How to localise a Meta ad for another market

You have a Meta ad that works. It is running in your home market, it has been live for months, and the obvious next move is to run it in the country next door.

So you localise the ad for another market by translating it. And the version that comes back is grammatically fine, reads like a translation, quotes the wrong price, and promises something you are not allowed to promise there.

Translation is one of four things, and it is the easy one

Four facts about a product change at a border, and none of them travel on their own.

• The name. A product can sell under a different name in a different country.
• The price. Not the converted price. The price you actually charge there, which is usually a rounder number than any exchange rate produces.
• The offer. Free delivery over a threshold in one country, a bundle in another, a sale that only runs where the season is the same.
• The claims. What you may say about the product, in that country, having cleared it.

An ad is short, so all four of those are usually on the picture. A translation touches one of them.

The price is where it goes visibly wrong

A converted price is not a price. If you sell at €29 in Germany, you do not sell at £24.86 in Britain; you sell at £25, or £24.99, and which one is a decision somebody made about your brand.

Worse, an ad that keeps the source market's number is not a translation at all. It is a wrong claim in a new language, and a buyer can screenshot it.

The rule worth adopting is that a missing price stays missing. A tool that fills the gap with the price from another country has quietly made a commercial decision on your behalf.

The claims are where it goes expensively wrong

What you may say about a supplement, a cosmetic or a financial product depends on the country you sell in.

That is not a translation problem and no translation engine can solve it. The only version that works is a list of claims you have already cleared for that country, and copy written inside that list rather than around it.

The same is true in reverse. Your brand may have wording it never wants used anywhere, and that list belongs to the product rather than to a market.

The language itself is not always the easy half

Some languages punish short copy harder than others.

Slovenian counts one, two, and many, and ZRC SAZU's note on the Slovene dual says it keeps that dual in all inflectional word types. So a verb ending tells the reader how many people the ad is talking to and a translation has to pick one. German has a formal Sie and an informal du, and the Goethe-Institut on du and Sie says adults who do not know each other use Sie, as they do when shopping. A campaign that switches halfway through reads as though nobody wrote it. Languages with cases change the ending of your product name depending on the job it is doing in the sentence, and a name dropped in unchanged makes the sentence around it stop agreeing.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary grammar of the market you are selling into, and it is exactly what gets flattened when copy is translated word for word rather than written again.

Two markets in one language is the common case

Germany and Austria share a language and share nothing else: different price, different offer, different landing page, and a vocabulary that is different in places. The EU's protocol on Austrian terms of German lists specific Austrian terms and gives them the same status as the terms used in Germany.

The United States and the United Kingdom are the same shape. So are Spain and Mexico, and France and Belgium. A market is a country and a language, and treating them as one field is the mistake that makes people think localisation is a translation feature.

Meta treats them as two settings. Its help page on language targeting says a language is an optional choice in the audience settings, there for reaching people who understand a language that is not widely spoken in your selected location.

How to localise a Meta ad for another market

Write the product down once. Then answer four questions per country, once, and never again: the name, the price, the offer, the cleared claims. To hear how a country words an offer like yours, see its competitors' Meta ads first.

Ads Manager has a place for the writing, where Meta offers it. Meta's help page on dynamic language optimization lets you add up to 48 languages beside your default, with your own headline and primary text for each and a new image if you want one.

After that, localising an ad is a request rather than a project. The copy is written again in the new language, idiomatically, with that market's own answers in it, and the layout you approved stays where it was. What you get back is a version of the ad rather than a replacement for it, so the original is still there beside it.

That is what Nomi does. A market on a product holds its own four answers, it refuses to borrow another market's when one is missing, and asking for the German cut of an ad you already like takes a sentence.