A PPC guide to French-language campaigns in Quebec

What to take away

Charter of the French Language requirements for commercial advertising in Quebec

The Charter of the French Language has governed commercial advertising in Quebec since 1977. It applies to any business advertising to Quebec consumers, including paid search and display campaigns run from outside the province.

The core rule is that French must be present in commercial advertising. Under the original Charter, a business could use another language alongside French, provided French was available. Bill 96 changed the balance.

The applicable law is the Charter of the French Language, as amended by Bill 96. A bilingual headline where French and English carry equal weight may not satisfy the standard.

Some exemptions exist. Advertisements in media aimed at a non-French audience, such as an English-language newspaper or radio station, can be exempt. A Google Search campaign targeted at all of Quebec is not that.

The Office québécois de la langue française enforces the Charter, and complaints can come from competitors or members of the public. Check the OQLF's current guidance for enforcement details that apply to a particular campaign.

For PPC teams, the practical question is whether a French-speaking Quebecer can understand the ad, the offer and the next step entirely in French. If not, the campaign is exposed.

What Bill 96 changes for PPC ad copy and landing pages

Bill 96 amended the Charter in 2022 and phased in obligations over the following years. It raised the bar from French being present to French being markedly predominant in most commercial advertising.

The practical PPC takeaway is that French should be the clear lead, while any English remains secondary. The applicable test can depend on the advertising format, so do not treat a 50/50 bilingual ad as automatically compliant.

For responsive search ads, that is awkward. Google's asset mix can serve an English headline first if the system predicts a better click-through rate. You cannot always control which combination appears.

One workaround is to keep English assets out of campaigns that target Quebec broadly, and reserve English ads for audiences you can justify as exempt. Document the reasoning either way.

Bill 96 also touches contracts, invoices and customer service. A PPC lead that becomes a sale pulls the business into those obligations, so the ad is only the first touchpoint.

The Quebec government's portal for businesses sets out the compliance context for employers and self-employed workers at Businesses | Gouvernement du Québec. Read it before you scale a Quebec campaign.

Landing pages face the same test. A French ad that lands on an English page is a compliance gap and a conversion problem at the same time.

Commission d'accès à l'information guidance alongside language rules

Language law and privacy law are separate regimes, and PPC teams often conflate them. The Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec oversees access to information and privacy, including the obligations introduced by Law 25.

The regulator's English-language portal at English | Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec is the starting point for understanding how Quebec treats personal information in advertising.

Law 25 modernized Quebec's private-sector privacy law. It requires a lawful basis for collecting personal data, clear notice, and in some cases express consent before using data for advertising purposes.

For PPC, that affects remarketing lists, customer match uploads, conversion tracking pixels and lead forms. Consent banners and form language need to reflect Quebec rules, not just a generic notice.

Quebec's privacy framework sits alongside federal rules. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada administers PIPEDA, which applies to commercial activity across the country, so campaigns can face both layers.

The specific statutes and regulations the Commission administers are listed at Lois et règlements | Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec. Check them when you build consent flows for a Quebec account.

A useful habit is to treat language and privacy as two separate checklists for every campaign. Passing one does not mean you pass the other.

Structuring French keywords, match types and negative lists

French keyword research for Quebec is not translation. Search behaviour differs, and so does vocabulary. Québécois French uses terms that differ from France French, and English loanwords appear in some categories and not others.

Start with the head terms in French, then expand with the phrasing real users type. Google's keyword planner will show French-language volume for Quebec, but volume alone is a weak signal in a market this size.

A workable process looks like this:

Accents deserve attention. Google generally treats accented and unaccented forms as close variants, but the ad copy should still use correct accents. Sloppy accents read as machine translation to a Quebec audience.

Negative lists need both languages. If your account targets Quebec and the rest of Canada, English negatives protect the French campaigns from cross-serving, and French negatives do the reverse.

Keep French search terms and negative keywords in language-specific groups so search-term reviews show which queries are driving each campaign.

Writing French ad text that still converts

Compliance is the floor, not the goal. French ad text still has to earn the click. The good news is that Quebec searchers respond to the same things other searchers do: clear offers, specific claims and a reason to choose you.

Write French first, not English first. Copy translated sentence by sentence tends to be longer, flatter and oddly formal. French ad copy usually needs fewer words to say the same thing.

Respect character limits. French is often longer than English for the same idea, so a headline that fits in English may truncate in French. Write to the limit in French and let the English version shrink.

Avoid France French. Terms that are standard in Paris can read as foreign in Montreal. Use vocabulary your Quebec customers actually use, and test it.

Number and price formatting should follow Canadian conventions: GST and QST where relevant, and prices in Canadian dollars. A US dollar price in a Quebec ad invites distrust.

For broader paid-media experiments, the programmatic advertising piece offers another perspective; in French PPC, keep each creative test focused on one question.

One more point on claims. Competition Bureau Canada enforces misleading advertising provisions nationally, and a strong French claim must be substantiated in French and English alike.

If your French search ads underperform, inspect search queries before changing bids. For campaigns using video advertising, evaluate that format separately rather than using its results to judge search copy.

Landing page and form requirements for Quebec campaigns

Quebec landing page requirements follow the ad. If the ad is French, the page should be French, with the same offer, the same price and the same next step.

A French ad that lands on an English page breaks the chain. The user bounces, the quality score suffers, and the compliance position weakens.

The cleanest setup is a French landing page for French campaigns and an English page for exempt English campaigns, each with its own tracking. Mixed pages with a language toggle work less well on mobile.

Forms carry two obligations. Language: labels, error messages, consent text and confirmation emails should be in French for French campaigns. Privacy: the form must explain what happens to the data and, where required, collect consent.

Quebec's business portal at Entreprises | Gouvernement du Québec is written in French and is a useful reference for the wording conventions Quebec regulators expect.

A short pre-launch checklist for any Quebec landing page:

Run this list before every Quebec launch, not once a year. Pages drift as offers change.

Bilingual account structures versus single-language accounts

There are two common ways to run Quebec alongside the rest of Canada, and each has costs.

A single bilingual account mixes French and English keywords in shared campaigns. It is cheaper to manage, but ad rotation, negatives and reporting all get muddier, and language compliance is harder to prove.

A split account runs French and English campaigns separately, with their own budgets, ads, landing pages and negatives. Reporting is cleaner, compliance is easier to demonstrate, and you can judge French performance on its own terms.

The split approach costs more setup time and needs enough French volume to justify its own campaigns. In Montreal and Quebec City, that volume usually exists. In smaller markets, it may not.

A middle path is a French campaign for Quebec and a shared English campaign for the rest of Canada, with tight geo-targeting and negatives on both sides. This is often the practical answer for agencies.

Whichever structure you choose, review it as part of your wider search advertising audit rather than as a one-off project.

A disciplined approach that prioritizes one question at a time keeps French tests from sprawling.

Finally, document your language decisions. If you serve English ads to a Quebec audience under an exemption, write down why. That record is worth more than any after-the-fact explanation.

Common questions