Google contextual advertising in Croatia

Croatia is a country in Central Europe, located on the Balkan Peninsula. Croatia has a population of 4.09 million and a GDP per capita of $29,828, which is the 49th in the world.

The country’s economy has a developed tourism sector, industry, and agriculture. The country has been a member of the European Union since 2013, which speaks of clear business rules and progressive legislation. All this makes contextual advertising in Croatia a very promising investment.

What to consider when setting up contextual advertising in Croatia?

When setting up contextual advertising in Croatia, it is important to take into account not only the avatars of potential customers, but also the geographical, cultural, social, and economic characteristics of the country. Let’s deal with the most important of them.

Language targeting

The official language in Croatia is Croatian. 96.1% of local residents use it to communicate. Another 1% of the population speaks Serbian. So ethnically the country is quite homogeneous. Therefore, if you are targeting locals in your advertising campaign, use Croatian when setting language targeting.

However, almost 8 months of the year, Croatia hosts the tourist season and millions of tourists visit the country. If the type of activity of your business is more focused on the guests of the country (hotels, restaurants, excursions), then it makes sense to take this into account in your advertising strategy.

Most often, guests come to the country from Germany (more than 4 million people a year), Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria. So, consider addressing these people in languages they understand.

Important! Setting up and maintaining Google Ads in two separate languages is equivalent to maintaining two separate projects for a contextual advertising specialist. Each project will require him to collect a semantic core, create groups and ad texts, and work with different target audiences. This will affect the cost of running an advertising campaign.

Geo targeting

When setting up location targeting, start from the target audience your ad is intended for. Focusing on local residents, take into account the population density map:

As you can see on the map above, the population density is minimal on the Adriatic coast. However, it is this region that you need to target if your business is designed for tourists.

The largest city in Croatia is its capital, Zagreb, with a population of 688 thousand people. It will be of interest to you almost regardless of the niche in which you work. The country’s largest international airport is located here, so millions of tourists pass through it every year.

Due to the fact that Zagreb, as a large city, attracts a lot of people from the surrounding cities and towns, the pendulum migration is quite pronounced during the day.

Thus, in the morning, being in Zagreb, a person can look for a dry cleaner, which is located, for example, in the town of Velika Mlaka (a suburb of Zagreb), and visit it in the evening or on weekends. This should be taken into account when determining location targeting in a Google AdWords advertising campaign.

Traffic cost

Since Croatia is an EU country with a solvent population, competition among advertisers is quite high here, which leads to a high cost per click.

That’s why when setting up Google Ads for Croatia, it is important to carefully study negative keywords and connect analytics. The structure of an advertising account should make it possible to track the cost of a click, lead, and application in the context of each individual category of goods or services.

Among advertising tools, pay attention to those that bring cheaper conversions. For almost any business niche, search advertising for transactional queries and geo-referenced keywords works well.

Take a look at the new Performance Max ad format – these are Google’s automated ads that allow you to use all available placements within one ad campaign.

Cost of contextual advertising Google Ads for Croatia

The cost of setting up an advertising campaign in Croatia will depend on the service package you choose:

1. For online stores. Setting up shopping ads, creating a merchant feed and adding it in automatic upload mode to the Google Merchant Center. Duration of cooperation – 1 month.
2. Complex project work. Includes a block of search advertising campaigns, banner ads on the Google Display Network and remarketing, a new Performance Max format, and a block of video ads on YouTube. Duration of setting – from 3 months.
3. PPC specialist consultation. If you set up an advertising campaign yourself, use the advice of our contextologist. You can find out the time and price of the consultation by leaving the order on the site.

To get a detailed estimate of the project, leave a request on our website – the manager will contact you and announce the exact cost of the work.

In addition to the cost of the work of a marketing agency, the cost of an advertising campaign in Croatia is reflected in the price of a click to the site from Google AdWords. For popular business topics for Croatia, we have listed the rates from the Keyword Planner:

• washing machine repair – $0.69;
• ventilation cleaning – $1.19;
• Plumbing services – $0.87;
• beauty salons (manicure) – $0.60;
• carpet cleaning – $0.77;
• permanent makeup – $0.55;
• dentist – $0.97;
• refrigerators – $0.81;
• Korean cosmetics – $0.71;
• dog food – $0.61;
• fertilizer for flowers – $0.44.

Peculiarities of the online advertising market in Croatia

The level of Internet penetration in Croatia is quite high – out of 4 million people, approximately 3.27 are active Internet users, which corresponds to a level of 80%:

At the same time, more than 2 million local residents are constantly shopping online. Before making a purchase, 55% of Croatians study product reviews on special sites. Pay attention to this when developing your marketing strategy.

Google is the most popular search engine in Croatia – it is used by 97.02% of local residents. Second place goes to Bing – it is used by 1.52% of Croats. The share of other search engines is less than 1%:

This gives us the opportunity to focus on Google AdWords as the main source of traffic for the site, as here you can find a paying audience for almost any online business.