I love doing consulting work for clients across different industries. My main focus is entertainment and video games but I get a good share of my business from outside of those two industries. The reason I love doing this work is that it sharpens my research skills, brings new ideas to the table for current clients on how to target searchers and it allows me to gain new knowledge that I can use with clients.

A common mistake I find clients make is trying to target searchers in Canada, the US and the UK with the same set of creative and keywords. This is a common mistake you should avoid. The main reason you want to break out these countries into different campaigns is because of local spelling. If you check out this list (or this one), you’ll see that a common word like colour is spelled differently in Canada and the US.

Breaking out keywords and creative by local language will help make sure your ads come up when people search. Your ads can’t show up if your keywords aren’t targeted to the right searchers. Also organizing your campaigns by country means that you can target your ads and products by what is popular in each part of the world. You may find that your red product does better in Canada while your green one is more popular in the US and UK.

In the end, helping keep your campaigns as targeted as possible means you’ll stand a better chance of having your ads show up. Now this just doesn’t apply to Canada, the US and the UK but to many countries around the world. You’ll have to make sure while doing your research that you find out what makes each country different that you want to target. Google’s Insight Search tool is one way to help you do this. Remember all searchers are not the same and your creative and keywords shouldn’t be either.