LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads in North America vs Europe: what European B2B teams should change

Most European companies start North American campaigns inside their existing accounts. It feels efficient, and it creates reporting problems that last for years. Google’s help center states that an account’s currency and time zone are permanently set when the account is created, and that time-segmented reports use the account’s time zone.

A Paris-based account reports a New York working day across two calendar days and in euros. Hour-of-day and day-of-week bid adjustments are set against European time, so a campaign scheduled for business hours stops serving at lunchtime in New York and in the early morning in California. Our paid media team creates a separate North American account under the same manager account, in USD and the time zone where most of your buyers are, before anything else changes.

These are the settings we check first on every North American launch for a European client.

Google’s default location option, Presence or interest, reaches people who are likely to be in or regularly in your targeted locations and people who have shown interest in them. For B2B campaigns aimed at buyers in North America, interest-based reach brings traffic from people researching US topics from elsewhere, including Europe. We use Presence, which Google describes as people likely to be located, or regularly located, in the targeted locations.

Then fix the schedule to North American hours, separate the US and Canada if budgets or languages differ, and import qualified opportunities from the CRM with offline conversion imports so value-based bidding learns from North American pipeline rather than European form fills.

Canada deserves its own decision. If Canadian accounts are a material part of the plan, a CAD account or at least separate Canadian campaigns keep budgets and reporting clean, and Quebec needs French ads and pages rather than English campaigns that happen to reach Montreal. Keep search terms and negative keywords separate too: Canadian buyers search for Canadian suppliers, regulations and spellings, and those queries should not compete with US campaigns for the same budget.

StatCounter put Bing at 9.78% of US search in October 2026, against 5.58% in Europe, with Google at 85.45% and 88.77% respectively. For enterprise B2B search that difference is worth a campaign.

Microsoft Advertising also lets you use LinkedIn profile targeting by company, industry and job function in search, audience and Performance Max campaigns. Its help pages note limits: up to 1,000 companies per ad group or campaign, companies added manually, and the targeting works as a bid adjustment rather than narrowing delivery. Even so, it is the closest thing to account-based search available, and we include it in most North American enterprise programs.

LinkedIn says it has more than 1.3 billion members, and its June 2026 newsroom post places the United States as its largest market, ahead of India and Brazil. For European companies that usually means larger North American audiences per job title, and higher competition for them.

Targeting rules also differ. On June 7, 2024 LinkedIn stopped letting advertisers build audiences in Europe from LinkedIn Group membership, following a complaint under the Digital Services Act. Teams that built European campaigns without group data are already used to company lists and job attributes, which is the right foundation for North America too. LinkedIn’s documentation says a company list needs at least 300 matched members to serve and suggests at least 1,000 companies for best results, so build the North American list early. Our company list targeting guide covers the setup.

Measure LinkedIn the same way as Google: send qualified meetings and opportunities through the LinkedIn Conversions API, which LinkedIn describes as a direct server connection that does not require cookie-based tracking.

Run these in order. Skipping the first three is the most expensive mistake we see.

1. Create North American Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts in USD and the right time zone, under your existing manager account.
2. Agree the North American account list and upload it to LinkedIn as a company list; add the top accounts to Microsoft Advertising company targeting.
3. Connect the CRM: offline conversion imports for Google and Microsoft, Conversions API for LinkedIn, with North American stages as conversion actions.
4. Configure region-aware consent for the North American site and landing pages.
5. Launch high-intent search and LinkedIn campaigns to the account list in North American hours, with localized landing pages and North American proof.
6. Review after 30 days on accounts engaged and meetings, not on CPC.

We are based in Montreal and run Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Microsoft Advertising in North American hours for clients across the United States and Canada.

Fees are published in USD on our pricing page, with no markup on media.

If your European team is about to extend campaigns to North America, talk to our team before the accounts are created.