Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
How's your Chinese?
Published January 2024. Last updated July 2026.
Google shows English adverts to people who searched in Chinese even though the campaign language is set to English.
I spotted this when I saw 新西兰 雇主 担保 工 签 in a search terms report. Google translate tells me that this means New Zealand Employer Sponsored Work Visa. As it turns out this is a good fit for the campaign.
But, although the search was a good fit, the lead wasn't.
The person who enquired was able to communicate in English using Google Translate, but they weren't fluent enough to have a conversation with my client. This meant that no transaction was possible and the cost to acquire the lead was wasted.
We don't want to pay for leads we can't talk to.
I found a list with the 5 000 most common Chinese characters and turned it into a text file suitable for copying and pasting into a shared negative keyword list. The final Chinese characters negative keyword list contains 4841 characters as Google rejected some.
I've added them as broad match negative keywords which theoretically should stop our ads showing for Chinese-language searches.
If you want to do something similar you can grab my list by right-clicking and selecting the download or save option: Chinese characters negative keyword list.
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