In today’s global commerce ecosystem, brands looking to expand their reach beyond domestic borders have unprecedented opportunities—but also face unique challenges.
For eCommerce sellers already finding success in one marketplace, expanding to international markets offers a clear path to growth. However, managing pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns across multiple countries takes strategic coordination that goes beyond simply copying and translating what has worked domestically.
Why Expand Your PPC Campaigns Internationally?
With thoughtful execution, expanding to international audiences can offer big benefits to modern brands and retailers:
- Revenue diversification that protects against domestic market fluctuations
- Reduced dependency on a single marketplace’s policies or algorithm
- Access to new customer segments with different buying behaviors and preferences
- Protection against domestic tariff impacts by establishing a presence in other markets
- Extended selling seasons as peak shopping periods vary between markets
- Maximized existing product catalog without requiring new product development
For brands that have reached a certain scale domestically, international expansion is an obvious next step for continued growth. 🌱
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Multi-Marketplace Management: 5 Steps for a Profitable PPC Strategy
Okay, the list of benefits looks pretty nice—but managing PPC campaigns across multiple international marketplaces is far from easy. Here’s how to build a PPC marketing strategy that maintains brand consistency while adapting to local market conditions.
1. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research for Each Market
You already know that keyword research is the foundation of any successful PPC campaign, but this process becomes more crucial—and more complex—when expanding internationally. Even in markets that share the same language, search behaviors and terminology can differ significantly.
For example, if you sell luxury cookies in ornate gift tins, it likely won’t make sense to target “biscuit”-related keywords in your US search ads. But if you’re expanding to the UK, these terms will be vital to brand awareness and market penetration.
✅ Top Tips: International Keyword Research
- Start with your proven keywords from your home market as a baseline
- Use marketplace-specific keyword tools for each region you’re targeting
- Examine competitor listings in each marketplace to identify relevant terms
- Consider cultural and regional variations in product terminology
- Gauge competition levels by how many reviews competitive listings have
Finding profitable keywords takes trial and error, but this research is a critical first step to a data-driven multi-market strategy.
To explore the data within English-speaking markets, check out Trellis’ free Amazon keyword research tool.
2. Optimize and Localize Your Listings
Your global PPC campaigns are only as effective as the listings they lead to. Before launching campaigns in a new marketplace, optimize your product listings for local market expectations.
✅ Top Tips: Listing Optimization for International Markets
- Start with professional translation of all listing content (titles, bullet points, descriptions)
- Localize product measurements (inches to centimeters, ounces to grams, etc.)
- Use region-appropriate imagery that reflects local customer experiences
- Check compliance with local regulations for product descriptions and claims
- Adjust pricing to account for local market conditions and competition
Translation to a local language isn’t enough. Localizing your content means adapting your entire marketplace presence to fit the local culture of your target audience.
For example, the subtext and symbolism of certain imagery, and even emojis, vary by region. Your listing content’s tone, idioms, and slang might not land in a new market. It’s up to you to build your understanding and optimize listings accordingly.
➡️ Note: These localization strategies also apply to all your ad campaign elements (ad copy, landing pages), as well as digital marketing tactics outside marketplaces (Google ads, social media content, paid search).
Plus, localization improves your search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing efforts for global audiences. It’s just good practice.
3. Manage Time Zones and Scheduling
One of the more practical challenges of running multi-market campaigns is coordinating activities across different time zones. For efficiency’s sake, it doesn’t work for most brands to simply run campaigns full throttle 24/7.
Effective PPC management and bidding strategies will help make sure you’re reaching potential customers when they’re most active and that your team can efficiently maintain your campaigns.
✅ Top Tips: Managing Campaign Timing Internationally
- Implement marketplace-specific dayparting to target peak shopping hours in each region
- Stagger campaign launches to allow for monitoring and troubleshooting
- Set up automated bid adjustments based on local conversion rate patterns
- Create a centralized campaign calendar that accounts for all time zones
- Schedule maintenance windows that minimize disruption across global markets
For example, if you’re a US-based brand launching a campaign in a target country like the UK, you might schedule initial bid increases for the UK market around 2-3 PM GMT, when both UK shopping activity is high and your US-based team is available to monitor performance.
The Serving Hours Dashboard in Trellis helps you identify optimal bidding times to run ads with the highest ROI potential across different target markets.
4. Adjust Your Pricing Strategies
At the end of the day, your cost per click (CPC) must align with your profit margins for your campaigns to be profitable. When expanding internationally, several additional factors come into play with pricing strategy.
✅ Top Tips: Pricing Within an International PPC Strategy
- Account for VAT and local sales taxes, which vary significantly in different countries
- Factor in higher fulfillment costs for international shipping and/or local warehouse storage
- Consider the impact currency exchange rate fluctuations may have on profitability
- Analyze local market price sensitivity, which can differ from what you’re used to
- Monitor competitive pricing in each marketplace independently
Many brands are turning to dynamic pricing solutions to coordinate price changes across multiple marketplaces simultaneously while maintaining their competitive positioning.
A powerful dynamic pricing platform allows you to experiment with different pricing strategies and understand their impact in different markets.
“I’ve said this before,” remarks Ali Babul, Trellis Chief Evangelist. “Always be pricing. Change your price. Understand what that means to your product. Don’t be scared of it. It will give you more clarity and comfort to grow your business and get more profit in your pocket.”
5. Coordinate Promotions Across Markets
Promotional campaigns can boost sales velocity, give wings to product launches, and clear out excess inventory when needed—but coordinating these efforts across multiple marketplaces can be tricky.
✅ Top Tips: Multi-market Promotions
- Create a global promotional calendar that accounts for regional shopping events
- Align PPC ad spend increases with promotional periods in each marketplace
- Stagger promotion start dates to allow for performance monitoring and inventory management
- Maintain consistent brand messaging while adapting offers to local preferences
- Develop processes for quickly applying learnings from one market to others
For example, you might run similar percentage discounts across all markets but adjust the featured products based on regional bestsellers or seasonal relevance.
Understanding TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale) across different marketplaces can help you understand how promotions affect the overall efficiency of your paid media in each region.
Tracking and Optimizing Campaign Performance
Speaking of TACoS, let’s talk PPC metrics. 📈
The key to long-term success with international PPC campaigns is setting up a sustainable system for tracking and optimization. Managing campaigns across multiple marketplaces creates data challenges that require systematic solutions.
As you set this system up, look to incorporate these elements:
- Standardized KPIs that allow for cross-market comparison
- Unified reporting dashboards that consolidate data from all marketplaces
- Attribution modeling that accounts for regional differences in customer journey
- Regular performance review cadence for each market
- Automated alerting for significant performance changes in any marketplace
Multi-touch attribution becomes especially important when managing international campaigns, as the customer journey often looks different across markets.
“If I’m shopping,” explains Krishna Vemulapali, Trellis Co-Founder, “the odds are, I’ve interacted with multiple organic listings, multiple ad placements, before I’ve made that shopping decision.”
A tracking system that integrates data from Amazon Marketing Cloud, Shopify, your DTC website, and other international marketplaces can help you understand how your PPC campaigns impact the shopper journey.
What to Look for in a Multi-Market PPC Platform
As you expand into multiple regions, manual campaign management becomes increasingly impractical. A purpose-built tech solution can help you coordinate all your campaigns efficiently and effectively.
Here are a few key capabilities to look for in a PPC advertising platform for a multi-market use case:
- Cross-marketplace campaign creation and management
- Automated currency conversions for budgeting and reporting
- Centralized performance dashboards with standardized metrics
- Rule-based automation that can operate according to local marketplace conditions
- Bulk operations for efficient campaign maintenance
The days of “growth at all costs” are over. For modern sellers, it’s more important to grow profitably, even when expanding internationally. This means choosing technology partners that help you prioritize profitability, not just growth.
Build Your International PPC Foundation
Expanding your PPC campaigns to international marketplaces is one of the biggest growth opportunities for successful eCommerce brands. While the process requires careful planning and execution, the potential rewards—revenue diversification, expanded international customer base, and protection against marketplace disruptions—make it a worthwhile investment.
Trellis’ advanced eCommerce platform can help you synchronize and optimize international PPC ad campaigns. To see it in action, book your demo today.
