How to use website visitor data to choose your next target language

Whether you are translating your website for the first time or you are planning to add more languages to your existing multilingual website, choosing the next language to translate into can be a difficult task. There are many ways to help you make this decision. A common approach is to analyze which markets are critical to your company's growth and proactively localize for those markets. However, if you don't have a clear target market in mind or need help narrowing down your choices, web analytics data provides you with an ideal data-driven decision-making tool.

Key data

First, there’s one important data point you need to focus on: your visitors’ browser language preferences. Most web analytics tools track this data by default. The language settings of your browser and operating system determine your visitors’ language preferences. For example, a visitor in Spain will see the browser default language as Spanish, regardless of whether they visit the Spanish version of your site, the English version, or another language version. By analyzing this data, you can better understand your visitors’ language preferences and their purchasing habits, helping you make decisions about which languages to translate first.

Language Data Aggregation Methods

To accurately assess demand, you can aggregate data for different variants of the same language. For example, you can combine all French versions (such as European French, Canadian French, Algerian French, etc.) to understand the overall demand. For Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, they are not fully interoperable, and some users may choose the English version instead of reading the other version of Chinese, so you may need to assess the demand for these two versions separately.

Data-based decision factors

After analyzing the data, the following are some key factors to consider:

1.  Market culture and habits: In some markets, website traffic and conversion rates may improve with language skills. For example, the return on investment (ROI) may be lower in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, where English penetration is higher. In markets with a higher reliance on the native language, the ROI may be higher. In addition, the difference in conversion rates in different markets is also closely related to consumers' payment habits, holiday cycles, and the ratio of online to offline bookings.

2.  Average booking amount: Look at the average spend per booking by visitors from a specific market. If you have more traffic in a market, but visitors are paying less per booking, the increase in traffic may not necessarily translate into a significant increase in revenue. Sometimes, a market with less traffic but a higher amount per transaction is a better target.

3.  Bounce rate: Bounce rate refers to visitors who enter your website and immediately leave because their preferred language version is not available. Bounce rate can be an important indicator of unmet market demand and help you identify which language versions are in high demand.

4.  Hotel cancellation rates: Visitors from some countries need a valid travel reservation to apply for a visa, resulting in higher cancellation rates in these markets. In some markets, especially those that do not require a credit card or do not verify the credit card immediately, cancellation rates can be as high as 50%. Therefore, it is important to understand the cancellation rate data for these markets in order to better assess the priority of target markets.

Avoid selecting language based on IP address

It is important to emphasize that when selecting a target language, you cannot simply decide the language based on the visitor's IP address (i.e. physical location). This practice is quite common, but it may lead to overlooking some key factors. For example, users in multilingual countries or foreign residents may use other languages, and tourists may also make cross-border online reservations when traveling. Therefore, choosing a language based solely on the IP address may not be accurate and cannot fully reflect actual needs.

By deeply analyzing the language preferences and behaviors of your website visitors, you can more intelligently choose the next language version to localize, thereby improving your market coverage and user experience.

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