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The promise of incremental returns is what drives businesses overseas. But amid the global trade uncertainty, can businesses still export confidently and grow profitably?
Those ahead of the curve have found an innovative way to go global with confidence and efficiency. Their “secret” solution — AI-powered ads.
AI-powered ads solutions can help businesses identify new markets with a prospect of profit. And when combined with consented first-party data, they let businesses engage new customers with speed, scale, and efficiency.
The Vietnam-based visa and concierge services group, The One Digi Corp, for example, used AI-powered Google ads solutions to identify and enter 10 profitable markets within months of starting its international expansion journey, doubling its sales revenue.
As for Thai online travel agency 12Go, which was already running international ad campaigns, its conversion value grew by 3.3X in just six weeks after using Google’s AI-powered ads.
3-step guide to international expansion with AI-powered ads
AI-powered ads can help businesses in all stages of international growth expand profitably. Here are three steps your business can take to go global with AI-powered ads.
To confidently identify markets with the prospect of profit, set up a Search campaign with broad match and Target CPA (cost per action) bidding.
Start by using Keyword Planner to find keywords most relevant to your export category in global markets, and most likely to perform well based on forecasts in the tool. Then add those keywords to your Search campaign with broad match, and set it to run in all international markets.
Because broad match is designed to capture diverse intents and nuances to maximise the reach and coverage of your ad, it will help you spot new markets and new areas of demand where people are searching for your category of export.
Finally, from among the markets showing demand, pin down those with a prospect of profit using Target CPA bidding. Set a target CPA at your desired level below the breakeven cost. The markets where your ads drive the highest conversion rates at, or below, your target cost are the ones with the prospect of profit.
After entering new markets with the prospect of profit, expand your reach in-market efficiently with AI-powered ads.
Performance Max lets you reach new customers at scale across all of Google’s channels, including Search, Display, YouTube, and Maps with a single campaign. Additionally, it uses the full power of Google AI, from end to end, to improve your bidding and generate creatives that will optimise your performance across the channels.
To reach potential customers even before they’re searching for your products, use Demand Gen. The campaign, powered by Google AI, creates an optimised mix of high-impact visuals and messages that is served across YouTube and Google’s most immersive surfaces, including Shorts, Discover, and Gmail. The creatives generate demand by engaging new, qualified audiences through lookalike segments, which are based on those who’d previously visited your site or made a purchase.
To grow profitably in new markets, you’ll also need to engage valuable customers. Bidding strategies powered by Google AI help you achieve that by driving higher conversion volume or conversion value at cost efficiency.
Target CPA bidding, for instance, lets you achieve your ROI goal by using real-time signals, such as location and time of day, to maximise the volume of customer conversions within your target CPA.
As for Target ROAS (return on ad spend) bidding, it lets you maximise the value of customer conversions. Once you have conversion values assigned to customer transactions and conversion tracking set up, you can use the bidding strategy to optimise for high-value conversions to achieve your target ROAS.
To further boost the performance of your AI-powered campaigns, link it to your consented first-party data.
Google Ads Data Manager, for example, lets you easily connect data from disparate sources in one place. With it, you can easily enable features like enhanced conversions for leads. The latter matches offline conversions back to your Google Ads campaigns and improves the accuracy of your conversion measurement so you can get high-quality leads.
Google Ads Data Manager also simplifies the use of Customer Match, which lets you use your online and offline data to reach and re-engage valuable customers across Search, the Shopping tab, Gmail, YouTube, and Display.
How 2 businesses used AI-powered ads to go global
AI-powered ads are a game-changer for businesses expanding overseas, whether they are a fledgeling exporter or an established one.
The One Digi Corp started advertising its new visa services website to foreign travellers visiting Vietnam in 2024. It wanted to scale its campaign internationally, so it partnered with Google to conduct a six-week pilot using broad match and conversion-based bidding.
Following the success of the pilot, the business refined its bidding strategy to Target CPA bidding and scaled up its AI-powered ads campaign. It expanded across 10 markets with the prospect of profit and in a few months, its conversion volume increased by 135%, its revenue doubled, and its cost per conversion fell by 20%.
Experienced exporters can also use AI-powered ads to supercharge business results. The online travel agency, 12Go, which used to set up its international ad campaigns manually, ran a six-week A/B test from Nov. to Dec. 2023 to see how AI-powered campaigns would improve performance.
It used broad match and also tapped into its consented first-party data to strengthen its Maximise conversion value bidding strategy. The strong results of the pilot — 3.3X higher conversion value and 2.6X more conversions — led 12Go to roll out AI-powered ads solutions to its other campaigns.
Wherever your business is on its export journey, pair your consented first-party data with AI-powered ads. It’ll help you find and enter new markets efficiently, and grow your profits confidently.
Contributors:
Chatkamol Supanusonti, Account Manager, LCS Thailand; Danny Phi, Account Strategist,
GCS Vietnam; Gama Aprilian, Regional Product Lead, GCS APAC; Loc Hoang, App Growth
Manager, GCS SEA; Panarini Tima, Performance Solutions Specialist, LCS Thailand; Ploy
Intarathachang, Industry Manager, LCS Thailand; Poon Supapit Rungruangpol, Account
Executive, GCS Thailand; Sifan Ouyang, Product Specialist, GCS APAC
