Multple Campaigns running together

Hi Sean - if I am asked to do this kind of campaign (global coverage for an international business) I have never had any problems in setting things up pretty much as it sounds you are doing now i.e. same keywords and ads but each ad group targetted geographically to avoid overlap. As an aside I have sometimes found, usually in US v. UK, that the effective keywords will vary for the same product/service between locations and therefore although things are initially set up the same in-depth research often reveals some differences.

It sounds as if the main ongoing issue is a measurement one. Do you use different landing pages for each geographical campaign? If so it should be fairly easy to track regional campaign effectiveness along with Googles own tracking and analytics services. You seem to be on the right lines for your German campaign.

Finally, my own experience of having key phrases made inactive for reason of duplication has been when the key phrase in question has appeared in multiple ad groups within the same campaign each of which trigger different ads. I suppose that if the key phrase appears in various ad groups but only ever triggers the same ad that's not much of a problem for Google.

Iain