Google contextual advertising in Latvia

The Republic of Latvia is a state in Northern Europe with its capital in Riga. The population of the country is 1.89 million people. The country’s economy is focused on the banking sector, logistics, tourism and the food industry.

The country is a member of the European Union, thanks to which there are clear business conditions and progressive legislation. This makes opening a new business in the country and launching contextual advertising very promising and profitable.

Peculiarities of setting up contextual advertising in Latvia

Setting up Google contextual advertising in Latvia and localizing the campaign to the specifics of this country requires taking into account various nuances. Let’s deal with the most important of them.

Pendulum migration

Riga is the capital and largest city of the country. 641 thousand people live here, which corresponds to one third of the total population of Latvia. At the same time, Riga is a local business hub, where many people from the surrounding small towns and suburbs of the capital gather daily.

Therefore, when setting up an advertising campaign for Latvia, when determining geotargeting, you should place the maximum emphasis on the capital of the country. And also take into account that your target audience may, during the day, while in Riga, look for dry cleaning of clothes, which is located in Jurmala, for example.

Language targeting

The state language in Latvia is Latvian. However, in the country, a significant proportion of the population here speaks Russian – 24% of local residents can be attributed to the Russian-speaking national minority. This must be taken into account when setting up a Google Ads advertising campaign. To reach both target audiences, set up ads in two languages in your advertising account.

It should be noted that running advertising campaigns in two languages requires additional efforts from a contextual advertising specialist and is roughly equivalent to running two separate projects (since the semantic core, landing pages and ad texts for each campaign will be different). This also affects the cost of maintaining such multilingual projects.

High cost of advertising

Despite a relatively small GDP (compared to the Scandinavian countries or Germany), Latvia is still an EU country, which means that the cost of a click in Google AdWords is quite high here. This forces us to choose only the most effective contextual advertising tools, carefully work out negative keywords and pay a lot of attention to project analytics. Pay special attention to such tools:

1. Search ads. This tool allows us to attract the most targeted customers who are already ready to make a purchase on the site. Search advertising is suitable for almost any business niche. It is important to understand that the conversion of different keywords will be very different. Therefore, semantics must be divided into different groups. This division allows you to fix the cost of a lead separately for each category and exclude those groups for which advertising is not profitable for business. It is necessary to allocate brand-model queries, transactional keywords, phrases with geolocation into different groups. Include informational keywords in the campaign at the last stage, when the results for other groups have already been adjusted and suit you.
2. Shopping ads. Advertising on Google Shopping is only suitable for online stores. However, for them, it shows a very high efficiency. In many projects, the conversion cost for Shopping campaigns can be 30-40% lower than for search. That’s why Google Shopping can be a great tool for reducing advertising costs and increasing margins for the highly competitive Latvian advertising market.
3. Local advertising campaigns. They show excellent performance for local businesses. If you are targeting tourists or those who are looking for goods and services in a specific geolocation, local campaigns are what you need. They allow you to show ads on Google Maps, search, or partner sites from the Display Network to those who are in the immediate vicinity of your restaurant or beauty salon.
4. Remarketing campaigns. Since the cost of a click in Latvia is quite high, it is worth paying special attention to retaining the audience that has already visited your site, but has not ordered anything. Indeed, from the second touch, it is sometimes much easier to sell a product or service than from the first. Use multi-level remarketing campaigns for this purpose, and don’t forget about end-to-end analytics to understand where the client came from and which tool ultimately led to the conversion.

Cost of contextual advertising Google Ads for Latvia

The total price of contextual advertising in Latvia consists of the fee for the services of a marketing agency for setting up an advertising campaign and the budget for traffic from Google AdWords. The cost of setting up and maintaining contextual advertising, in turn, depends on many parameters. Among them – the number of categories of goods and services for which ads are shown, the region where ads are placed, the number of languages in the project, the number of advertising tools used, etc.

An important factor that affects the overall budget of an advertising campaign is the cost per click. An approximate indicator can be found in the Keyword Planner in Google Ads. Below are CPCs for popular lines of business, using various queries as an example:

• washing machine repair – $0.94;
• ventilation cleaning – $1.22;
• Plumbing services – $0.80;
• beauty salons (manicure) – $0.50;
• carpet cleaning – $1.28;
• permanent makeup – $0.48;
• dentist – $0.78;
• refrigerators – $0.92;
• Korean cosmetics – $0.94;
• dog food – $0.92;
• fertilizer for flowers – $0.59.

Using this data and the online contextual advertising calculator on our website, you can independently prepare a draft media plan for your project. Keep in mind that the actual cost per click in your account depends on many related parameters and may differ by +-40% from the one indicated above.

Google share in total search traffic in Latvia

The Google search engine is the most popular among users from Latvia. In the total share of search traffic, its share is 95.34%. According to this criterion, Google leaves far behind all the closest competitors. The second place in popularity among Latvians is occupied by Bing, with its share of 2.31%. Another 0.17% of locals choose DuckDuckGo. Other search engines are used by less than 1% of users from Latvia.

This monopoly position of Google in the local search engine market allows us to say that by setting up advertising in this search engine, you will get the maximum coverage of the audience from this country and multiply the potential of your advertising campaign.