If you try to communicate with others who don't understand the same language, you might find it tough to get your message across. Similarly, when advertising using Google Ads, you want your ads to appear to customers who can understand them. Learn more about targeting ads to geographic locations.
Language targeting lets you target your ads to potential customers who use Google products and third-party websites based on the languages those customers understand.
Choose your target language
Language targeting allows you to choose the language of the potential customers you'd like to reach. We'll show your ads to customers who use Google products (such as Search or Gmail) or who visit sites and apps on the Google Display Network in that same language.
Target languages on the Search Network
Google Ads on the Search Network can target one language, multiple languages, or all languages. Your ads will be eligible for queries where the keywords match and Google believes that the user understands at least one targeted language.
By targeting all languages, you can reach people who understand more than one language and may search in several languages.
How Google Ads detects languages
On the Search Network
Google Ads uses a variety of signals to understand which language the user knows, and attempts to serve the best ad available in a language the user understands. These signals could include query language, user settings, and other language signals as derived by Google AI.
Example
Pat understands both English and Spanish. While her mobile browser is set to a Spanish interface, her other activity on Google strongly suggests she understands English too (for example, many of her queries may also be searched in English, such as "buy shoes online"). Therefore, she may be shown ads that target either English or Spanish, when the keywords match. Pat may also enter a query in Spanish and be served an ad in English.
On the Display Network
On the Google Display Network, Google Ads may detect and look at the language of pages or apps that someone is visiting or has recently visited, to determine which ads to show. This means that we may detect the language from either pages or apps that the person has already visited, or the page that she is currently visiting.
Example
Maya has visited several cooking blogs on the Google Display Network that are written in Japanese, and she views ads from campaigns targeted to people whose preferred language is Japanese. Japanese ads may also show when she reads other blogs on the Display Network that are written in English because of her browsing history.
On YouTube
Google Ads can show ads on YouTube based on the languages the person understands. This is determined by the language preference that someone sets on the YouTube homepage, and various other signals such as browser language, location, and browsing history.
Example
Sam lives in France and has his YouTube homepage set to French, but also visits websites and has Google searches in English. Sam may come across ads in both French and English as his activity suggests he can understand both languages.