How to Leverage Performance Max to Expand Your Global Marketing Strategy

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Now more than ever, businesses are looking for incremental revenue opportunities. And global advertising is leading the pack. Adlucent’s VP of Strategy, Ryan Gibson, spoke at the Global Ecommerce Leadership Forum (GELF) alongside Google’s International Growth Agency Team Head of Industry, Kevin Perry, about how advertisers can take that step toward international advertising.

For companies shipping internationally, there’s a lot of opportunity left on the table if they choose to forego international advertising. Think of it this way, if a brand is shipping to Europe but not advertising in the UK, that’s almost equivalent to shipping in the US but shutting off ads in California and Florida, the two largest US states. Imagine the untapped potential. Despite the promising opportunity, it sure is daunting to tackle all the challenges that can come with international expansion. That’s why we’ve recapped Ryan and Kevin’s session to show you how to grasp the low-hanging fruit of global advertising so your brand can move abroad with a testing mentality. 

Strategies & Tools for International Advertising

To cut through the noise and find international success, use the RAPID framework:

• Readiness: Determine your readiness to grow internationally.
• Analyze: Analyze opportunities to expand.
• Pitch: Develop a convincing pitch and media plan. 
• Identify: Identify barriers to international growth.
• Drive: Drive success by scaling your international strategy.

At Adlucent, we lean on our unique International Growth Agency Partnership (IGAP) relationship with Google to utilize custom tools to analyze market opportunities, create media plans and find solutions to overcome barriers. For instance, Google’s Market Explorer tool allows us to find and prioritize markets for our clients based on user interest for the category, ad costs, GDP, Google product reach, and several other metrics. A similar, simplified public access tool called Market Finder takes your URL and category and gives you top markets to go after.

Performance Max Ad Types and Tactics

When turning planning into results-oriented ad campaigns, Performance Max (Pmax) is your one-stop shop for testing expansion into new countries. With one campaign type, you can reach users across several platforms; Google Search and Shopping, Discover Feeds, and Youtube, all optimized to your conversion goal. For best practices for Pmax campaigns, check out our post on Performance Max Campaigns for Shopping.

Keep in mind is Pmax is lower funnel focused. So if you need brand awareness in these new countries, you will need to lean into specific display, video, and social formats to build recognition.

Driving International Success with Performance Max

Let’s look at a few international campaigns we launched for a large, multinational brick-and-mortar retailer to recap how Pmax proved successful. Before coming to us, this retailer had already completed the RAPID framework. Once they established their brand’s readiness to go international, we analyzed which of their thousands of SKUs made sense in each market. This way, we could prioritize SKUs accordingly and avoid thinning the algorithm by spreading a small budget across all possible products.

We built these new international campaigns with our US shopping structure as a starting point but simplified them into a more consolidated structure to improve data significance and consolidate conversions into similar product groups. As expected, this expansion presented several headaches, including; shipping challenges, currency challenges, and language differences in distinct geographies like the province of Quebec in Canada. Many of these obstacles are common to most international retailers, so prepare accordingly. 

In time, this hard work paid off, and then some. Currently, we have a 30% higher ROAS in these campaigns compared to our US shopping program, due primarily to 60% lower CPCs. These campaigns drove $15M in incremental revenue last year for the business, which is about a 5% lift on top of total SEM revenue.

Conclusion

While there are obstacles to global advertising, the payoff for expanding to foreign markets is well worth it, especially if you already fulfill orders in those markets. There are plenty of tools and resources to help you along the way and provide vital information to inform your decisions. 

Do you want to expand your brand into international markets? You’ve come to the right place. Chat with us today and learn how we can partner with your brand to grow your international business!

Brad Costella

Brad is a Senior Director of Strategy at Adlucent. He is a strategic, data-driven, solutions-focused marketing leader with 10+ years of experience in omni-channel digital marketing and customer acquisition. He has a passion for turning insights into actionable strategies that improve real world outcomes for advertisers and customers. He believes that success comes from finding and striking the sweet spot where customer's needs intersect with a brand's value and goals.