• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 3 hours ago

Campaign-level language targeting will disappear from Google Search and Performance Max campaigns in September.

The ad platform also will begin favoring the ad and landing page whose language matches the search term.

This means if someone searches for something in German, the advertising platform will give higher priority to ads and websites that are also written in German. 

"The system takes into account ad creative and landing language," Ginny Marvin, ads product liaison at Google, told MediaPost. "There's no change to how we use user signals such as language preferences. With this update, the system will also use enhanced ad group prioritization to select the most relevant ad language based on the user’s search context when there are multiple eligible campaigns or ad groups."

The post details what will change and how it will impact the campaign. For many things it will have no impact -- such as language exclusions, which are already not supported. Leaving a language unselected doesn’t mean it will be excluded.

"As language targeting has evolved, the campaign-level setting has become redundant, Ginny Marvin, ads product liaison at Google, wrote in a LinkedIn post. "The system already understands and handles language automatically, looking at an array of signals including the language of the ad creative and landing page, search term language and the user’s language settings and preferences."

Manual language targeting was first made available by Google in 2001 for up to 14 languages as part of its early push to globalize the self-service ad platform.

'The company did not confirm, but Google will likely eliminate this feature because artificial intelligence and automation are able to detect the language of choice by the person reading or interacting with the ad and content. 

Ad creative and text customization in AI Max will not change. Google does not translate ad creatives.

Reporting will not change, and ads matching to different languages when the user understands the ad or landing page language will not change. And there will be no change for those advertisers using single-language campaigns such as English or Spanish. 

Marvin wrote that the feature lost its function and cited friction as a reason the feature is being eliminated. Now the system will prioritize ads matching the language that the user’s search term matches, which is one feature that's changing.

"When you have multiple eligible campaigns or ad groups in different languages within your account, we’ll now use our existing AI-driven ad and asset group prioritization to identify and select the most relevant ad language based on the user's search context," Marvin wrote. 

Marvin provided an example. For multilingual users, AI-driven ad groups will prioritize and identify the most relevant ad based on the users’ specific context and language preference at auction time.

"When users are traveling in a different country, the system primarily relies on the user’s language preferences, which remain consistent when they travel," Marvin wrote. 

There is no need to restructure campaigns, but Marvin suggested that advertisers should review campaigns to ensure the ad creatives and landing pages are clearly structured in the advertiser's intended languages for users.

"We also recommend to stop including language criteria in new and updated Search campaigns when sending Google Ads API requests," she wrote. "For existing campaigns, you may remove language targeting for hygiene purposes. The setting will no longer apply."