Finding customers with Google Ads in Spain: from setup to your first campaign

To find customers with Google Ads in Spain, you need to get four things right from the start: open the account with Spain and euros, write your ads in the language your customers search in, target location as "people in" the area, and have conversion tracking running from day one. If any one of these is missing, your budget will most likely go to the wrong people. In this post, as someone who has been running ads in Türkiye since 2009 and now lives in Spain, I walk you through the points where Turkish-owned businesses in Spain get stuck most often.

Account setup: country, currency and billing

The country and currency you choose when you open a Google Ads account can't be changed later. If your business operates in Spain, choose Spain as the country and EUR as the currency. Sticking with your old Turkish account in TL creates exchange-rate differences and billing headaches; a separate, clean account is far more orderly for your accounting in Spain.

Your billing details, including company name, address and tax ID (CIF or NIF), must match your registered details exactly. Businesses in Spain usually buy Google's advertising service from Google's company in Ireland, which counts as an intra-EU purchase of services. How VAT is declared depends on whether you're registered in the ROI (operadores intracomunitarios). This is purely a tax matter, so be sure to check your own situation with your gestoría or accountant. My only advice is this: ask your gestoría "How are we going to handle the Google Ads invoices?" before you open the account, not three months later.

Account structure matters too. If you serve more than one city in Spain, a separate campaign for each city makes budget control easier. If you offer one service in one city, one campaign with a few ad groups is enough.

Language targeting: Spanish, Catalan and the Turkish diaspora

In Google Ads, the language setting is based on the user's Google interface language and search signals. In Spain most people use their phone in Spanish; in Catalonia some use Catalan, and many foreigners use English. So in practice, I split it like this:

• Local customers: Choose Spanish as the language, and add Catalan if you're in Catalonia. Ad copy and landing page are in Spanish.
• Tourists and foreigners: English runs in a separate campaign with its own ad copy.
• Turkish diaspora: Choose Turkish as the language and use Turkish copy and a Turkish landing page. This audience is small but has clear intent; it's very valuable for someone looking for a service in Turkish.

Don't mix languages in one campaign. Since ad copy is written in a single language, adding five languages to the language setting just gets you impressions from people who can't understand the copy.

Location targeting: city, radius and the most critical setting

In Spain you can target by city, province (provincia), postal code or a radius around an address. For local businesses such as restaurants, hair salons or repair shops, a radius of a few kilometers around your shop usually makes sense. If you deliver or provide on-site services, target the area you can actually reach, not the places you can't.

The really critical setting is hidden in the "location options" section. Google's default and recommended option is "Presence or interest": your ad shows to people in the target area as well as people who are interested in that area. That means someone sitting in Istanbul searching "Barcelona restaurante" can spend your budget too. For a local service business, the right option is usually "Presence": people who are in, or regularly in, the target area. In the Spanish accounts I've seen, this single setting is the biggest source of wasted budget.

Spanish keyword research

You won't find Spanish keywords by translating from Turkish. People search for services in their own way. For example, a Spaniard might search "kebab cerca de mí", "döner a domicilio" or "reforma baño Barcelona precio"; the phrasing that comes to mind in Turkish may not be used in Spanish at all. These are the steps I follow:

1. In Google Ads Keyword Planner, search with the location set to Spain and the relevant city, and the language set to Spanish.
2. Search on Google in Spanish and look at the autocomplete suggestions and the "People also ask" box.
3. Note the words your competitors use to describe their services on their Spanish websites.
4. Build a negative keyword list: exclude irrelevant searches like "gratis", "trabajo" or "curso".
5. Have a Spaniard or a native Spanish speaker check the list.

I explain how I build the same keyword logic on the organic side in a separate post, SEO in Spain: Spanish and Catalan. When ads and SEO feed from the same keyword list, they reinforce each other.

How to think about budget

I won't give you a fixed number like "this many euros a day is enough in Spain", because cost per click varies a lot by industry, city and competition. Instead, use this model:

• Check the estimated cost per click of your target keywords in Keyword Planner.
• Make a realistic estimate of how many out of 100 visitors to your site will call or fill out a form.
• Calculate how much a customer is worth to you.
• Putting these three together tells you the most you can spend to win a customer. Your daily budget is set by this calculation, not by guesswork.

The first two or three weeks are a learning period. Changing the budget every day during this time keeps resetting Google's system. Start small and scale based on data.

Spanish ad copy and assets

With responsive search ads, Google asks you for multiple headlines and descriptions and then combines them itself. When I write Spanish copy, I pay attention to a few points: at least one headline should include the search term, one should carry the city name, and one should give a concrete detail that sets you apart from competitors (like "Abierto hasta las 2h", "Presupuesto sin compromiso" or "Hablamos turco y español"). Decide whether to address people as "usted" or "tú" based on your industry; the friendly "tú" is common in restaurants and retail, while "usted" fits better in law or healthcare. What matters is keeping the same form of address across all your copy.

Don't leave ad assets (formerly called extensions) empty: call buttons, sitelinks, location, callouts and price assets make your ad bigger and raise your click-through rate. Enter your phone number in Spanish format (+34) and match your opening hours to your ad schedule. If you're closed at night, there's no point paying for calls that come in at night.

Don't advertise without conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is the only thing that shows whether your ads are bringing in customers. It's the gap I see most often among Turkish-owned businesses in Spain. What you need to track depends on your business:

• Phone calls (the call button in the ad and clicks on the number on your site)
• Clicks on the WhatsApp button
• Contact form submissions
• Online orders or bookings
• Direction requests (if your Google Business Profile is linked)

If your site has a cookie consent banner, which it should in Spain, your tracking codes need to work with that consent mechanism. I've covered the legal side of this in Legal requirements for websites in Spain. I also recommend linking your Google Business Profile to Google Ads so your address and reviews appear next to your ad in local searches.

The most common Google Ads mistakes I see in Spain

1. Showing Turkish ad copy to Spaniards. Language set to Spanish, copy in Turkish. You get impressions but no clicks, and any clicks don't convert.
2. Leaving "Presence or interest" switched on. Your budget gets spent on people outside the target city, or even outside the country.
3. Spanish ads pointing to a Turkish page. The ad is in Spanish, but the page that opens is in Turkish. The user leaves right away.
4. Broad match with no negative keywords. Searches for "trabajo" and "gratis" eat up the budget.
5. Saying "ads don't work" without conversion tracking. You can't judge what you don't measure.
6. Machine-translated copy. A Spanish reader notices it in the first sentence, and trust drops.

Should you manage it yourself or get help?

A small business starting with one service in one city can set up a basic campaign on its own with the steps above. Once multiple languages, cities and services come into play, the structure quickly gets complicated and mistakes get more expensive. I handle ad setup and monitoring for Turkish-owned businesses in Spain through my advertising management in Spain service; if you're curious about Instagram and TikTok, take a look at Instagram and TikTok ads in Spain. For the big picture, my digital marketing in Spain page is a good place to start.