Google Shopping lets you sell into new countries by adding them as target countries in your Merchant Center feed and either extending an existing campaign or running a separate one per market — but currency, shipping cost, and delivery-time settings must be correct for each country before you spend a penny, or Google will simply stop showing your products there.
Start a conversationBefore you touch a campaign setting, the question that actually decides whether international Shopping works is: is your product feed set up to sell into that country? Google Shopping ads are built from your Merchant Center feed, and Merchant Center treats each target country as its own set of requirements — price, availability, shipping cost and delivery time all need to be accurate for the destination country, not just for the UK.
If you add a new target country to your feed without updating shipping settings for it, one of two things happens: either Google shows your products with UK shipping costs and delivery times that are wrong for that market (which tanks trust and conversion rate at the landing page), or Merchant Center disapproves the offers for that country entirely because the shipping data doesn’t reconcile. Either way, the campaign settings you build on top are irrelevant until the feed is right.
There are two structural approaches, and which one is right depends on how different the markets actually are from each other, not on which is technically easier to set up.
A single feed with multiple target countries — often paired with one Shopping or Performance Max campaign that’s allowed to serve into several countries — is the simpler option to build and maintain. It works reasonably well when the markets you’re entering are genuinely similar to the UK: comparable price points once converted, similar shipping expectations, similar competitive landscape. You get one place to manage bids and budget, and Google’s automated bidding has more aggregate data to learn from, which can help performance stabilise faster.
Separate campaigns per country give you what a combined setup can’t: independent budgets, independent bid strategies, and separate performance reporting per market. That matters as soon as the markets genuinely diverge — different price sensitivity, different competitor density, a market where you’re establishing a new customer base versus one where you already have brand recognition, or simply because you want to be able to pause or scale one country without touching the others. The trade-off is more setup and more ongoing management, and each new campaign needs enough of its own conversion volume for automated bidding to work with, which is slower to build up per-market than pooling volume in one campaign.
Adding a country to your Shopping feed is a five-minute technical task. Making that market actually convert profitably is not. The feed and campaign settings only remove the barrier to your ads showing — they do nothing about whether your shipping costs make sense for that market, whether a competitor is already dominant there, or whether your margin survives the currency conversion and delivery cost. Treat expansion into a new country as a proper go-to-market decision, not a checkbox in Merchant Center.
If your existing Shopping activity already runs through Performance Max, the same feed-first logic applies before you extend it into new countries — PMax pulls from the same Merchant Center feed, so shipping, pricing and currency accuracy for the new market matter just as much as they do for a standard Shopping campaign. The added complication with PMax is visibility: you can pull country-level performance from the Locations report, but PMax’s asset groups and automated bidding blend signals across the whole campaign, so it’s harder to isolate early whether a new country is actually working or quietly underperforming behind an otherwise healthy account average. If you’re testing a new market, keeping it as a separate, clearly-labelled campaign — even inside PMax — makes it much easier to tell whether the expansion is paying for itself.
Not to get the ads approved — Google doesn’t require a translated landing page to target a country. But an English-only page will typically convert worse with non-English-speaking customers than a localised one, so it’s worth weighing translation cost against the size of the opportunity before you decide to skip it.
Yes. A single feed can target multiple countries, with per-country shipping, tax and (optionally) pricing settings layered on top. This is the simpler setup and works well when the markets are broadly similar; it’s less suited to markets that need genuinely different pricing, budget or bid strategies.
Automatic currency conversion is less maintenance but produces odd-looking prices, since a converted £19 rarely lands on a clean local number. Manual per-country pricing lets you set deliberate local price points but needs upkeep as exchange rates move. There’s no universally correct answer — it depends on how much ongoing management you’re able to give the feed.
In my experience it’s rarely the campaign settings — it’s shipping cost and delivery time data that’s inaccurate or just carried over from the UK setup, which either gets offers disapproved or shows customers promises that don’t match reality at checkout. Fixing the feed data usually matters more than adjusting bids.
There’s no fixed figure I’d quote without knowing your margins, average order value and the competitiveness of that specific market — it varies too much to generalise. The more useful principle is to size the test so a poor result is cheap to absorb, and expand only once you’ve got real conversion data from that market to work from.
It can widen the surface area your products appear on inside a target country, but it pulls from the same Merchant Center feed as standard Shopping, so the same currency, shipping and pricing accuracy is required either way. The trade-off is that PMax’s automated bidding blends signals across the whole campaign, so it’s harder to isolate early whether a new country is actually working, which is why I’d keep new-market testing in its own clearly separated campaign.
Feed structure, campaign setup and budget allocation for a new market all interact with each other, and getting them wrong is an expensive way to find out. Start a conversation and I'll help you think through whether expansion makes sense yet, and how to structure it if it does.
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