How does location targeting and ad language affect who can see my ads?

When determining if your ads are eligible to be displayed, Microsoft Advertising Editor uses both your ad language and location target settings. Both criteria must be met in order for an ad to display.

Microsoft Advertising Editor's language targeting allows you to target your ads to particular web searchers based on your specified ad language. Microsoft Advertising Editor uses several signals to determine whether your ad will display to a potential customer based on the ad language you set, including query language, publisher country language, and the potential customer's language setting. For a list of languages your ads can serve in, see About language options in Microsoft Advertising Editor. For a list of countries/regions where your ads can display, see Where does Microsoft Advertising show your ads?

Here are the steps you'd take to determine where your ads are shown:

Note

Microsoft Advertising support may not be available for all languages.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3
Your ads will be eligible to display on search queries with keyword matching if the search query language or user language settings matches your ad language. You can create different ad groups with different languages. Choose from:
  • All available countries and regions
  • Selected cities, metro areas, states/provinces, and countries/regions
  • Near a specific business, landmark, zip code or coordinates
Choose from:
  • Show ads to people in your targeted location
  • Show ads to people in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location

An example:

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3
Result: Ads available to show in:
  • Germany
  • Austria
  • Switzerland
Result: Ads available to show in Berlin.

Berlin meets both the language setting and location target.

Result: Ads available to searchers physically located in Berlin.

How does my ad language impact where my ads can be seen?

Both the location targeting criteria and the language setting criteria must be met in order for an ad to be eligible for display. Of course your other targeting settings, beyond location, will also have an impact on the determining if the ad should be shown to the searcher.

For example, let's say you set your ad language to German. Because your ads are specific to a market, you decide to select your location target to Berlin, and even more specifically, show your ads only to people in your targeted location. Now, your ads will only show to searchers physically located in Berlin. For more information about targeting, see About targeting customers

Don't see your country listed? This list will continue to be updated as we expand to new markets on a regular basis.

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