You have a great, niche product–counseling services focused on homesickness and loneliness for English and Portuguese speaking expats globally. The market size is huge (millions of potential customers!), but when you talked to your PPC agency, they gave you the cold shoulder.
They told you the targeting was impossible, the audience was too fragmented, and the budget would bleed out faster than a tech stock in a recession.
And here’s the shocker: They were probably right.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It means your approach is fundamentally flawed.
I’ve analyzed countless campaigns designed to hit highly specific, scattered audiences–especially in the wellness and services sector. The consensus from the trenches, confirmed by a recent deep dive into the r/PPC community discussions on this exact problem, is clear: Stop using broad tools for surgical targets.
We are going to dissect the viability of running a PPC campaign for a highly niche wellness brand targeting English and Portuguese speaking expats globally. We’re going to turn skepticism into a scalable blueprint. Let’s dive in.
The Fragmentation Trap: Why Traditional PPC Fails Expats
When we talk about targeting expats, most marketers default to the simplest strategy: Location targeting (e.g., Amsterdam) + Language targeting (e.g., English). Sounds easy, right? It’s not. It’s a guaranteed budget sink.
The Problem with Location and Language Filters
The agency was being genuinely honest. Traditional PPC targeting is ill-suited for scattered, niche expat audiences. You’re dealing with an extremely complex behavioral segmentation, not just geographic pins.
1. Google is actively removing the tools you need: Community members noted a critical, compounding issue: Google Ads is actively removing reliable language targeting features. Relying on simple language settings is a leaky bucket.
2. The Local Noise: Targeting ‘English speakers in Berlin’ captures tourists, locals learning English, international business travelers, and non-target residents who use English occasionally for search. General English searches in foreign countries will instantly waste a significant portion of your budget by capturing non-expat locals.
3. The Setup Complexity: To even attempt this globally, you would need multiple campaigns per city and language combination. That massive initial workload and cost are often prohibitive for a niche brand. If you want to run English campaigns in 10 European cities, that’s potentially 10 completely different micro-strategies–and that’s before adding Portuguese.
Your audience isn’t too small, it’s just scattered. Trying to lasso millions of expats with a single broad campaign is like trying to catch fish with a net full of holes.
Stop Wasting Budget: The Keyword Strategy That Actually Works
If you can’t target them geographically, you must target them intentionally. The key to unlocking success here lies in shifting your focus 100% to hyper-specific, high-intent keywords.
Hyper-Intent Keywords vs. Broad Waste
Forget general terms like ‘counseling’ or even ‘expat services.’ Your success hinges on using specialized, high-intent, long-tail keywords. Why?
Because the expat who searches for ‘English speaking therapist in Amsterdam for homesickness’ is infinitely more valuable than the one searching for ‘therapist near me.’ The first query includes the specific language, location, and the exact emotional pain point your brand solves (homesickness/loneliness counseling).
Here’s the critical caveat: These high-intent terms have lower search volume. Don’t worry about that! Low volume with high conversion beats high volume with low conversion every single time.
Furthermore, a significant chunk of effort must be spent upfront on exclusion lists and blocking non-relevant search terms and locations. If you don’t aggressively block everything that smells like a tourist or a local, your budget will vanish before the end of the first week.
Behavioral vs. Intent: Why Meta Wins the Expat Game
When you are dealing with a population defined by a behavioral characteristic (moving abroad), you need a platform that understands behavior—not just search intent.
This is where Meta (Facebook/Instagram Ads) comes roaring into the picture.
Meta/Facebook Ads likely offers superior targeting capabilities due to behavioral data. Think about it: Meta knows if someone recently changed their location, if they are members of ‘Expats in Paris’ Facebook groups, or if they have recently interacted with interest categories like ‘International Relocation Services’ or ‘Foreign Language Classes.’
While Google catches them at the moment of pain (search), Meta allows you to build awareness and relevance *before* they are searching, specifically segmenting based on their lived experience as an expat.
The Key Takeaway from the Reddit thread validates this: Focus 80% of your energy on high-intent, low-volume keywords on search and heavy behavioral targeting on Meta.
Community Insights: What the r/PPC Gurus Really Said
I always tell clients: don’t trust the hype; trust the data from people who are spending the money. The r/PPC subreddit, home to some of the sharpest technical advertisers, provided a highly skeptical but ultimately constructive roadmap.
Validation of Agency Concerns: The sentiment was highly technical and validated the agency’s initial concerns about audience fragmentation and complexity. As user ‘eevee_nina’ observed in the thread, the biggest issue is not the overall market size (millions of expats), but accessing the high-intent, paying segment efficiently.
The Brand Niche is Too Narrow (Digitally): The brand’s specific focus on ‘homesickness/loneliness counseling’ might be too niche for consistent high digital demand. Advertisers suggested broadening the offering slightly (e.g., ‘expat adjustment counseling’) while maintaining the core message on landing pages.
The Hard Truth: “Your audience isn’t too small, it’s just scattered. Stop throwing money at general PPC,” was the consensus. They emphasized that success hinges on hyper-segmentation.
This isn’t about throwing up five ads and hoping they stick. This is about disciplined, micro-segmentation.
Your Blueprint for Success: Starting Small to Scale Big
If you want to move forward efficiently, you must abandon the global strategy for now. The only viable approach is starting small: focusing resources on one language and one major European city hub for a focused trial.
Phase 1: Deep Dive and Trial (Focus Amsterdam/English)
1. Pick One City: Let’s use Amsterdam, a known expat hub, as your test market. This minimizes the initial setup complexity.
2. Focus One Language: Start with English, where search volume is highest among high-earning expats.
3. Build a Firewall: Dedicate 30% of your initial setup time purely to crafting exhaustive negative keyword lists (blocking terms related to tourism, local history, broad medical issues, non-English services, etc.).
4. Specialized Landing Pages: Create deeply localized and highly specialized landing pages for Amsterdam expats, talking directly about their challenges in that specific city.
Phase 2: Leverage Behavior and Intent
1. Hyper-Intent PPC: Focus 100% of your search budget on high-intent, long-tail searches (e.g., “expat counseling English Amsterdam,” “homesickness therapist Netherlands”).
2. Meta Dominance: Utilize Meta Ads to target people based on recent location changes, language usage, and membership in expat groups within Amsterdam’s catchment area.
Niche down until the budget runs efficiently, then scale the proven winners. Once you prove that the model works in Amsterdam, you can replicate the exact same campaign structure, keyword lists, and landing page template in Berlin, then Paris, and so on.
The Bottom Line
Targeting highly niche, geographically fragmented audiences is the hardest job in PPC. It requires technical diligence, patience, and a willingness to accept low initial volume.
The agency was right to warn you about the difficulty. But difficulty doesn’t mean defeat. It means you must pivot from broad, intent-based Google Ads to highly segmented, behavioral Meta Ads, supported by ultra-focused long-tail keywords.
Stop trying to catch the whole ocean. Catch one perfect fish, prove your lure works, and then build the fleet. That’s how you win this niche market.