Multilingual Pay per Click is a system of advertising on the Internet whereby you bid on certain keywords in multiple languages and when an Internet user conducts a search using those keywords, your Ad will appear on the page. The more you are willing to pay and the more relevant your keywords are, the greater the chance of your Ad appearing.

The beauty of the system lies in the fact that you don't pay anything until someone actually clicks on your Ad and is taken to the landing page of your site. The idea is to drive as many people as possible to your site in the hope that they like what they see and become customers. Obviously with Multilingual Pay per Click you need to appeal to different cultures.

Businesses who want to run Multilingual Pay per Click campaigns on a global level therefore really need to understand how international search engines work on a local level in order to be successful. Some people mistakenly believe that all they have to do is translate their website and keywords into various languages and away they go. Wrong!

There's absolutely no point in creating a wonderful website in English and carefully choosing all your keywords and then have it all translated into another language without taking into account the fact that the translated words may not be appropriate search terms in each different country. Cultures vary considerably, and so does the way they communicate.

What you need to do is to start from scratch with each target language and a successful multilingual Pay per Click campaign will involve at its most basic the following:

- Having your website landing page and at least a few other pages translated specifically to appeal to the culture and country you want to target. There's no point in having your ads in another language if when they click through they land on an English site.

- Identifying the most popular search engines in various countries, don't make the mistake of thinking that Google is everyone's first choice even if they do have a massive global presence

- Identifying the key target phrases and search words that are the most popular in the language of the country you are targeting

- Ongoing tracking and analysis of your campaign

All of this can be time consuming and difficult if not impossible for you to do yourself if you don't have the knowledge and the expertise to do it. It cannot be said often enough; you cannot just translate the copy and the keywords and expect that to work, it simply won't. The translated words may be accurately translated but may not be the appropriate words that are used in another country.

Having your Multilingual Pay per Click campaign managed by someone who knows what they are doing is going to give you the best return on your investment. A Multilingual Pay per Click campaign doesn't end when it's created and implemented - ongoing tracking, monitoring and analysis of the results and tailoring of the campaign are also necessary to get the best return on your investment.