As a part of its Indic Language initiatives, which included the launch of the recent Indic Language Internet Alliance, Google has announced that its Google Display Network now supports Hindi ads. This means that advertisers can build campaigns targeting Hindi language sites, using text, image, rich media and video display ad formats, for users who have Hindi as their language for Google products or visit sites on the Google Display Network. Google India has confirmed to MediaNama that with this change, they now allow Hindi keyword targeting in Google Adwords. How this helps Google and advertisers It allows better targeting and has higher clickthrough rates. Participants at MediaNama's #NAMAIndic* event had said that Indic language advertisements get click-throughs that are 2-4 times. Given that much of India's Internet usage is by bilingual users - those who can use the Internet in English and an Indic language, it's unlikely that many will have an Indic language as their primary language. Where this will work is, that Hindi language advertisements will be shown on websites that have text in Hindi. AdWords, which also does contextual targeting, doesn't translate ads or keywords. It's also worth noting that advertisers will have to create a separate campaign for language targeting in Google Adwords: the same campaign won't allow usage of multiple languages. Should have been done much earlier While this is a welcome move, it is rather late, and Google should have released language targeting a few years ago. Advertisers and agencies aren't exactly quick to adopt new…
