Google contextual advertising in Moldova

The contextual advertising market in Moldova is at the stage of active growth. This small but rapidly growing country of about 3 million people is of interest to advertisers looking for new promising destinations.

Although Internet penetration in Moldova is not yet as high as in Europe, it is growing steadily. More and more Moldovans are using the Internet for shopping, entertainment and searching for information. This opens up good opportunities for promoting goods and services through Google Ads in Moldova.

Next, we will consider the specifics of this emerging market: its potential and characteristics of the audience, trends and growth prospects, as well as practical recommendations for setting up effective advertising campaigns in Moldova, taking into account the local mentality and preferences of local users.

Peculiarities of setting up contextual advertising in Moldova

Despite its small size, the online advertising market in Moldova is developing dynamically and has a good potential for growth. More and more international companies use the setting of contextual advertising in Moldova to attract the target audience and increase sales.

However, before launching advertising in Google Ads for Moldova, it is important to study the specifics of the local market and the characteristics of the Moldovan Internet audience. This will help to best adapt advertising campaigns to local specifics and achieve maximum efficiency from the invested budget.

Language targeting

In Moldova, the main language is Romanian. It is owned by the vast majority of the population – about 80%. This is the state language of the country, which is used for office work, teaching at schools and universities.

Russian is also widely spoken in Moldova. It is owned by approximately 65% of the population. This is due to the long stay of the republic in the Soviet Union. Russian is often used in everyday life, especially among the older generation of local residents.

When setting up Google Ads for Moldova, the best solution would be to create two separate campaigns – in Romanian and Russian. This will allow you to cover both language audiences as relevant as possible. Advertising texts and landing pages should be adapted to each language – translated and localized taking into account cultural and mental characteristics.

At the same time, it is important to remember that for a PPC specialist, this is tantamount to running two separate advertising campaigns in terms of the volume of tasks to be solved. It is necessary to collect semantics separately for each language, carry out clustering, create declarations and divide them into groups. This will affect the final cost of the contextologist’s work.

Target audience

When setting up advertising campaigns in Moldova, it is important to understand the characteristics of the local audience and take them into account in targeting. About 93% of the population of Moldova are ethnic Moldovans. Orthodoxy prevails, but among the locals there are also Protestants, Catholics and Muslims. Religion has a noticeable influence on culture and traditions.

The age structure of the population of Moldova is characterized by a significant predominance of young people. The proportion of young people under the age of 30 in this country is about 40%. These are active Internet users who are open to new technologies and innovations.

Understanding these features will help you correctly segment your target audience, choose the best advertising tools and create the most relevant ads. In most topics, it will make sense to focus specifically on the active and able-bodied target audience, which makes up a significant proportion of local residents.

Geo targeting

Most of the inhabitants live in cities, especially in the country’s capital, Chisinau. It is the largest city and economic center of the country, with a population of about 670 thousand people.

Government agencies, leading banks, retail chains, IT companies are located here. Chisinau has the highest level of income and consumption. When setting up an advertising campaign, be sure to take into account Chisinau, as well as its suburbs – they are the most promising in terms of getting traffic and sales.

The second largest city of Balti has about 150 thousand inhabitants. It is an important industrial hub and transport hub. The food, light industry, and mechanical engineering are developed here. Also here is one of the largest universities.

Among other large cities, it is worth noting Bendery (90 thousand), Rybnitsa (85 thousand), Magpies (40 thousand) and others. These are developed regional centers with high business activity.

Also promising are border areas with neighboring countries – Romania and Ukraine. Cross-border trade, logistics, and tourism are actively developing here, which contributes to the dynamic development of business.

Rural residents make up about 30% of the total population of Moldova. Mostly these are small villages and villages engaged in agriculture. The income level of the villagers is much lower than in the cities. There are also fewer earning opportunities and lower purchasing power.

Internet coverage in rural areas is not as wide as in cities. According to various estimates, only 30-50% of the rural population has access to the Internet. Therefore, when targeting in contextual advertising, these regions will bring a minimal effect. It is better to focus on the population of large regional centers, where purchasing power and Internet coverage are much higher.

Level of competition

The level of competition in online advertising in Moldova is still relatively low compared to more developed countries in the European Union. This factor should be taken into account when setting up advertising campaigns – you can get a lot more clicks with the same budget.

The average cost of a click in contextual advertising does not exceed 0.2-0.5 dollars, which is much lower than in Germany, Canada or the USA. Competition is higher in niches such as finance, e-commerce, home appliances. But even here it is moderate.

In general, this opens up good opportunities for new players to enter their niche at a relatively low cost. With proper Google Ads setup, you can quickly capture market share and increase audience reach.

Promotion tools

The following tools can be used to promote in Moldova:

1. Contextual advertising in search. Works well due to relatively low competition and cost per click. Allows you to effectively reach the target audience.
2. Targeted advertising in social networks (Facebook, Instagram, VKontakte). Social networks are very popular in Moldova due to their focus on the youth target audience.
3. Shopping Ads (Google Shopping). They are displayed in search results and allow showing the user product cards with prices and photos. They show great efficiency when promoting online stores.
4. Video ads. Due to the high popularity of YouTube in Moldova, there are good opportunities for video marketing. The format allows you to vividly present the brand to the user and increase its recognition.
5. Google Performance Max. A new tool from Google that allows you to combine different channels of interaction with the audience within a single advertising platform. The system itself optimizes the budget and advertising platforms to achieve the set KPIs.

Cost of contextual advertising Google Ads in Moldova

The price of contextual advertising in Moldova can vary greatly depending on the subject and the level of competition in the niche. Also, the cost is influenced by the quality of the landing page, the relevance of ads to the user’s request, the experience of the PPC specialist, and much more.

CPC in Google AdWords also plays an important role. For popular niches, we give it below:

• refrigerators — $0.12;
• cosmetics from Korea — $0.14;
• beauty salons — $0.15;
• dentist — $0.49;
• dog food – $0.17;
• plant fertilizer — $0.13;
• toys for cats – $0.17.

Given the relatively low competition, contextual advertising in Moldova can show very high efficiency. The main thing is to set up the campaign correctly and achieve a high CTR and conversion for customer requests.

Google share in total search traffic in Moldova

As we can see from the SimilarWeb service statistics, Google is almost an absolute monopolist among all search engines in the Moldovan market – it accounts for as much as 97.19% of the local organic traffic.

At the same time, its closest competitors, Yandex and Bing, are far behind and do not receive any significant share of visitors. Therefore, when setting up advertising in Moldova, we recommend focusing mainly on Google.