EU SME week . The tagline - "Small Business, Big Ideas" - aptly captures the excitement of a small business, and Google was one too just a few years ago. Now we offer online advertising solutions that many of today's SMEs use as part of their marketing strategy. While the local or national market is a great start for any business, clearly the single market (and beyond) should be the ultimate growth ambition of European entrepreneurs.estimates - only 7% of EU consumers had shopped cross-border. How does the picture look from the seller's perspective? SMEs that use
AdWords , Google's online advertising product, can reach consumers who are searching for products and services in multiple languages, across borders, all from a single online advertising account paid for in one currency. Advertisers may target ads to users in more than 40 languages or use location targeting to direct ads to different countries, regions, or cities. The biggest bonus though, is that advertisers only pay if someone interacts with their ad. In simple terms, if there is no click, there is no payment.
AdWords offers the ability for SMEs to show ads to consumers using several methods, such as matching country or language targeting to Google domains (.fr, .de, etc) or by specific geographic search terms ("London plumbers" would show to users in London). Another component of targeting is by an analysis of the user's IP address. IP addresses can give a general sense of a user's physical location, based on the regional assignment of IP addresses. Such advertising targeting capabilities give advertisers a reasonable sense of control that they are not wasting precious advertising euros on clicks from potential customers that they are unable to serve.
Many European SMEs have successfully grown their businesses across national borders thanks to the global targeting capabilities in AdWords. Having found success in the UK with AdWords, the footwear retailer
Cloggs launched a French-language website coupled with ads targeted to French consumers which has generated an average of 100 sales daily.
What we see is that the proportion of our EU customers' AdWords budget spent on cross-border prospects is about double the Commission's 7% figure for cross-border consumer purchases. That difference is not surprising - AdWords advertisers can more easily target consumers across borders compared to traditional media. Further, our figures include B2B sellers, and some may have set up local fulfillment operations such that consumers are unaware that the ultimate seller is in fact based abroad.
In any event this is a figure that both we and the Commission would like to see increase. And more choice for consumers is a good thing too. To that end, we have increased our efforts to educate AdWords advertisers about how they can attract consumers from across borders to their websites by expanding their advertising campaigns internationally. AdWords specialists recently held online web tutorial sessions in 4 languages open to advertisers in 7 EU countries, offering tips for how to expand their reach across borders. We invited thousands of advertisers in the EU to these live sessions and will make recordings of these trainings available online. This month, we're going to post international campaign expansion tips on Google's European Inside AdWords blogs (check out the Swedish Inside AdWords
blog for an example), spreading the word for how AdWords can support the entrepreneurial ambitions of SMEs in the EU.
Posted by Rich Flanagan, Product Marketing Manager
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