International PPC: Shopping and PMax Across Countries

See what changes when your store sells in several countries, from shipping settings in Merchant Center to ROAS targets per market, and the order to set it up.

Selling in several countries touches five layers: Merchant Center, product data, the Google Ads account, campaigns and reporting. Merchant Center needs shipping, returns, prices and language for each country. Campaigns can select products by feed label, but each campaign’s location targeting decides where its ads serve. A market gets its own budget and ROAS target only in its own campaign. Work in this order: choose and test a country, prepare Merchant Center, build campaigns, set targets and read results per market. One blended ROAS hides weak countries.

Cross-border ecommerce on Google Ads mostly runs through two campaign types: Standard Shopping campaigns and Performance Max. Both take your products from Merchant Center, where Google keeps your product data. This guide maps international PPC, pay-per-click ads in several countries, from start to finish for a store that already sells at home. Each section answers one question briefly and points to the article that covers it in full.

What changes when a store starts selling in a second country?

Most of the setup stays shared. What changes is everything that depends on where the shopper is: delivery, returns, currency, language, location targeting, bidding targets and the way you read results. Your feed, the product data your store sends to Merchant Center, carries part of this. Campaigns and reports carry the rest.

Layer	Shared by the whole store	Set for each country
Merchant Center	business details, website, offer IDs	shipping services, return policies, the currency of prices and shipping
Product data	attributes such as brand and GTIN	the language of titles and descriptions, the countries a product targets, often a feed label
Google Ads account	the account currency, billing	nothing: one account has one currency
Campaigns	nothing	the countries targeted, the products used, the budget, the bidding target
Reporting	account totals	revenue, ROAS and trend for each market

Two Google rules sit behind the table. Merchant Center identifies a product by its content language, feed label and offer ID together (Add and manage products). So every language version of a product is a separate product. In Google Ads, the account currency is fixed: the API describes the currency field as immutable (customer).

In what order should you set up a new country?

Set up a new country in seven steps, in this order. Each one depends on the step before it: a campaign can show only the products that Merchant Center already offers in that country.

Choose the country from your own data: where clicks and orders already come from, which languages you already have content in, where you can ship.
Plan the test before you spend: a budget cap, a fixed duration and the result that means scale or stop.
Prepare Merchant Center for the new country: shipping, returns, prices and product data in the market’s language.
Decide how products reach the country: add the country to an existing data source, or create a separate source with its own feed label.
Build the campaigns: which products each one uses, which countries it targets and how it treats people outside them.
Set budgets and ROAS targets for each market, from that market’s own history.
Read results market by market, in one currency, against each market’s own past.

Which country should you enter next?

Start from the data you already have, not from the size of the market. The user location view in Google Ads shows where people physically were when they interacted with your ads. It splits results into targeted and non-targeted locations (user_location_view), so you also see places you don’t target. Clicks and orders that already arrive from a neighbouring country are a cheaper first signal than any market report.

Then check what the country asks of you: a language your data and site already cover, shipping you can offer, a returns policy you can keep. To compare candidate countries using your own ad data and Google’s free tools, see choosing your next market. The route from the first idea to the first month of ads is laid out in a step-by-step plan for selling abroad.

Two routes come up often enough to have guides of their own. Stores from Czechia, Slovakia or Ukraine moving into the German-speaking markets should start with selling in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Ukrainian stores entering an EU country have a separate launch checklist for selling in Europe.

How do you test a new country without risking the home market?

Give the new country a campaign and a budget of its own. Then the home market keeps its own budget, and each market’s results stay separate. Decide three things before launch: the budget cap, the length of the test and the ROAS in that market that tells you to scale or stop.

In a new country, your campaigns start with no conversion history. The portal treats 30 conversions a month per campaign as the minimum to learn on and 50+ as comfortable. A test below that volume needs a longer window and a verdict you agree on in advance, rather than a daily check. Budget, duration and bidding for a market with zero history are covered in test-marketing a new country.

What does Merchant Center need for each country?

Each new country needs four things in Merchant Center, and the product data must match what the shopper sees on the site. For the full setup, including when one Merchant Center account is no longer enough, see Merchant Center for several countries.

What	What Google’s documentation says	What to check
Shipping	shipping services are set for the countries they deliver to, each with a currency; shipping costs in a currency other than the product’s can get products disapproved	every country you target has a shipping service in the right currency
Returns	each return policy is created with the list of countries it applies to	the new country has a policy that matches your real terms there
Price and currency	the price in your product data must match the landing page and checkout; currency conversion can show shoppers a converted price in the ad	converted prices suit the market, or the site sells in the local currency
Language	language is part of a product’s identity in Merchant Center	titles and descriptions are in the language shoppers in that market search in

The middle column follows Google’s documentation. Shipping comes from the Merchant API’s Overview of shipping settings and from Merchant Center Help’s Best practice guide for optimizing shipping and return configuration. Returns come from Create and manage your online return policies, and price and currency from the Price [price] attribute page. With currency conversion, the converted price shows in the ad and doesn’t have to appear on your landing page or at checkout.

If Merchant Center is new to you, start with the single-country basics in our Merchant Center guide.

Translation reaches further than titles. Feed text, keywords, Performance Max assets and landing pages all need the market’s language, as covered in localising ads for a new language. For the pages themselves, Google Search recommends a separate URL for each language version and advises against redirecting visitors automatically by IP address (Managing Multi-Regional and Multilingual Sites). If your store runs on Shopify Markets or a WooCommerce multi-currency plugin, read how these platforms feed Merchant Center before adding a market.

A missing shipping setting is the third most common flag in our sample

We looked at a sample of 400,000 products that carried Merchant Center flags (GetProfit data, catalogue snapshots collected in August 2026). Merchant Center flagged 38,032 of them for missing shipping in a country. Only two flags came up more often: products not eligible in any campaign and products out of stock. The sample isn’t random, so large catalogues dominate it: read it as a common slip, not a rate.

The flag means a product is set to show in a country that has no shipping set for it. Each new market adds one more country where that can happen. Check for the flag in Merchant Center after every country you add, before the campaign for it goes live.

How do feed labels tie a country’s products to a campaign?

A feed label is a tag on your product data that campaigns use to select products. You can set a Shopping or Performance Max campaign to use only products with a given label. With no label set, it uses all available feeds in the linked Merchant Center account (Performance Max for online sales with a product feed). A label holds up to 20 characters: uppercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores (ShoppingSetting).

Two rules cause most multi-country mistakes with labels:

A feed label is not a country. Google’s Merchant API guide says a data source’s feed label “has no impact on targeted country”. Target countries come from the country list on the data source or from a product’s shipping attribute (Manage API data sources for product uploads). In Google Ads, a country code in the label doesn’t let ads serve in that country either. The campaign needs its own location targeting.
The same ID in two sources means one overwrites the other. Data sources don’t keep products apart. Two sources sending the same offer ID with the same label and language overwrite each other. The same Merchant API guide names the fix: distinct feed labels or unique offer IDs.

Your setup depends on what the new country shares with the markets you already serve:

The new country has	Setup in Merchant Center	What to watch
the same language and currency	add the country to the existing data source’s target countries	products then share one set of data, prices included
the same language, another currency	add the country and rely on currency conversion, or send prices in the local currency through a separate source with its own feed label	with conversion, the price must still match your landing page and checkout
another language	new product entries in that language, usually in a data source of their own with its own feed label	the campaign for that country uses that label, and titles and descriptions are translated

To choose the setup for your catalogue and avoid duplicate products between sources, see feed labels explained.

One campaign for all countries, one per country, or a separate account?

Google’s guidance for retailers advises consolidating Performance Max campaigns where you can. It also says separate campaigns sometimes make sense, for example for different countries, languages, budgets or ROAS targets (Retailer best practices for AI-powered Performance Max campaigns). The limit is conversion volume: every campaign needs enough conversions to learn from. For how Performance Max learns from a large catalogue, see our Performance Max guide.

Structure	What you get	What it costs	Fits when
One campaign for several countries	one pool of conversions to learn from	one budget and one ROAS target for all the countries in it	markets are small, alike in language and price, and each brings few conversions
One campaign per country	its own budget, ROAS target, products and location targeting	each campaign needs its own conversions	a market has enough conversions or needs a different target
A separate Google Ads account per country	its own currency, billing and access	results sit in different accounts, and you have to combine them	a market sells in another currency, or another team or company runs it

The portal has a working rule for splitting. Splitting a campaign pays off when it has more than 100 conversions a month, or when its parts differ in ROAS by more than 50%. Either way, each part should keep at least 30 conversions a month. For a detailed comparison of the three options, see structuring campaigns across markets.

An account can also hold several stores or brands instead of several countries. Then the risk is that one store’s budget and conversions distort another’s, which is the subject of several stores in one account.

How should location targeting be set?

Location targeting decides which people a campaign can reach. For the locations you include, Google Ads offers two settings (Location targeting):

Presence or interest: people who are in or regularly in your locations, plus people who have shown interest in them. Google lists it as the recommended default and the option with the broadest reach.
Presence: only people likely to be physically in, or regularly in, your locations.

For excluded locations, the recommended default excludes people likely to be physically located there. Your store usually ships only to the countries in your Merchant Center setup. Under presence or interest, your ads can also reach people elsewhere who show interest in those countries. Check where spend actually goes in the user location view, which splits results into targeted and non-targeted locations.

For which setting to choose, which countries to exclude and how to find spend outside your markets, see location targeting across countries.

How do you split budgets and ROAS targets between countries?

In Performance Max, a ROAS target belongs to one campaign: portfolio bid strategies aren’t available for this campaign type (About Target ROAS bidding). So a country gets its own target only when it has its own campaign. That is the main reason to split by market once each market has the conversions to carry a campaign.

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store spends 40,000 a month on ads and gets 180,000 in revenue, a ROAS of 4.5. The home market takes 30,000 of the spend and brings in 150,000, a ROAS of 5.0. A new market takes 10,000 and brings in 30,000, a ROAS of 3.0. The account report shows 4.5 and hides the weak market. One shared target of 4.5 would ask the new market for more than it returns today, and the home market for less.

Set each market’s target from that market’s own history, not from the account average, and change targets and budgets gradually. The portal works with steps of up to 15% for a ROAS target, no more than once every one to two weeks. For a budget, the step is up to 20% at a time. For how to divide spend between markets, and when one shared target sets the wrong bar for them, see budgets and ROAS targets per country.

Why do countries seem to take turns?

One client selling in several European countries asked us why Germany worked one month, then Italy, then Spain, but never all of them at once. Three ordinary causes can explain that pattern:

A shared budget. When one campaign covers several countries, they share one budget. More spend in one country leaves less for the others.
Local demand. Holidays, seasons and sales can fall in different weeks in different countries.
Normal noise. We measured this in 110 stores with at least eight months of history (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026). A store’s monthly ROAS typically deviated 16.0% from its own median. Its best month was 3.1× its worst (medians across stores). A single market, with fewer orders, can swing further.

Before reacting to one country’s drop, look at two things: the total across all markets, and that country’s own figures for the same months a year earlier. A fall in one market that the others make up for is a shift, not a loss.

To tell how much of a swing comes from the campaign shifting budget, the season or noise, see why your countries take turns.

How do you read results market by market?

Read every number per market first, and only then the total. The portal follows the same rule: it analyses an account that sells in several markets market by market, not as one blend.

Compare each market with its own past, on the same months, not with the account average.
Check combined reports against the sum of the markets. A combined analytics property that collects several country sites depends on tracking in each of them. Compare it with the sum of the market properties every month. If the combined figure falls below a single market’s figure, the fault is in the tracking, not in the sales.
Compare markets in one currency. A Google Ads account works in one currency set when it was created. When markets sell in different currencies, pick the currency you compare in and convert the same way every month, as described in selling in several currencies.

To tell whether a country’s fall comes from the market, other channels, tracking or the ads, see analysing an account country by country.

In the GetProfit portal, an account with several markets or shops gets a segment switch: Shop, Market or All. The portal’s change log ties a change to the market or shop it belongs to. Changes that cover the whole account stay in the All view. So you judge a new ROAS target in one country’s campaign on that country’s figures, not on the whole account.

Who changed what in your ads — and how it ended. The portal keeps a log of changes: budgets, bids, conversion goals, product sets, whole campaigns. The portal changes nothing without your consent.

Sign in with Google Ads →

Should assortment and prices differ by country?

Often they should. A product that fails in one country tells you about that country: its price position, its competitors, its demand. It says little about the product in your other markets. So decide exclusions per market, based on enough evidence from that market.

The portal’s rule for excluding a product is at least 50 clicks with no conversions over 360 days. In an account with several markets, read that evidence market by market. An exclusion list shared by all countries removes products from markets where they may still sell. Whether one failure should remove a product everywhere, and how to keep each market’s assortment, is covered in excluding products country by country.

Merchant Center also benchmarks prices country by country. The price competitiveness report gives each product a benchmark price in a named benchmark country (PriceCompetitivenessProductView). Google’s Performance Max guidance for retailers suggests reading it by category, country and brand. Whether to charge different prices per country, with VAT and currency in the picture, is covered in international pricing on Google Shopping.

Which mistakes cost multi-country stores the most?

Each mistake comes with what to do instead.

Reading one blended ROAS. A strong home market lifts the account average and hides a weak one. Read each market against its own target instead.
Trusting a combined analytics property. If tracking breaks on one country site, the combined figure drops while sales hold. Check it against the sum of the market properties every month.
Treating a feed label as a country. The label only groups products. The country comes from the data source, shipping and the campaign’s location targeting, so set and check all three.
Sending the same offer ID through two data sources. With the same label and language, the products overwrite each other. Give each source its own label, or keep offer IDs unique.
Building one exclusion list for all markets. A product that fails in one country can still sell in another. Exclude per market.
Leaving small markets out of a restructure. A structure redrawn around the main market can drop smaller markets from the plan. Before launch, check every market against the new structure.
Rebuilding or renaming campaigns without warning. One client told us their own reports group campaigns by name and ID, so rebuilt campaigns get counted twice. Agree on naming and keep campaigns in place where you can.

Where to start if you take over a multi-country account

Before changing anything, work through the account in this order:

List every market with its campaigns, feed labels, target countries and location targeting setting.
Pull revenue and ROAS per market for the last 12 full months, in one currency.
Compare any combined analytics property with the sum of the markets.
Check Merchant Center for shipping and return settings in every country you target.
Look for spend in countries you don’t ship to.
Only then decide which markets get their own campaign, budget and target.

The full playbook for agencies and specialists is in taking over a multi-country store.

Sources

Performance Max for online sales with a product feed (retail) — Google Ads API: campaigns select products by feed label; with no label, all available feeds are used; a country code in a feed label doesn’t enable serving without location targeting. Checked 2 October 2026.
Manage API data sources for product uploads — Merchant API: a feed label has no impact on the targeted country; target countries from the data source or the shipping attribute; data sources don’t namespace products. Checked 2 October 2026.
Add and manage products — Merchant API: a product is identified by content language, feed label and offer ID. Checked 2 October 2026.
ShoppingSetting — Google Ads API: feed label format, up to 20 characters. Checked 2 October 2026.
customer — Google Ads API: the account currency field is immutable. Checked 2 October 2026.
Location targeting — Google Ads API: presence or interest versus presence, defaults for included and excluded locations. Checked 2 October 2026.
user_location_view — Google Ads API: metrics by the user’s physical location, targeted or not targeted. Checked 2 October 2026.
Overview of shipping settings — Merchant API: shipping services by delivery country and currency. Checked 2 October 2026.
Best practice guide for optimizing shipping and return configuration — Google Merchant Center Help: shipping costs in a currency other than the product’s can lead to disapproval. Checked 2 October 2026.
Create and manage your online return policies — Merchant API: return policies by country. Checked 2 October 2026.
Price [price] — Google Merchant Center Help: price must match the landing page and checkout; how currency conversion shows prices. Checked 2 October 2026.
Managing Multi-Regional and Multilingual Sites — Google Search Central: separate URLs per language, no automatic redirects by IP. Checked 2 October 2026.
Retailer best practices for AI-powered Performance Max campaigns — Google Ads Help: consolidate where you can; separate campaigns sometimes make sense, for example for different countries or languages; the price competitiveness report by category, country and brand. Checked 2 October 2026.
About Target ROAS bidding — Google Ads Help: no portfolio strategy for Performance Max. Checked 2 October 2026.
PriceCompetitivenessProductView — Merchant API: benchmark price per benchmark country. Checked 2 October 2026.
GetProfit data: catalogue snapshots collected in August 2026, a non-random sample of 400,000 products with Merchant Center flags — missing shipping for a country. 110 stores with at least eight months of data, June 2025 – June 2026 — monthly ROAS volatility.
GetProfit portal methodology — conversions per campaign, the rule for splitting campaigns, step sizes for targets and budgets, the exclusion rule, per-market analysis.