• by Ross Fadner , December 23, 2003

The global online community is a vast market that search engine marketers have yet to breach. Today, most search engine ad serving programs only work with English Web and ad content. But on Friday, Google finally opened its services to Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Japanese Internet publishers and advertisers.

Google's AdSense program will now accommodate the international advertising community by placing ads and links in each of the five new language interfaces. As one of the major search engine marketing placement services, AdSense enables web site publishers to serve ads that are specifically targeted to the content on each of their Web pages. Google scours the site, identifies the content, and then automatically serves relevant, text-based Google AdWords ads on the page.

Search engine marketing has become particularly profitable for Web publishers because programs like Google's AdSense and AdWords and Yahoo!'s Overture pay publishers every time a user clicks on an ad. Because the ads served by these programs are targeted by search engine technology, the ads are always highly relevant for users, and are a lucrative means of generating ad revenue for publishers and prospects for advertisers.

Publishers of sites in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese, or publishers who would like to use an interface in one of these languages, can now apply for participation in Google's AdSense program. Through AdSense, publishers have access to Google's database of more than 150,000 potential advertisers. However, ad links cannot be translated when a publisher serves an ad in a language other than the language in the Web content.

"AdSense publishers can choose to show ads in any one of six different languages - French, Italian, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, and English," said Fabio Selmoni, director of European Sales and Operations at Google. "The ads will not be translated. (They) come from advertisers who advertise in that language and who are targeting that country."

Google launched AdSense in March 2003. In April, they began to offer AdSense internationally to larger brand name publishers in Germany and France, while only offering ads in English.

Adds Selmoni, "More than half of Google's searches come from outside the U.S., so the international market is a very important market for Google and will continue to be in the future. This is the first phase in our process of making AdSense available to publishers around the world."