Have you ever wanted to target potential customers in foreign markets, but was put off by the language barrier?

Well, Google has realized that many of its AdWords advertisers are faced with this problem and has launched a couple of online tools to help make it easier for businesses to reach new markets overseas.

The Google Global Market Finder is a free, online keyword tool to help businesses find global AdWords advertising opportunities.

The Google Global Market Finder:

• Helps you find opportunities to reach over 1.7 billion customers around the world;
• Automatically translates keywords into your customers’ language;
• Shows you where customers are searching for your product, from Albania to Zimbabwe or anywhere in between; and
• Helps you make the most out of your ad budget by comparing cost estimates across languages and locations.

To use the tool, enter keywords that describe your product or service and select a market or region you’d like to explore. You can choose from regions such as the European Union, the ‘G20′ economies, or the Americas.

Google Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword into languages used in each of your selected markets. It then ranks each location by market opportunity by combining search volume, suggested bid price, and competition for each translated keyword. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like ‘how competitive is this market?’, ‘how does demand in one location compare to demand elsewhere in the world?’, and ‘how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?’ The automatic translation is not perfect, so you still have to do some work to make sure the translated terms are correct.

Google Ads for Global Advertisers

Google also launched a new website that brings together Global Market Finder, AdWords, Google Translate, and other tools that can help you find, engage with, and support your customers worldwide – whether those customers are consumers or businesses searching for suppliers online.

Google Ads for Global Advertisers is a website where you can learn more about Google tools that can help expand your business overseas. Google Ads for Global Advertisers contains step-by-step guides and tools that take you from local to global: from finding the right markets to expand your business, to localizing your website and campaigns into another language, to running ads in a foreign market, and finally, to monitoring your global ad spend.

This website pulls together resources for you to:

• Find the right market for your products and services, by using tools such as the Global Market Finder;
• Translate your websites and ad text using Google Translate Web Element and Google Translator Toolkit;
• Reach new customers with relevant online ads; and
• Understand options for international payment, shipping, and customer service.

On the website, you will find success stories of businesses that have gone global using AdWords, including:

• Purely Gadgets: PurelyGadgets MD Alan Lim describes how seizing the opportunity to start exporting proved key to the electronic distibutor’s survival in the downturn;
• Arena Flowers: Faced with fierce domestic competition and a weak pound, web-based florist Arenaflowers.com used Google AdWords campaigns to expand to Germany and Holland;
• Mosaic Marble: Husband-and-wife entrepreneurs describe how they use Google AdWords to reach customers in 8 languages worldwide;
• SysAid: Marketing executive Saar Bitner explains how Google AdWords helped SysAid grow and reach 6 million end users in over 100 countries;
• Cloggs: UK-based footwear retailer Cloggs describe how they launched a French language website with the help of Google AdWords; and
• 1791 Diamonds: New Zealand-based retailer 1791 Diamonds explains how they work with Google to sell engagement rings worldwide.

Google’s new website and tools should help you reach overseas markets, whether you’re a small business testing exports for the first time, or a mid-sized company looking to grow your multinational business. Both Global Market Finder and Google Ads for Global Advertisers will be available in 43 languages.

Could your business use Google Global Market Finder and Google Ads for Global Advertisers to expand into foreign markets?

Google Global Market Finder »

Google Ads for Global Advertisers »

Google just announced that Product Listing Ads is coming out of beta and rolling out to all U.S. advertisers over the next week.

Product Listing Ads is a basic ad format that makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory while still providing potential customers with high-quality, relevant results.

Over the last year advertisers listed hundreds of millions of products and Google found that people are twice as likely to click on a Product Listing Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location.

Product Listing Ads, along with Product Extensions, is part of AdWords Product Ads. With Product Ads, users can see the exact products you offer before they even reach your site, which leads to more clicks, higher quality leads, and higher ROI for your search ads.

Like Product Extensions, which lets you add the pictures and prices of relevant products to your keyword-targeted text ads, Product Listing Ads makes it easy to show the most relevant products from your Google Merchant Center account to potential customers searching on Google.com.

However, unlike Product Extensions, Product Listing Ads don’t require any keywords or ad text. Product Listing Ads are automatically triggered whenever someone’s search matches an item in your Merchant Center account, making it easy to show relevant ads for your entire product inventory.

Full story and video at Google’s Inside AdWords blog »