Web Site Measurement Hacks

Know How to Use Visitor Language Reports

Knowing which languages your visitors speak will help you improve your message and improving your message will help your conversion rates.

While tracking your visitor’s specific geographic distribution [Hack #78] is important, consider the primary and secondary languages of you visitors.

Online, you should strive to be helpful, courteous, and friendly—at least when you can determine that you have enough foreign traffic to benefit from your benevolence. But how do you know when you should consider translation? Easy—use your visitor language reports!

Visitor Language Reporting

Most web measurement applications provide language reporting based on information gleaned from the visitor’s web browser, most often generating a report similar to that seen in Figure 5-14.

The languages reported are picked up from the web visitor’s browser and controlled by a setting you can easily change in your browser if you’d like. Want to try this out? In Firefox simply clickTools → Options → General and then clickthe “Languages” button to add any number of International languages you’d like the browser to support. Piece of cake!

The information reported in a visitor languages report is particularly good, because users are telling you which language they prefer to communicate in. If I understand English but I read, speak, and write Spanish, I am very likely to change my primary language setting to “Spanish” in the hope that your web site will speak to me in Spanish. ...