How to localise a Meta ad for another market
Translating the words is the smallest part of it. Four things change at the border and a translated ad usually carries none of them, which is how a good ad becomes a wrong one in a new language.
You have an 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 translate 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. Plenty of products sell under a different name in a different country, and some of them for legal reasons rather than marketing ones.
- 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 it is a wrong claim in the one place a buyer is most likely to 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 is decided country by country, and the wording that clears one regulator is not the wording that clears the next.
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. Most brands have wording they never want 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, so a verb ending tells the reader how many people the ad is talking to and a translation picks one at random. German and French separate the formal and the informal address, and 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 retail vocabulary that is genuinely different in places.
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.
What to do instead
Write the product down once. Then answer four questions per country, once, and never again: the name, the price, the offer, the cleared claims.
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.
No. Translation changes the words. Localisation changes the words, the price, the offer, the claims and usually the landing page, because those are the things that differ at a border.
For a caption you might. For a headline on a picture, the failure modes are the ones a machine translation is worst at: register, grammatical number, the case ending on your product name, and the fact that it will happily translate a claim you are not allowed to make there.
Set. A converted price is an exchange rate, not an offer, and it produces numbers no brand would choose.
They need separate market answers. Same language, different price, different offer, different landing page, and some genuinely different retail vocabulary.
The honest answer is that the ad does not get made for that market until it does. A tool that fills the gap from another country has made a commercial decision for you.
As many as you actually sell in. The cost is four answers per country, once, rather than a new product each time.
Not usually, and it should not by default. Text length changes between languages, so the type has to be re-fitted to the space, but the frame you approved is the thing worth keeping.