Should ads in Pakistan be written in Roman Urdu, Urdu script or English?

Your inbox is the best research you have. Scroll through recent WhatsApp and Instagram messages and note the language customers write in, the words they use for your product and how formal they are. A mobile accessories shop in Saddar may find almost every enquiry arrives in Roman Urdu; a corporate law firm in Blue Area may never see one. Ads written in the customer's own register feel like a conversation rather than an announcement.

Each option has practical quirks. Roman Urdu has no fixed spelling, so pick one version of common words and keep it consistent across ads and landing pages. Urdu script must be set properly in images and checked in the ad preview, because some placements render it badly. English product names often stay in English even inside Urdu sentences, and that is fine. For Google search ads, think about what people type, which is frequently English or Roman Urdu even when they would speak Urdu.

Do not decide on taste alone. Run two versions of the same ad, identical except for language, with the budget split evenly, and compare messages or calls rather than likes. Results differ by trade and audience, so the answer for a bakery in Rawalpindi may not hold for a property dealer in DHA. We write ad copy natively in all three languages rather than translating, and the ad budget itself is always ad spend paid directly to the platform.