A buyer in Europe who types the name of a component, a machine or a material into a search engine has a need today. That is what search advertising sells: the position next to the result, for that person, at that moment. It does not create demand. If nobody in the country searches for your product, an advertisement will not change that, and the article on professional social advertising covers what to do in that case. If people do search, the question becomes practical: can a company based in China open an account, pay for it and keep it open? It can. The account is where it usually goes wrong first.
What blocks an account at the opening
Google's own services are blocked or unreliable from mainland China, so many companies reach the advertising interface through a workaround, or give the work to someone elsewhere. The workaround is itself a source of problems. An account opened from one place, logged into from another, paid from a third and described by a website hosted in a fourth looks, to an automated system, like an account that has been taken over. The platform does not publish a rule that says so; what can be observed is that accounts with unstable access and inconsistent identity are the ones that receive a verification request or a suspension for suspicious payment activity.
- Access that keeps changing. Several people logging into the same account from different networks and devices, or one shared login passed around a team. Give each person a named user, switch on two-step verification, and keep the main access point stable.
- An identity that does not match. The legal name of the advertiser, the name on the payment method, the business name on the website and the address in the account differ. Choose one spelling of the company's name and use it everywhere.
- A website that does not say who sells. No company name, no address, no contact, no shipping or returns information. The advertising policies treat that as misrepresentation, and the ads are disapproved before the account is judged.
- A second account after a refusal. Opening another account with the same company, card or website to get round a suspension is treated as circumventing the system, and ends both. Appeal the first one with the documents asked for.
- Advertiser verification left unfinished. The platform may ask the advertiser to prove the legal name, the country and the activity, with a registration document and a representative's details. The request has a deadline, and ignoring it pauses the ads.
Paying for it from a Chinese company
Three things are set when the account is created and cannot be changed afterwards: the country of the billing profile, the currency and the time zone. A wrong choice means a new account, with the history lost. Decide the currency by the market, not by your own accounts: advertise to France in euros, and let the difference be an exchange cost on your side. The billing profile has to name the company as it is registered. Then pick the payment method; the table sets out the usual four. Before the first payment, tell your accountant: a payment abroad for advertising has a tax treatment in China, and the invoice you receive decides what you can record.
| Payment option | How it works | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Company card | The platform charges the card as spend builds up. Quick to set up | The cardholder name must match the advertiser. A declined payment pauses the ads, and a Chinese bank may refuse foreign charges until it is told to allow them |
| Manual payment by bank transfer | You add funds in advance and the ads run until the balance is used | The ads stop when the balance reaches zero, and a transfer takes time to be credited. Keep a margin and watch the balance |
| Monthly invoicing | You pay on an invoice after the spend, under a credit arrangement | Granted by the platform after review, not on request, and rarely at the start. Plan for card or prepayment first |
| Authorised reseller or agency | A local partner holds the billing relationship and invoices you, possibly in your own currency and with a local tax invoice | A fee or margin on top, and the question of who owns the account and its data. Ask for administrator access in your company's name |
Targeting by country and by language: two different settings
Location targeting decides where the person is. Language targeting decides which language the person uses in their browser or search interface. Neither depends on the language of your advertisement, and a campaign aimed at a country with a language setting that does not match will simply not show. Choose the option that targets people present in the location, not the default that also includes people merely interested in it: it would show your ads to people in China searching for information about Europe, including your own team. Exclude the places where you do not deliver. There is no practical single setting called Europe, and the reason is not technical: the competitors, the words, the price level and the legal pages are different in each country.
- Build one campaign per country and language. Belgium needs French and Dutch separately, and each of them is a campaign with its own keywords and its own page.
- Write the keywords in the local language from what buyers type, not from a translation of your catalogue. A technical term, a trade name and a colloquial name can all coexist for the same part, and the buyer uses the one they were taught.
- Add negative keywords from the first day: jobs, free downloads, second-hand, repair, and the words that bring consumers when you sell to businesses. Read the search terms report weekly and extend the list.
- Write the advertisement and the landing page in the same language, and make the page answer the exact search: the product, its specification, the contact route. A home page is not an answer.
- Schedule the ads on the buyer's working hours, in the buyer's time zone, and make sure someone can answer a request in that window. An enquiry that waits a day loses to the supplier who replied the same hour.
The landing page is part of the account
The platform reads the page behind the advertisement, and so does the buyer. Both look for the same things: who the company is, where it is, how to reach it, what it sells and on what terms. For shopping-type advertising the product feed needs shipping and returns information per country, and a missing policy is a common reason for disapproval. The page has to load quickly from Europe, which a server in China rarely does. Because European visitors are tracked by the measurement tags, the page also needs the consent banner and privacy notice described in the articles on legal pages and on the EU data representative, and the platform asks the site to pass on the visitor's consent choice so that measurement works without breaking the rules. Without it, the account can run and tell you nothing about what it produced.
Before opening an account, fix four things on paper: the exact legal name and address of the advertiser, which currency and time zone the account will carry, which payment method will be used and who holds it, and which named person will log in from which stable connection. Then look at the website as a stranger would: does it say who sells, where, with what policies and how to reach them? Only then create the account, once. An account built on consistent facts is the one that is not asked to prove them later.