Copywriter at Promodo
Over nearly three years as a copywriter, I’ve written for US and European startups and companies, including SE Ranking. I enjoy working with words—finding the right phrasing, organizing ideas, and turning them into clear and useful content that shows real value and helps businesses grow.
When you enter a new market, you face challenges — getting your first sales, building brand awareness among the local audience, and holding your own against competitors. You must also comply with the new market's rules and handle everything else from scratch.
That's why it's important to understand, before launch, what demand exists in the market, who you'll be competing with, how to adapt PPC to the local audience, and how much to invest so you're not spending your budget blindly. Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead, explains how to get this right.
Read how we helped our client grow its awareness in Poland and increase conversions within a target ROAS in our case study.
When entering a new market, the starting conditions can be completely different:
When entering a new country, there's a temptation to immediately focus on people from your home market. After all, a familiar brand always feels closer to them. But if you're entering a new market, your main focus should be the local audience.
A brand can certainly run separate targeting for expatriates from its home country living abroad, but that shouldn't replace efforts to reach local buyers. They drive core demand and set the context in which the brand will compete in the new market.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
On top of that, when building a strategy for another country, you'll need to localize the website, messaging, pricing, and other elements. It may not match what your home-market audience is actually looking for.
One fashion brand we helped enter a foreign market launched with a localized website and, accordingly, localized prices that were higher than in its home market. As a result, home-market shoppers living in that country who already knew the brand ended up buying from the home-market website instead and asking friends or relatives to send them the product.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
Overall, your campaign logic and approach stay the same, but the content needs to be adapted for each specific market.
Adapt the following for every market:
What stays consistent across all markets:
Start by looking at the demand for your category, who's already serving that audience, how strong the competition is, and whether your brand is known there at all.
At the outset, define two sets of goals:
Budget allocation depends on this too. If both the brand and the category are largely unknown, you'll need to invest more upfront in building demand and awareness. If the category is already well known but the brand is new, you can shift budget toward performance campaigns and conversions more quickly.
That means there's no single ideal ratio of brand-to-performance spend that fits every new market. First, figure out exactly what you need to build: demand for the category or demand for your brand. Use that as your starting point when planning the PPC strategy.
The most common mistake is judging markets solely by ROAS and allocating more budget to the market that shows the highest number. But a high ROAS doesn't automatically mean a market is worth scaling. Demand there might be so limited that there's simply nowhere to put additional spend.
Calculate your test budget based on the expected traffic volume and CPC in that market. Compare those projections with your historical conversion rate and target CPA, and you'll get a rough estimate of how much you need to test the hypothesis.
From there, base your decisions not on ROAS but on scaling potential: is demand sufficient, and do CPA and margin hold up as budget increases?
Consider this hypothetical:
Revisit your budget allocation after each testing phase: allocate more to markets with confirmed potential, continue testing longer in markets with mixed results, and cut investment where ad optimization alone can't fix the problem.
You don't need to launch your full campaign lineup in a new market right away. First, determine which demand you can already convert into sales and which demand still needs to be created. That will determine your campaign mix and its KPIs.
It's important not to hold every campaign to the same ROAS bar. Brand Search targets an audience that already knows the brand and searches for it by name. Demand Gen, by contrast, reaches people who may not yet know the brand or the product at all. So a lower direct ROAS for Demand Gen can be a perfectly normal outcome if the campaign is bringing in new audiences and growing branded demand.
In a market where the brand is barely known, Brand Search simply won't have enough volume to be a main sales driver. It makes more sense to invest in Category Search and Demand Gen there, then scale up Brand Search as awareness grows.
If the category already has stable demand and the brand is new to the market, you can shift emphasis toward Category Search and Performance Max, while using Demand Gen in parallel to expand your audience.
The evaluation criteria stay the same across markets:
The set of metrics is the same across markets: ROAS, CPA, conversions, revenue, average order value, new customers, and branded traffic. What differs is only the benchmarks and targets you compare them against.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
For example, a 300% ROAS might be a great result in one market and a disappointing one in another. That depends on category competition, traffic cost, purchasing power, average order value, and margin. So don't carry a target ROAS or CPA over from one market to another without checking it first.
It's better to evaluate results using these criteria:
For instance, a higher CPC on its own doesn't mean a market is underperforming. If a more expensive click leads to more conversions, or customers with a higher average order value or better margin, the overall economics can still work out in your favor.
The same applies to branded traffic. In a new market, it can start out low, and that's okay. What matters more is whether the volume of branded search queries grows as you keep investing in advertising. If performance metrics haven't hit target yet but branded demand is steadily climbing, that can be a sign the market is gradually warming up.
It's important to launch and track branded traffic, but keep in mind that when entering a new market, there may be almost none of it at first. So shouldn't focus on it fully in the first few months.
At the same time, a brand campaign matters not just for capturing existing branded demand, but for tracking how that demand evolves. That way, we can see branded traffic grow over time, along with brand awareness and recognition in the new location.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
PPC can bring a user to your site, but it won't always earn the trust of someone seeing your brand for the first time. That's why, in a new market, support your PPC strategy with other approaches and actively build your brand.
For example, European consumers are very cautious about new brands. They research the website, the brand, and the materials in detail before anything else. You can't just launch ads and expect results right away (especially with clothing) — you'll get clicks and spend budget, but no real outcome.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
First and foremost: local influencers. If a creator the local audience trusts talks about your brand, it's easier to win that audience's trust. These kinds of recommendations can also boost branded search. People start searching for you by name after seeing an influencer's content.
You can build a list of nano- and micro-influencers, who often carry more trust, especially within local communities — and typically cost less to work with.
There are also factors that aren't part of marketing directly but still have a direct impact on ad performance. Local warehousing, for example.
If a brand ships products from another country in 2 weeks, while a local competitor delivers in 3 days, even a strong ad campaign won't fix that gap. So if you can get your product closer to the buyer and shorten delivery times, you remove one of the main reasons people choose the local brand instead.
— Anastasiia Yakuba, PPC Team Lead at Promodo
A physical store can also help you earn local buyers' trust. But it's a much bigger investment — rent, staff, equipment, and upkeep add up quickly. So don't open a store just to boost awareness. First, confirm there's real demand, that the market genuinely has potential for that kind of investment, and that your brand is actually ready to make it.
Copying a strategy that worked well in one market isn't enough when building a PPC strategy for another.
When entering a new market, adapt your messaging, semantics, and offers to the local audience, and assess demand and competition. Evaluate not just ROAS but scaling potential — whether you can grow your budget without hurting your unit economics. And allocate your budget to work on sales and demand generation at the same time, especially if the brand is still largely unknown in that market.
Copywriter at Promodo
Over nearly three years as a copywriter, I’ve written for US and European startups and companies, including SE Ranking. I enjoy working with words—finding the right phrasing, organizing ideas, and turning them into clear and useful content that shows real value and helps businesses grow.
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