How well does your website perform based on the visitor’s language preferences? Is there a large portion of your traffic that is not being well served because of a language barrier? Do you have multiple language support on your website and want to know if it is effective?

Web analytics can answer all of those questions, and it can show you how effective your marketing efforts are by visitor language.

I will be using Google Analytics, but you can use most analytics tools to easily look at visits and purchases by the language setting of the visitor’s browsers.

Click on: Visitors-> Language

Gather the following information:

• Total number of visits to the site
• Number of visits by Top 10 languages
• Total number of Sales on the site (if you are not running an eCommerce site then you can also look at number of conversions)
• Number of sales by those top 10 languages

Quality index Reports:

Quality index reports are a top level measurement designed to show how well a particular metric is performing when compared to the site as a whole.

The formula is: Quality index = % Goal Conversions from metric X / % visits from metric X

• 1.00 = metric X is equal with site average
• >1.00 = metric X is less likely to convert
• <1.00 = metric X more likely to convert

So for our Internationalization KPI (Key Performance Indicator) we will look at how well each language performed when compared to the website. Anything over 1.0 means that it performed that much better than the site average.

Quality index by Top Languages

• English-US: 1.67
• Chinese: 0.01
• French: 0.74
• German: 1.12
• Russian: 0.05
• Spanish: 0.55
• Japanese: 0.70
• Taiwanese: 0.12
• Portuguese: 0.04
• Italian: 0.32

One thing we notice right away is that are second largest source of traffic by language (Chinese) is performing terribly. This also turns out to be a great opportunity for our current situation as well. Chinese speakers are obviously coming to the site looking for our products but the site isn’t currently catering to Chinese speakers. I would put them first on the list of our internationalization project followed by either Russian or French. French speakers are coming in much higher volumes then the Russians and optimizing their user experience would probably have better results.

This is a great metric to track over time especially when looking for new international markets to enter.

Please let me know if you find these kinds of articles helpful to achieving your web analytic goals.