Building an Arabic Google Ads campaign in the UAE before the September 2026 change

Language targeting in Google Ads has never filtered by the language of the search query. It narrows who is eligible to see your ad based on the languages Google believes a person understands, read from their Google product settings and their behaviour. Matching the query language is the job of your keywords, because a keyword does not match a query written in another script. Set a campaign to Arabic while every keyword inside it is English, and you have not built an Arabic campaign. You have built an English campaign that fewer people can see.

That misreading is about to get more expensive. On 14 August 2026, Google Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin announced that campaign-level language targeting is being removed from Search campaigns and AI Max for Search in late September 2026. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and ppc.land all covered the post. After the change, Google leans on the language of your ad creative and your landing page, plus what it already knows about the user, and it favours the ad and landing page whose language matches the search term. The setting that most advertisers were using wrong disappears, and the thing that decides your language match becomes the Arabic ad and the Arabic page behind it.

Which moves the whole job from campaign settings into the build.

Why an Arabic campaign is a separate build, not a translated one

An Arabic campaign shares almost nothing with your English one except the offer. Different keywords, different auction, different creative constraints, different landing page, different negatives, different person answering the phone.

Start with the list. Your English keywords probably came out of Keyword Planner and a competitor export, and neither source gives you a usable Arabic set. I covered why in our guide to Google Ads keyword research in the UAE and will not repeat the volume mechanics here. The short version: Arabic demand splits across several accepted spellings of one word, and the tool rounds every fragment into the same bottom bucket.

Then there is the auction. An Arabic keyword set for the same product usually clears at a lower cost per click in the accounts I run, because far fewer advertisers in this market maintain an Arabic list at all. Thinner auction, softer price. It also means one new bidder moves your cost more than the same bidder would in English, so the price is less stable month to month.

The part people underestimate sits downstream. An Arabic ad sending clicks to an English page has always converted badly, and from late September it also weakens the language match Google uses to decide whether to serve you at all. An Arabic plan that stops at the ad text is not a plan.

If you already run English Search in the UAE and want to know whether an Arabic split is worth the budget, send us the account and we will read the search terms report before quoting anything.

What language targeting actually does, and what changes in September 2026

Google's help page on language targeting is clear once you read it slowly. It lets you reach people based on the languages those people understand. Not the languages they type. Google also states that it does not translate your ads, and that on the Display Network it may detect the language of pages or apps a person visits and use that as a signal.

None of this is intuitive. A user whose Google interface is English can still be shown your ad from an Arabic-targeted campaign, because their other activity suggests they understand Arabic too. Google's own documentation gives the mirror-image example with Spanish and English. Language targeting is a permissive signal about the person, not a strict filter on the query.

The safety advertisers think they bought is not there, either. Set a campaign to Arabic and it does not serve only on Arabic queries. If the campaign holds English keywords, it serves on English queries to anyone Google thinks understands Arabic, which in the UAE is a large and mixed pool.

	Until late September 2026	After the change
Where the language signal comes from	Campaign language setting plus Google's read of the user	Your ad and landing page language plus Google's read of the user
Role of the query language	Not a targeting input. Your keywords carry it	Ads and landing pages matching the query language get priority
Where you control it	Campaign settings	Ad group creative and the page behind it
Display, Video and Demand Gen	Campaign setting applies	Campaign setting still applies
Performance Max	Campaign setting applies everywhere	Search inventory follows Search. Other channels keep the setting

Treat the table as the announced shape rather than a settled fact and check the current help page before you rebuild anything, because Google moved this deadline once already. The earlier communication pointed at the end of 2025.

What to do before the setting goes away: leave the campaign language on All languages if your keywords already route traffic correctly, then give every ad group creative in one language only and a landing page in that same language. That configuration survives the change without an emergency rebuild.

Arabic keywords: standard, dialect, and the spellings Google treats as different words

Typed commercial search in the Gulf skews toward Modern Standard Arabic. Spoken and voice search skews toward the Gulf dialect. Your keyword list has to cover the written form, and your ad copy has to sound like it was written by someone who lives here rather than assembled from a Levantine or Egyptian template.

The mechanical problem is orthography. Arabic is written without short vowels, and several letters have accepted alternative forms that people type interchangeably. The alef appears with or without hamza. The ta marbuta at the end of a word gets typed as a plain ha. The final ya gets typed as alef maqsura. The definite article is present in one search and absent in the next. One intent, five strings, and Google's close variant matching is not a translation layer that unifies them for you.

Grammar adds a second axis. Adjectives agree with the gender of the noun, so the word for new changes form depending on what is new, and Arabic carries a dual alongside the plural. A list built by pluralising English terms and running them through a translator misses forms real people type.

Negative keywords do not match close variants, and that is the part that costs money and that I almost never see handled. Google's documentation says you have to add singular and plural forms and synonyms yourself. In English that is a small chore. In Arabic it multiplies: for each waste term you may need the bare form, the form with the definite article, the plural, and the alternative letter spellings.

Term you want to exclude	Forms you actually have to add
jobs	وظائف and the singular وظيفة
free	مجاني, مجانا, and the feminine مجانية
course	دورة, دورات, and the ha-ending spelling دوره
salary	راتب and رواتب
cheap	رخيص and the definite form الرخيص

Add a geography layer in both scripts as well. Arabic keywords pull in readers from Riyadh, Cairo and Kuwait who are researching Dubai rather than buying in it, so الرياض, السعودية, مصر and their Latin spellings all belong in a shared negative list unless you serve those markets.

Build the list from search terms rather than from a translation memory, and review it weekly for the first month. Our paid search team does that pass on bilingual accounts as standard because month one is where the Arabic waste concentrates.

Writing Arabic ad copy inside a 30-character field

Responsive search ads give you 30 characters per headline and 90 per description. Google halves the effective limit for double-width languages, which it defines as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Arabic is not on that list, so you keep the full 30. That sounds generous until you write the first headline.

Arabic loses ground in the tightest fields rather than the long ones. Descriptions at 90 characters are comfortable. Sitelink text at 25 characters is where the language bites, because one Arabic noun phrase with a definite article eats most of the field. Verify current asset limits in the interface before you build a large set, since Google adjusts them without announcement.

Do not translate 15 English headlines. Write 15 Arabic headlines against the limit. A translation inherits English sentence shape and lands either three characters over or awkwardly short, and you spend the afternoon trimming rather than writing. Native drafting is faster and reads better.

Capitalisation tricks are gone. Arabic has no upper case, so every emphasis technique that English ads borrow from typography stops working. Emphasis in Arabic comes from word order and verb choice. An imperative like احجز الآن carries weight that a capitalised English equivalent gets from the letterforms.

Mixed direction is where ads break visually. Arabic runs right to left, but numbers, Latin brand names and most punctuation are directionally neutral or left to right. The Unicode bidirectional algorithm places those neutral characters according to what surrounds them, so a headline that ends with a phone number, a percentage or a bracket can render with that element on the wrong visual side. Always check in the ad preview rather than in your spreadsheet, and where possible keep Latin strings and digits in the middle of the line rather than at either edge.

Digits are a choice. Western digits and Arabic-Indic digits are both correct Arabic. UAE brands overwhelmingly use Western digits in ads, and that is what I default to, because prices, phone numbers and dates read faster to a bilingual audience that switches between both languages all day.

The display path fields accept Arabic, but your final URL stays Latin. Keep the path short and readable rather than clever.

The Arabic landing page: RTL layout, hreflang, and who answers the WhatsApp

A translated page is not an Arabic page. The layout has to mirror: navigation, form labels, progress indicators, directional arrows and the reading order of a three-column block all flip. Logos, product photography and numerals stay put. Getting that second half wrong is what makes a page look machine-made.

The build rests on dir="rtl" and lang="ar" on the html element, CSS logical properties instead of hard-coded left and right, and a font with real Arabic coverage. We wrote that up in our guide to bilingual Arabic and English websites, so I will stay on the ads-relevant parts here.

Give Arabic a real URL. A separate path such as /ar/ with reciprocal hreflang annotations for ar-AE and en-AE, plus x-default, and both pages pointing at each other. Avoid the pattern where one URL swaps language based on the browser setting, because your Arabic ad then points at a URL that sometimes renders in English. That was always bad for conversion. After September it also muddies the landing page language signal Google uses to decide which of your ads to prioritise for an Arabic query.

Forms need attention beyond the labels. The phone field has to accept a +971 number in Latin digits while the rest of the page runs right to left, and name fields need to accept Arabic input without silently stripping characters. Test a submission in Arabic before you spend a dirham.

The failure I see most often has nothing to do with code. An Arabic ad sends a lead to an Arabic page with a WhatsApp button, the prefilled message is in English, and the person who replies does not speak Arabic. Prefill the wa.me message in Arabic so the conversation opens in the right language, and route those threads to someone who can hold it. If nobody on your team can, run the Arabic campaign at a budget your Arabic-speaking capacity can actually service. If the page itself is the missing piece, that sits with our web team.

Six mistakes I find in almost every Arabic account I audit

Machine-translated ad copy. It produces grammatical Arabic that reads like a government circular, and it picks category words that carry different commercial weight in Arabic than their English dictionary entry suggests. The output is text nobody searches for, which is a keyword problem wearing a copy problem's clothes.

One campaign holding both languages. Budget then flows to whichever side spends faster, usually English, and the Arabic side never gathers enough data to be judged. Reporting also blurs, so nobody can answer whether Arabic worked.

No Arabic negative keywords. English negative lists do nothing against Arabic waste, and because negatives do not match close variants, a single Arabic negative catches far less than you assume.

An Arabic ad pointing at an English page. Still common, still the fastest way to burn an Arabic budget.

The wrong register. Copy written in Egyptian or Levantine marketing style reads as foreign in a Dubai ad. Standard Arabic with light Gulf vocabulary is the safe register for UAE Search, and a native reviewer in market is worth more than another round of tooling.

Location targeting left on the default. Arabic keywords attract regional researchers. Set targeting to presence, meaning people in your targeted locations, rather than the option that also includes interest, or you will pay Dubai prices for readers in Riyadh.

Fix the last two before you touch bids. They are settings changes and they take an afternoon.

Budget and CPC: what the Arabic auction looks like

Arabic keywords generally clear below their English equivalents for the same product in the accounts we run, because fewer competitors bid there. I am not going to attach a percentage to that, because the gap moves by vertical and one new advertiser can close it inside a month. Anyone quoting you a fixed discount for Arabic across the UAE is quoting a number they cannot source.

Measure it yourself. Run the Arabic campaign for two to four weeks on its own budget line, compare average CPC against the English campaign for matched products, then compare cost per qualified lead rather than cost per click. Cheap clicks arriving from outside your service area are not cheap leads.

Size the budget against the learning requirement rather than a percentage of English spend. Smart bidding wants roughly 30 conversions in 30 days before it has anything to learn from. If Arabic cannot plausibly reach that at your conversion rate, either fund it properly or start it on manual bidding and accept a slower read.

Account structure: separate campaigns or one campaign with Arabic ad groups

Separate campaigns, once the budget supports it. Budget, location targeting, ad schedule and bid strategy are all campaign-level, and the two languages behave differently on every one of them.

Below a certain spend, splitting starves both sides. In that case run one campaign with an English ad group and an Arabic ad group, and let the keywords route the traffic, which works because a keyword does not match across scripts. Keep the creative in each ad group monolingual and pointed at a page in the same language, which is exactly what the September change rewards.

Monthly Search budget	Structure I would use	Reason
Under about AED 4,000	One campaign, one English ad group, one Arabic ad group	Two campaigns at this level leave neither with enough conversions to read
About AED 4,000 to 15,000	Two campaigns, one per language, separate budgets	Arabic gets a protected budget line and its own bid strategy
Above about AED 15,000	Two campaigns per language, split by product line or emirate	Enough volume for clean reads on both axes

Those thresholds are our working rule of thumb, not a Google rule. Name campaigns so the language is visible at a glance, something like UAE | Search | AR | Brand, because bilingual accounts get misread first at the reporting layer.

One warning on shared budgets. They defeat the point of the split, since the language that spends faster takes the pool. Give Arabic its own budget or do not split at all.

The bilingual accounts we run for brands including Fabiana Filippi, Rayhaan and DSQ Cosmetics all ended up in the same shape. Arabic needed its own keywords, its own creative, its own page and its own budget line, and it stopped looking like a rounding error the moment it stopped sharing a campaign with English. If you want that structure reviewed on your account before the September change lands, talk to us.

Written by Artur Gall, CEO and founder of SkyLight Marketing, Dubai.

FAQ

Does language targeting in Google Ads target the language of the search query? No. It selects people based on the languages Google believes they understand, using their Google settings and behaviour as signals. The language of the query is carried by your keywords, since a keyword does not match a query in another script. From late September 2026 the campaign-level setting is removed for Search, and Google prioritises the ad and landing page whose language matches the search term instead.

Should I put Arabic and English keywords in the same campaign? Only on a small budget, and then in separate ad groups with separate ads and landing pages. Above roughly AED 4,000 a month in Search spend, split them into two campaigns so Arabic has its own budget, bid strategy and location settings.

Are Arabic clicks cheaper than English clicks in the UAE? In our accounts Arabic usually clears lower for the same product, because fewer advertisers keep an Arabic keyword list. The gap varies by vertical and moves when a new bidder enters, so treat your English CPC as the ceiling and measure your own two-week sample rather than trusting a published discount figure.

How many characters do I get for an Arabic headline? The same 30 as English. Google halves the limit only for double-width languages, which it defines as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The tighter assets are where Arabic hurts, particularly 25-character sitelink text.

Do I need a separate Arabic landing page or is a translation plugin enough? A separate page at its own URL, built right to left, with reciprocal hreflang for ar-AE and en-AE. A plugin that swaps the same URL based on browser language means your Arabic ad sometimes lands on English, which hurts conversion and, after the September change, confuses the language signal Google reads from your landing page.

What Arabic negative keywords should I start with? Jobs, salary, free, course, download, wholesale, meaning and definition, each in more than one form, since negatives do not match close variants. Add regional geography such as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait in both Arabic and Latin script if you only serve the UAE, then build the rest from your own search terms report in week one.