerce gave us a world of great opportunities to grow. Now, we have access to millions of marketplaces worldwide only a click away.

Competition is the downside of that. Since marketing became accessible to almost every business worldwide, the competition is bigger each day.

Many retail companies are trying to sell their products in different markets.

But, there’s a little problem with that.

Going after several markets at once requires substantial optimization and editing of your visuals or ads.

Not all markets will react the same when seeing a campaign. There are important ethical and cultural differences we need to consider.

When personalizing your Facebook campaigns for different countries and cultures, the most basic and most effective thing you can do is create multi-language campaigns.

In this article, we’re going to find out:

What is Language Localization on Facebook?

In a nutshell, language localization on Facebook is a type of Facebook campaign that allows us to automatically (or semi-automatically) launch ads to specific speech and language areas within multiple counties, regions and countries.

Take Switzerland for example.

It’s one country, but it has four official languages – French, German, Italian and Rumantsch.

Statistically speaking, ads on native languages and dialects will have a click-through-rate (CTR) double than the general ads in English or any other language.

Here’s Facebook language localization in action:

The Negative Impact of Not Using Language Localization on Facebook

When people see an ad that’s not in their native tongue, they perceive it as a “general” ad and ignore it.

Not because they don’t want to click on it, but because their mind processes them as irrelevant than the ads in their native language.

On the other hand, users are blind to ads that are not written in their own language.

Additionally, people are definitely more likely to engage with popular brands not just because they created a campaign using their language, but because that clearly proves that those brands care about them.

Such brands are willing to go the extra mile to deliver personalized experiences to the buyers.

All of this means that not using language localization on Facebook will result in missing a massive amount of opportunities.

Let’s go back to our Switzerland example.

Around 60% of the Swiss population speaks German, 20% speaks French, 6% speaks Italian, and the remaining 14% are people talking in Rumantsch and other unofficial languages.

If you created your campaign in German only, you would miss around 40% of potential customers.

That’s almost half of the total population.

Not creating multi-language campaigns while targeting audiences from different countries at once might be even worse.

Let’s assume that you’re targeting entire Western Europe. Of course, a lot of people there know English, right?

But don’t you think that your CTR and conversion rates would be even higher if you also created that same campaign in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Norwegian, and other languages?

You see my point. Grabbing attention using the native language of your audience yields better results and ensures your offer and message are well received.

Now, we approach another problem. The battle between what you should do, and what you can do.

Why do many retail companies still skip language localization?

The short answer is, because it’s a pain in the ass to do so.

Not to mention it’s expensive and is something no one really likes to do. Imagine that expensive designer sitting with his Latte copy/pasting different language copy into images, and then into videos. How happy is she? I don’t blame her.

So how do you create over 200 different campaigns without burning through your designers hours every day?

And, naturally, teams give up on multi-language campaigns because they think that the great results that language localization can bring, require a tremendous amount of time invested.

Marketers typically approach multi-language Facebook campaigns in two ways:

• Avoiding language localization all together and “living” with the consequences of poor performance
• Creating the allusion of localized language campaigns by changing up only one main creative that yields sub-optimal performance.

So, what’s the best solution for this problem?

Let’s take a quick look at one example:

Say you have 50 retail stores and 20 products, and you want to target 3 different markets.

If you create one creative for each product inside each store and in 3 different languages, that would be over 3000 different creatives.

So how do you create 3000 different creatives at scale without wasting a considerable amount of money and time?

Create a scalable language localization system inside your company

Yes – it’s possible to create such a campaign in no time.

Let’s take a look at a time-saving and systemized process that will organize and streamline all of your future Facebook campaigns.

Essentially, if you want to target multiple locations at the same time, this process is going to save you hundreds of hours per campaign.

Meet Hunch.

Hunch allows you to create over 2000 versions of the same campaign with different product images for different retail store locations, and most importantly – in different languages.

Step 1 – Prepare your feed

The first step of this process is to prepare your feed. The feed is the form of the spreadsheet containing all information about each ad. Every row represents one ad.

If you want to create a separate ad for each product, store location and language, you should create three different subsheets inside your feed:

• DPA data – this is the feed related to the products themselves. This is where you type in all the information such as product links, product images, titles, descriptions, and so on.
• Location data – if you want to create a campaign for multiple locations, you can use this subsheet to include separate store data, such as the store name or address.
• Translation data – this feed is intended for writing down translations in different languages.

Once you do this and then connect your feed to Hunch, Hunch will automatically create the fourth subsheet that we like to call Combined feed.

This is the feed that’s ready for creative and campaign purposes. Essentially, Hunch will use that very feed to create hundreds of different ads.

There’s no need to manually create each of the 3000 creatives using photoshop or illustrator. Hunch will automatically do that for you.

Here’s how to create over 3000 creatives within one single campaign with Hunch:

Step 2 – Connect your feed with Hunch

Once you’ve created your feed, it’s time to connect it with Hunch.

Just paste the URL of your feed into the Data source URL box, choose the frequency of updating, and fetch the data.

Step 3 – Design and create a dynamic template

Here lies the beauty of Hunch.

When creating multiple ad campaigns with Hunch, you don’t need to design each ad separately. Hunch does that automatically for you.

In a nutshell, each item in your feed has a different text, image, description, and so on.

No matter what creative templates you wanna use (videos or images), Hunch uses these dynamic and static creative assets to create hundreds of ads at once.

Combining those dynamic and static creatives from your feed allows you to create eye-catching and awesome-looking creatives that will spark engagement among your target audience.

Step 4 – Launch a campaign

Last but not least – the final step is to launch your campaign.

Once you set-up your campaign parameters, such as the campaign budget and its objectives, it’s time to use different targeting strategies for different ad sets.

This comes in pretty handy when you’re working with multiple locations and languages.

The only thing you need to do with Hunch is to select a dynamic field from your feed which is associated with a particular ad set.

This way, you can select dynamic fields such as EN, FR or DE for different languages or other dynamic fields for particular store locations.

This allows you to create multiple ad sets and campaigns targeting different people.

Once you do this, hundreds (if not thousands) of different ads are ready to be launched.

The bottom line

As you can see, with almost the same effort, money and time invested, you’re able to create two different types of campaigns.

You can choose:

• Creating one single creative targeting all the markets at once. With this solution, you’ll hardly be able to make dramatic progress.
• Alternatively, you can invest the same amount of money and energy and create thousands of different creatives and campaigns at once. In this way, you’re using the full potential of Facebook ads and converting more people.

It’s up to you to choose what you want.

In case you still want to create one single creative, no worries. You can check some of our other articles about Facebook advertising that could be interesting to you.

If, however, you want to automatically create thousands of creatives at once and target multiple markets with personalized offers, you can schedule a Hunch demo.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

CPM on Facebook is increasing dramatically. Facebook becomes more expensive.

So the main question is:

How do we survive the dramatic increase in CPMs?

This article aims to answer those questions.