Guide
Global advertising: Why it works and how to get started
Global advertising refers to the process of running international ad campaigns for your products or brand. For an effective global advertising strategy, consider running ads in multiple countries and optimising your campaigns to help increase visibility of your brand and grow your sales.
Start using Amazon Ads to display your products and create campaigns.
Create cost-per-click ads to help customers across the world find your products on Amazon.
Leverage insights and signals that optimise the customer experience and drive sales for your brand worldwide.
Read our complete guide to the Amazon Ads features and tools available that can help you build a global business.
What is global advertising?
Global advertising, or international marketing, is the process of running ads for your products or brand in countries beyond the home base for your business. This can mean advertising in countries in different regions (like Mexico in the Americas and Japan in Asia) or in multiple countries within the same region (like France and Italy in Europe).
With more customers shopping online than ever before, now is a great time to focus on reaching shoppers around the world. If you want to increase the visibility of your brand and help grow your sales, global advertising may be the solution you’re looking for.
Where can you advertise?
You can use self-service Amazon Ads solutions like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display to reach customers across the globe.
Three benefits of global advertising
Advertisers see an average return on ad spend (ROAS) of 2.4 four months after launching Sponsored Products campaigns in a country other than their brand’s home country.1
1. Reach more customers
Engage shoppers across the globe who are looking for products like yours.
2. Tap into peak shopping seasons around the world
Boost visibility for your products and brand during local and peak shopping events when customers are browsing for items.
3. Create ads in any time zone
Ads can display whenever customers browse for relevant products on Amazon, so your ads will be working hard for you – even when you’re not working.
How to decide where to advertise
Advertising in a new country can feel daunting. Here are some ways to help determine where else you want to start advertising.
Get to know the audience
Familiarise yourself with the shopping habits in different countries. If you’re a brand owner, use the Brand Analytics feature in Seller Central to gain insight into the most popular keywords and shopping queries in different regions. Then launch ads in countries where products similar to yours are popular with shoppers.
Use shared languages to your advantage
Identify countries that have a shared or related language to your brand’s home country, and launch ads based on your groupings. This can help you reduce the need for translations for your ad campaigns. For example, you could start by launching ads in countries with similar languages, like Spain and Brazil (Spanish and Portuguese), or countries with the same language, like the U.S., U.K. and Australia (English). Even if the countries are in different regions of the world, launching ads in locations with a familiar language can help you feel comfortable advertising in new countries.
Try neighbouring locations
Countries that are within the same region as your business may have cultural similarities or shared customs, and they may offer similar types of products to yours. If you want to keep delivery logistics in mind, consider remote fulfilment options and advertising in countries that are near each other. Programmes like Remote Fulfillment with FBA and Pan-European FBA can help you fulfil orders to customers across North America and Europe, respectively. Remember, there might be some taxes and regulatory fees to consider when selling and advertising in multiple countries. Learn more about multicultural marketing.
Tip: Sign up for free one-on-one support from a dedicated Amazon Ads specialist who can help you with your multi-country advertising strategy. They’ll share tailored recommendations and help you start, review and optimise your international campaigns.2
Features to make global advertising easier
The ad console has tools that can simplify every stage of the campaign process. A recent study on global sales highlights how using tools available in the ad console has helped multi-country advertisers drive 11x higher ad-attributed sales at a 40% lower cost per click (CPC) on average.3 Try these tricks when launching your global campaigns in the ads console:
- Simplify your campaign management and manage your advertising for all countries in a single account.
- No matter which global advertising account you’re working on, you can change the default language and currency to match your preferences.
- No more switching from one country to another to see your campaigns. Now, you can view and manage all your sponsored ads campaigns in a single campaign manager view. You can even take a deeper look at a specific country or make a country-to-country comparison using the new “Country” filter.
- Simplify pulling campaign reports. Schedule and download a single sponsored ads campaign report for the countries of your choice and convert them to your preferred currency.
- The days of creating campaigns one by one in each country are over. Use the multi-country campaign creation and copy feature to save time copying and setting up new campaigns across countries.
- Skip researching keywords in other languages. Instead, let us provide a list of a suggested keywords in the local language of the country where you’ll run your ad campaign.
- If you want to make an informed decision about which keywords to add to your campaign, try sorting your suggested keywords by estimated clicks or sales volume with custom keyword ranking.
- Already have a list of keywords you want to use? No problem. Simply enter your keywords in the keyword localisation feature and translate them into the local language of your campaign. We continually audit our keyword translations to ensure we’re bringing you the most relevant keywords for your campaigns.
- Leave translations for your branded content to Amazon Ads translations. The easy-to-use service is supported by professional linguists and will have your text and video format translations back to you in just a few days.
- When creating a new Sponsored Brands video ad campaign, Amazon Ads will now automatically translate your creative and set your campaign live once the video is translated.
Learn how to use global advertising features from seller Farah Finds
What to do after you launch global ads campaigns
It’s important to review your campaigns and optimise them based on performance. After you’ve launched in multiple countries, use our checklist for international ad campaigns to set yourself up for long-term success:
1. Select “dynamic bids – down only” as your campaign strategy
We’ll control costs in real time by reducing spend on clicks that are less likely to convert to a sale.
2. Strategically increase your bids
When your campaign is generating a high return on ad spend (ROAS), you can double down on this success by increasing your bids to win more impressions and drive sales. When your campaign is generating low impressions, maximise your chances to show your ads to shoppers by increasing your bids.
3. Keep your campaign always-on
Set a daily budget that’s high enough to keep your ads showing for the entire day so you don’t miss out on potential sales.
4. Use keyword match types with manual keyword targeting
Broad match helps you generate the widest traffic exposure and discover new shopping queries relevant to your campaign. Phrase match is good for long-tail keywords – the longer, more specific phrases that highly interested customers typically use. Exact match can help drive conversions. We suggest adding exact match keywords only after you’ve figured out which shopping queries perform well for you.
5. Add negative keywords to your manual keyword targeting
Help increase ROAS and control your costs by preventing ads from appearing on specific shopping results or detail pages that aren’t relevant to your products.
6. Launch a manual product targeting campaign
Engage shoppers who are closer to a final purchase by targeting specific products, categories or brands that are similar to the product in your ad.
Tip: Fine-tune your targeting according to the product price, and select higher-priced products for which your products could be a lower-cost alternative for shoppers.
7. Use negative product targeting to filter out specific products from your campaign
Make your campaigns more effective by excluding brands or products you don’t want your ads to show against, so you won’t reach shoppers looking for those specific brands and products.
Global advertising examples to inspire you
Case study
German health and nutrition company foodspring used the multi-country features and tools from Amazon Ads to save time launching campaigns in new countries and help meet their goals to grow internationally.
Case study
After successfully advertising in the U.S., home decor company Warm Home Designs recognized they had an opportunity for their products to reach new audiences in Mexico. They used Amazon Ads tools and features to help create successful campaigns in Mexico.
Case study
When a China-based company, Luftzeuge, was looking to expand their offering and advertising efforts into Europe, one of their main challenges was translating their existing creative assets to enable them to advertise in different countries and languages. They used Amazon Ads localization services to translate their creative assets in order to grow their business in Europe.
Case study
Learn how Caffè Vergnano, one of the oldest coffee roasting companies in Italy, used Amazon Ads to help increase sales and build brand awareness across Italy, Spain, Germany and France.
Learn more about global advertising
Learn more about how to advertise globally in these resources:
- International advertising tools guide
- Expand and help drive cross-border sales with North America Remote Fulfilment
- A guide to advertising for international events
- Insight-driven guide for new international campaigns
- Grow your global presence with ads webinar
- Step-by-step videos on global advertising
- VAT and tax resource guide
If you’d like additional support and guidance, reach out to request services managed by Amazon Ads. Budget minimums apply.
1 Amazon internal data, WW, 2019–2021, limited to sellers with
– Minimum SP monthly budget of 100 $│£│€
– Minimum SP campaign duration of six months post launch
2 This 1:1 benefit is currently open to a limited number of eligible advertisers that have an active professional selling account in good standing with Amazon.
3 Amazon internal data, EU, NA, 1 July 2021–28 Feb 2022