Need a native Italian specialist to adapt your ads for the Italian market?
If only they were also a great copywriter with years of experience…
I’m a freelance Italian SEO & web consultant, helping businesses make their message work in the Italian market. But that’s a pretty boring introduction, isn’t it? Let’s try something else…
4 questions to get us started
- What do I do? A lot of things, but here we’re talking about ads in Italy: I adapt your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages for the Italian market. Not just translation: transcreation that respects search intent, character limits, and your brand’s voice.
- Why me? I’m a native Italian specialist and I’ve been working in SEO since 2006: I know how keywords work and I bring together strong writing skills with solid technical knowledge. Did I mention I know my fellow Italians? I know how Italians search, what resonates with them, and what gets lost in translation.
- How do I work?
With integrity and a focus on results. I want your ads to connect with the right audience, not just generate clicks. I also believe in the long game: your success is my success, and I’d rather build lasting partnerships than chase quick wins. - How do we start? How about a Zoom (or WhatsApp, Google Meet, whatever works for you) call? Send me a message…
What transcreation means for your campaign
Your campaign, rewritten for how Italians search, not just translated.
Running ads in Italy, on Google Ads or any other platform, with translated keywords and copy is the fastest way to pay for the wrong clicks. Good transcreation adapts your campaign’s language to how Italians search, read, buy and now ask AI, so it resonates with their culture and your budget reaches the right people. That covers the keywords, the ads and the landing pages.
I’m a native Italian SEO and web copywriter, working in search since 2006. I don’t manage your campaign: I give your team, or your agency, the Italian it needs to perform.
Transcreation in practice: 3 examples of why your Google Ads need a native Italian
Three cases, three different traps: the wrong word, the right foreign word, and the wrong voice.
Lost (or added) in translation: the stroller that became a wheelchair
A web marketing agency running a multilingual campaign for an online store selling baby products asked me to handle the Italian side. Here’s the kind of ad a literal translation produces for one of them, baby strollers:
| Headline 1 | Headline 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| English | Lightweight Travel Stroller | Folds in One Second |
| Literal Italian | Carrozzina Leggera da Viaggio | Si Piega in Un Secondo |
| Transcreated | Passeggino leggero da viaggio | Si chiude in un secondo |
“Carrozzina” is in the dictionary for “stroller”, but Italians use it for a lie-flat pram, and for a wheelchair. Bid on it, and your budget pays for clicks from people looking for mobility aids, who didn’t want your ad either. The word Italian parents actually search for is “passeggino”. And if you still want “carrozzina” traffic, you need negative keywords like -disabili (disabled), -invalidi (an older word for disabled), -anziani (elderly) and -elettrica (electric, which in this context almost always means a wheelchair).
A dictionary gives you a correct word. A native Italian search and copy expert gives you the one your customers type.
Thou shalt not overtranslate: when English is the right Italian
Translating everything can be a mistake too. Take a store selling men’s running shoes. The dictionary says “scarpe da corsa”, but Italians often borrow the English word:
| Keyword | Monthly searches | CPC |
|---|---|---|
| scarpe da corsa uomo | 5,400 | $0.07 |
| scarpe running uomo | 18,100 | $0.06 |
Search volumes and CPC from a keyword research tool, Italy, October 2026.
The “correct” translation gets less than a third of the searches, and its clicks cost slightly more. Both keywords belong in the campaign, but the budget and the headlines should follow the one Italians actually type.
Sometimes transcreation means translating more. Sometimes it means translating less. And consulting means spotting the options when they come up, and explaining them clearly.
Formal, informal or neither? These Romans Italians are crazy!
English has one “you”. Italian has four ways to address the reader, and each tells them who you think they are. Take “Book your free trial”:
| Voice | Headline | Characters | Typical fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| tu (informal) | Prenota la tua prova gratuita | 29 | Consumer brands, apps, fitness, fashion |
| Lei (formal) | Prenoti la Sua prova gratuita | 29 | Professional services, finance, health, luxury |
| voi (plural) | Prenotate una prova gratuita | 28 | Businesses, teams, families |
| impersonal | Prova gratuita su prenotazione | 30 | Institutions, mixed audiences |
As of October 2026, Google Ads headlines allow up to 30 characters.
There’s no single right answer that a dictionary, or even an AI tool left unchecked, can pick for you. But there are good defaults:
- tu is usually the right choice. Online, even professional and institutional brands are moving from the formal to the informal register. Yet a law firm that writes tu may sound careless rather than authoritative, and so less trustworthy.
- Lei is still expected where distance is part of the respect: law, medicine, finance, luxury, or an older audience. Elsewhere it can sound stiff. A gym that writes Lei may not sound fun at all.
- voi speaks to a group: a company, a team, a family. Technically it’s the second-person plural, but where it fits, it’s a useful way to avoid the choice between tu and Lei.
- impersonal is another way to avoid the choice altogether. It’s safe for institutions or mixed audiences, but slightly colder, because nobody is being spoken to. On the plus side, it keeps the focus on the offer rather than on the reader.
Whichever voice you pick, it has to match from the ad to the landing page: an ad that says tu leading to a page that says Lei feels like talking to two different companies.
What I transcreate
1. Keywords
The words your Italian customers actually type, not the ones a dictionary suggests.
- An Italian keyword list mapped to your original one by intent
- Negative keywords: the Italian terms that would waste your budget
- Regional and colloquial variants, where they matter
2. Ads
Copy that sounds written in Italian, not translated into it.
- Headlines and descriptions within each platform’s limits (on Google Ads, responsive search ads allow up to 15 headlines of 30 characters and 4 descriptions of 90)
- Assets: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets
- The right voice for your brand: tu, Lei, voi or impersonal (see above)
3. Landing pages
You pay for the click; the landing page has to turn it into a customer.
- Landing page copy adapted for Italians and consistent with your keywords and ads
- If needed, I build the page too (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, WordPress) and enjoy doing it.
Transcreation in the age of AI
Of course I use AI in my transcreation work, and it’s a great partner. Did I mention I also build AI pipelines and automations, and never stop studying AI? AI speeds up the brainstorming: it unfolds the options, surfaces synonyms and expressions I hadn’t considered yet, and drafts variants in seconds.
It helps the other way round, too. Sometimes a sentence we’ve just drafted (the AI and I) feels “odd”, and the ear of a native speaker rings a bell. I ask the AI to double-check, and more often than not it confirms that the expression sounds unnatural to an Italian.
I’m also very aware of a curious phenomenon: every professional overestimates how clear their own work is. It’s worth keeping in mind during a transcreation, because the more we work on a text, the more familiar its words and expressions become to us, yet they may not be familiar at all to the final audience!
AI can help spot those unclear words and passages, too. But the final choice is still a human one. AI can lay out the options. A native ear has to tune into the work and judge the effect the words will have on the people reading them.
How it works
I’m a freelancer, not an assembly line! Meaning, I’m flexible and can adapt to the needs of my clients and their campaigns. Here’s how a typical project goes:
- We talk. A short call (Zoom, Google Meet, WhatsApp, whatever works for you) about your campaign, your audience and your goals.
- You send the material. Your current keywords, ads, landing pages and brand guidelines, if any: links, files, briefs, whatever you have.
- We agree on the details. Scope, format, timing and fee.
- I deliver. The Italian version, with a note on each choice, ready for your campaign manager to work from.
Some interesting questions (and answers) about my ads transcreation service
Can’t I just use machine translation or AI for my Italian ads?
You can, and for a first draft it’s fast and usually grammatically right. What it misses is the choice: which word your Italian customers actually type, and which one sounds like an ad they’d trust. That takes a native speaker’s judgement, working with AI, not instead of it.
Do you only work with Google Ads?
No. Google Ads is the most common case, but the same transcreation works for any platform: Microsoft Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and others. I don’t run the campaign myself. We agree on the format together: for example, a document (Excel, Google Sheets, Google Docs…) with the Italian keywords, ad copy and landing page text, plus a note on each choice, so your campaign manager can work from it directly, on whatever platform you use.