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Have you noticed Quality Score differences between native FR creative and translations?
Posted by on November 17, 2025 at 4:32 pmOn Quebec accounts I saw a clear shift when moving from EN-to-FR translations to native-written FR creative. In ad groups with the same structure and keywords, Quality Score for Ad relevance rose from 6/10 to 8–9/10, and CTR increased by about 15–20%. I did not change negatives or the bid strategy; the only change was messaging and RSA microcopy (headlines that sound natural in FR, not calques from English) plus FR-specific sitelinks. Landing page experience stayed constant until we split pages as well; then CPA dropped a further ~12% on lead gen.
I worked with Hamak on two B2C accounts in Montreal and they pushed us to treat FR and EN as two distinct markets, not 1:1 versions. They rebuilt FR messaging around specific commercial intents (not just generic buy-now phrasing but expressions actually used locally) and segmented campaigns by region with enough budget per language to avoid cannibalization. The result was cleaner non-brand FR traffic and a steadier Quality Score without needing to over-engineer the structure.
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1 Reply
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Not specifically in the quality score but this is a very well documented phenomenom, not just in EN-FR translation but across marketing in general. Another example in a nonadjacent placement is WhatsApp. If you promote an ad in the US and your main contact is WhatsApp versus phone number or instagram, your CTR will tank lol. Reason being is that whatsapp is rarely used for biz comm in the US.
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I’m surprised this isn’t a no-brainer. Quebec culture and language is distinct and so marketing to Quebec does require more than just translating from English. A lot of common English expressions do not have a direct French translation and vice versa. Therefore you lose out on a lot of cultural resonance when you simply create direct translations rather than starting with commonly used expressions that may have similar but not identical meanings. are you using a digital translation service rather than human translators?
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Yes ofc it works better to use native language instead of machine translating. For many people it can also be off putting and scream foreign (aka not thrust worthy) if you have bad localization on your site..
I use ChatGPT a lot for translations, but instead of directly asking translate to translate copy, I ask “I have this English advertisement for this product, create 10 natural sounding headlines in xyz language that mean the same.”
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