Google Ads Search Terms by Language: Block or Keep?

Why foreign-language search terms show up in an English campaign

They show up because Google's language setting is about the user, not about what they typed. Google guesses which languages a person understands from signals it does not fully disclose. If it decides a user can read English, and their search matches one of your keywords, your English ad can run, even when the search was in Spanish, Polish or Vietnamese.

Take a plumbing company in Houston running broad match on "emergency plumber". Over a month the search terms report might include:

• emergency plumber near me
• plomero de emergencia cerca de mi
• plomero 24 horas houston
• encanador de emergência
• сантехник срочно

None of these is in English. All of them are about the same thing. Broad match works on meaning, so a query in another language that means "emergency plumber" is the kind of match it's built to find. The language setting doesn't stop it if the person searching also counts as an English user.

Most of the pages ranking for this topic stop at the setting: pick the right languages, write ads in those languages, done. Several of them also report that Google is loosening or retiring the language setting for some campaign types. Whatever state the setting is in on your account, the conclusion doesn't change. The language setting was never a query filter. Only keywords and negative keywords decide which words you pay for.

What language targeting can and cannot do for you

Language targeting narrows the audience. It doesn't clean up the queries. Treat it as one coarse control and leave the detailed work to negatives.

What it can do:

• Keep your ads away from users Google is fairly sure don't understand any language you selected.
• Let you run a separate campaign for a language you actually serve, with ads written in that language.

What it cannot do:

• Read the query. A bilingual user with an English phone who searches in Spanish is still an English user.
• Separate a language from a location. Someone in Monterrey searching in English is an English user. Someone in Houston searching in Spanish may be both. If your problem is where the clicks come from rather than what language they're in, that's a different leak, and it starts in the same report. See wrong location clicks in the search terms.
• Catch false friends. A word that is spelled the same in two languages but means something else gets through every setting there is.

So "set language targeting correctly" is advice for the audience layer. It's needed, but it's not enough. The waste you see in the search terms report sits a layer below that.

How to find foreign-language terms in the search terms report

The search terms report has no language column, so you have to find these terms yourself. Three filters catch most of them: non-English characters, common short words from other languages, and scripts other than Latin. Do this on an export, not in the interface.

Search terms for Search, Shopping and Performance Max are all reported in campaign_search_term_view, so one export can cover all three. Display, Video and App report no search terms. Any language mismatch there doesn't show up as a query you can read or block.

Filter 1: characters English doesn't use

In Google Sheets, put this next to the search term column:

=REGEXMATCH(A2, "[^\x00-\x7F]")

It flags any term that contains a character outside basic ASCII: accents (é, ñ, ü, ã), Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and so on. It also flags a few English terms with curly apostrophes or brand names like "Nestlé", so read the results before you act on them.

Filter 2: short words from other languages

Many foreign queries have no accents at all. "plomero 24 horas houston" passes Filter 1. Catch these with a list of the short, common words of the languages you expect:

=REGEXMATCH(LOWER(A2), "\b(para|cerca|precio|barato|gratis|donde|como|pour|prix|pas cher|fur|und|preis|kosten|per|prezzo|com|preco)\b")

Change the list to fit your market. A US home services account mostly needs Spanish. A Miami account may need Portuguese and Haitian Creole too. A software account selling worldwide may need ten languages.

Filter 3: sort by cost, then by count

Once you've flagged the terms, sort them two ways. By cost, to find the few that cost real money. By number of terms, to see how widely the leak is spread. Foreign-language waste is usually a long tail: dozens of terms that each cost a few dollars, with no single line big enough to catch your eye. That pattern is covered in low-volume terms that add up.

To put a number on it: say the flagged terms come to 60 clicks a month at $2.50 each. That's $150 a month, or $1,800 a year, for clicks your business may not be able to serve. Whether that matters depends on your budget. The point is you won't see it until you add it up.

Some of these terms will be missing from the report entirely, because Google hides low-volume queries for privacy. The terms you can see only give you a sample of the leak. Search terms hidden by privacy explains how to estimate the rest.

If this is your first full pass through the report, how to analyze a search terms report in 20 minutes gives you the order to work in. The language filters fit in as one extra column.

Block, ignore or embrace: sort by whether you can serve the buyer

Don't decide by language. Decide by whether the business can turn this searcher into a customer. A Spanish query from someone you can serve is a lead. An English query from someone you can't serve is waste. Language is just a quick way to spot terms worth checking.

Every flagged term goes into one of three groups.

Embrace: same intent, and you can serve it

"plomero de emergencia cerca de mi" for a plumber whose dispatcher speaks Spanish is a buyer. Check the conversion column. If terms like this convert, don't block them. Give them a home:

• A separate campaign or ad group targeting Spanish, with Spanish keywords and Spanish ads.
• A landing page in Spanish, or at least a clear "Hablamos español" with a phone number.
• A Spanish negative list on the English campaign once the Spanish campaign is live. That way each query goes to the ad written for it and the two campaigns don't compete for it.

That last step matters more than it looks. While Spanish queries run through the English campaign, they get English ads and English pages, so they convert worse than they would in a proper Spanish campaign. Smart Bidding then learns from those weak results. How junk queries skew your bids explains how that bad data spreads into the bids for your good terms.

Block: same intent, but nobody can serve it

The Portuguese and Russian plumbing queries above have the right intent. If nobody at the company speaks those languages, the lead goes nowhere. The caller hangs up, or the form arrives in a language nobody reads. These go on the negative list.

Check one thing before you block: did any of them convert? A form fill in Portuguese may still have turned into a job. Maybe the customer's kid translated, or the job was simple enough to need few words. If a language you thought you couldn't serve keeps converting, that's worth telling the business owner before you cut it off.

Block always: different meaning

These are false friends: words spelled the same, or nearly the same, in two languages but meaning different things. In accounts we audit they're rare but expensive per click, because they have nothing to do with what you sell.

• "pain" is "bread" in French. A pain clinic on broad match can run into "pain de mie" or "pain sans gluten".
• "gift" is "poison" in German. "Gift" queries from German speakers aren't shopping for presents.
• "carpeta" is "folder" in Spanish. A carpet cleaner bidding on broad "carpet" can match it as a close variant.
• "librairie" is "bookshop" in French, not a library.

Block these as exact or phrase negatives for the full foreign phrase ("pain de mie", "pain au chocolat"), never as the single shared word, or you'll block your own keyword. Close variants are why "carpeta" can get through at all. Why exact isn't exact covers the mechanics.

Ignore: too small to matter, for now

A single impression in Korean with no click costs nothing. You don't need a negative for every foreign query that ever shows up. When to block terms with no clicks sets out where that line sits. Watch the term. Block it when it starts costing money or when it keeps coming back.

Building language negatives that hold

You can't block a language word by word. Every language has hundreds of thousands of words. What works is a short list of the most common short words in that language, plus the specific terms that actually showed up in your report. Here is how to build it so it doesn't backfire.

Start with short common words, not with topic words

"para", "precio", "cerca", "barato", "donde" turn up in a large share of Spanish commercial queries and almost never in English ones. Ten to twenty of these words, added as phrase-match negatives, catch more Spanish traffic than two hundred plumbing words in Spanish would.

Pick carefully. Some short words are risky:

• "de" shows up in English brand and place names (De Walt, Delaware searched as "de", "de-icer"). Leave it out.
• "con" is also "con" in English, as in "pros and con". Low risk for most accounts, but check.
• "per" is Italian for "for" and English for "per hour". A rental or service business with "per day" pricing queries would block its own buyers.
• "com" is Portuguese for "with" and also how people type ".com" without the dot.

Before adding any of these words, run it against your converting search terms from the last 90 days. If it would have blocked a single conversion, it's the wrong word.

Use phrase or exact, not broad

Broad, phrase and exact are the three negative match types. Broad negatives behave unpredictably across match types, and that's exactly what you don't want on a list built from short words. A single-word phrase negative like "precio" blocks any query that contains that word, which is all you need here.

Add accented and unaccented forms

People type "plomería" and "plomeria", "español" and "espanol", "preço" and "preco". Add both forms. It costs one extra line and closes an obvious gap.

Watch for conflicts with your own keywords

A negative list built from another language can quietly block a keyword you're paying for. If you sell into Quebec and your keyword list includes French terms, a French-word negative list on the same campaign shuts them off. Google doesn't always warn you. The cases it misses are in negative keyword conflicts Google Ads won't flag.

Put the list where it belongs

A list of Spanish words fits as a shared list on every English-only Search and Shopping campaign. It does not belong on the Spanish campaign you just built to embrace those buyers. Keep it shared, not at account level, unless every campaign in the account is single-language. Account-level vs campaign-level lists sets out the trade-off.

Performance Max and Shopping: where language leaks are hardest to close

Standard Shopping is easy: it accepts negative keywords and shared lists, like Search, so your language list attaches as usual. Performance Max is harder. It accepts up to 10,000 campaign-level negative keywords but no shared lists, so a language list has to be added by hand to each PMax campaign and kept up to date in each one.

This matters for two reasons.

First, Performance Max matches queries even more loosely than broad match, and it gets meaning from your assets, your landing pages and your product feed as well as from keywords. Queries in other languages that mean the same thing as your products are an easy match for it. If your feed has "running shoes", expect "zapatillas para correr" and "tênis de corrida" to show up.

Second, without shared lists, updates drift. You add "preço" to the Search list in March. Three PMax campaigns never get it. Six months later one of them has spent on Portuguese queries the others had blocked. If you run several PMax campaigns, keep one master language list in a spreadsheet and copy it into every campaign each time it changes. 10,000 negatives is plenty of room for a short-word list in several languages, so space isn't the limit. Keeping the copies in sync is.

If you've added negatives to PMax and the queries keep coming, the cause is usually one of the cases in Performance Max negative keywords not working, not anything to do with language.

Where this approach stops working

Negatives catch the foreign queries you can see. They don't catch the ones Google hides, and they can't make a good call on languages your business half-serves. Say so to the client before you promise a clean report.

Some honest limits:

• You can only block what appears. Hidden terms stay hidden. A Spanish word list cuts the hidden Spanish traffic too, because it blocks on words, not on terms you've seen. A list of specific foreign terms doesn't.
• Mixed queries are messy. "plumber cerca de mi" is half English. A "cerca" negative blocks it. If your business serves Spanish speakers, that could be a buyer.
• Display, Video and App give you nothing to read. If your ads appear on foreign-language content through those channels, the search terms report won't show it. Placements and content exclusions are the controls there, not negatives.
• Language doesn't tell you whether someone will buy. A perfectly English query like "plumber salary texas" is waste too. Foreign-language terms are an easy group to find, but they're rarely the biggest leak. The intent-based negatives in negative keywords for service businesses by intent usually matter more.

What PPCleaner does with foreign-language terms

PPCleaner reads every search term your Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns paid for, judges whether it could ever have converted for what the account sells, and adds the ones that couldn't as negatives every night. A Portuguese plumbing query in an account with no sign of serving Portuguese speakers gets the same treatment as "plumber salary". So does a French "pain de mie" in a pain clinic account.

Two safeguards matter for language in particular:

• It never blocks a term that converted in the last 90 days. If your Spanish-speaking customers are converting, those terms are protected even if nobody told the tool the front desk speaks Spanish.
• Every block can be undone in one click for 90 days. If you later launch a Spanish campaign and want those queries back, you can reverse the blocks without hunting through lists.

There is also a limit. PPCleaner can't know your business serves a language unless the account shows it, through conversions, keywords or landing pages. If you've just hired a bilingual dispatcher and nothing has converted in Spanish yet, look at what it blocked in that language and undo what you want to keep. It also won't build the Spanish campaign for you. It never touches budgets, bids, ads or keywords. Deciding to embrace a language stays your call. Blocking the languages you've decided against is the part it takes over, every night, without your having to run the regex again.