Location and language targeting

The policy is explicit: an Ad Grants campaign cannot target all countries and territories. You have to name the places where your organization operates.

Most accounts treat this as a box to tick. It is the most underused lever in the program.

Local targeting wins against everything else

Of five campaign themes we compared across 706 accounts, local campaigns beat every other type. A keyword with a city or region in it starts twice as often as any other — 11.9% of keywords against 5.3–6.4% — and inside the same account local ad groups win 64% of head-to-head comparisons, the most of all five themes.

And only 45% of organizations run local campaigns at all. On more than half of accounts this is a ready lever nobody has touched.

The mechanism is simple. "Food bank" is an auction against every food bank in the country and every commercial result that has learned to rank for it. "Food bank Portland" is an auction against the handful of organizations that actually serve Portland — and the person searching it is far closer to needing you.

Language settings

Language targeting in Google Ads does not change the language of your ads. It filters by the language setting of the user's browser and interface. Two practical consequences:

• Set the language of your market, and add English. In most countries a meaningful share of residents browse with an English interface — immigrants, students, expatriates, anyone who bought a device in English. Leaving English out quietly excludes them.
• Add any other language your audience actually uses. If your organization serves a community that browses in another language, that language belongs in the settings — not as a nicety, as reach you are otherwise paying nothing for and getting nothing from.

One thing language targeting does not do is translate. If you add a language, the ads and the landing page still have to exist in a language the reader can act on.