I’ve heard it bandied about around the office that AdWords CPCs are way lower outside the US.  Well, with a brand-new international client  — a Hong Kong-based software developer — building campaigns from scratch, I got a golden opportunities to test this out directly this month.

We split their brand-new campaigns into otherwise identical US and non-US campaigns (both English language).  Over the campaigns’ 1st 3 days, the difference has been dramatic:  Average CPCs are 51% lower outside the US, which has allowed their average position to be 3.0 positions higher, which has led to — get this —  7000% more clicks and 4700% more conversions.  With a conservative bidding strategy to start, the only place they are seeing significant impression volume is outside the US.

Now, we’ll obviously be able to get more out  of those US campaigns with some optimization work, but there’s no doubt that international targeting is going to be critical to this client’s ROI goals.  And, had we just targeted All Locations and not split the campaigns up from the start, there’s a good chance that higher US bids would have eaten up daily budgets so quickly that it may have been difficult to spot the huge international opportunity.  The best part is, thanks to copy/paste in AdWords Editor, it took all of about 10 minutes to mirror all the campaigns!