Should I run ads in French and English in Canada?

The starting question is not whether French is generally a good idea in Canada, it is whether your specific service area includes a market with real French-speaking demand. Quebec is the obvious case, but Ottawa-Gatineau and parts of New Brunswick also have meaningful French-speaking populations worth considering even for a business that never targets Quebec directly.

A business serving only Western Canada, or a market with negligible French-speaking search volume, generally has little to gain from building and maintaining a second language campaign. The added cost of writing, translating, and managing two sets of ads is only worth it where there is real demand behind the second language.

Check this before assuming either way. Google Ads reporting can show language and location data for your current account, which is a more reliable starting point than a guess about who your customers are.

Quebec's Charter of the French Language sets requirements for French in public-facing commercial communications aimed at the province, which is a constraint to be aware of when your ads, landing pages, or website content are directed at Quebec residents. The specifics of how this applies to a given campaign are a legal question worth a real conversation with counsel familiar with Quebec advertising rules, not something to guess at from a general description.

Quebec's Law 25 separately governs how businesses handle personal information collected from Quebec residents, including consent and disclosure requirements. This matters for any lead form, cookie banner, or analytics setup on a page that Quebec ad traffic lands on, since the ad is only the first step in a process that also touches your website and how you store what a visitor submits.

Neither of these replaces legal advice specific to your business and your offer. Treat this section as a flag that these two rules exist and apply to Quebec-directed advertising, not as a complete compliance checklist.

Running a French campaign is not the same task as translating an existing English one word for word. Search terms, common phrasing, and even the tone that reads naturally in French are often different from a literal translation of the English version, and a French speaker can tell the difference immediately.

This affects performance directly. Keywords need their own French-language research rather than a translated list, since the words a French speaker actually types into Google are not always a direct mirror of the English equivalent.

Budget for this as a real second campaign with its own research and writing, not an add-on task tacked onto the English campaign at the end of a project.

Set language targeting deliberately in Google Ads rather than leaving it on the default, since the setting controls which users are eligible to see each campaign based on their interface language, not the words in their search. Pair French campaigns with a French version of the landing page they send traffic to, since a French ad sending traffic to an English-only page tends to lose visitors immediately.

Check the geographic and language breakdown in your account's reporting to see how much of your current traffic and conversions already come from French-speaking markets, which helps size how much budget the second language campaign deserves relative to English.

Our fee for running Google Ads is 10% of the ad budget, never below $600 a month, and adding a second language campaign changes the amount of setup work involved far more than it changes that minimum. We flag the Charter of the French Language and Law 25 as items to confirm with your own legal counsel before launching into Quebec specifically.