A Guide to Measuring Website Localization ROI

As levels of global internet connectivity continue to climb, opportunities abound for international businesses seeking to engage new audiences and drive revenues from overseas markets. Just 1 in 4 of an estimated 4 billion daily internet users is an English speaker, and the explosion in mobile device usage is reshaping the global commercial landscape.

Pivotal to the success of any international business growth is the adaptation of online collateral for local-market use. But whether marketing and informational pages or full e-commerce platforms, localizing websites of any kind takes time, effort, money, and requires the energies of multiple key personnel groups across an organization.

Before getting started, establishing a clear path to ROI is vital – measuring not only the monetary return on new-language sites but also building an effective strategy to support and analyze performance.

Preparing to expand your multilingual web presence?

Check out our guide to effectively measuring website localization ROI.

‘Investment case’ is just a fancy way of asking the question “why are we entering this new market?”

It’s an important question to answer, as determining the success of any localization program is tied to the overall expectations of the expansion project or business strategy.

If there isn’t any demand for your product or service in the market you’re preparing to enter, there may not be much chance of success – no matter how well you localize your website.

• Population and demographic data
  How many potential customers does your target market have that fit your ideal buyer profile?
• Number of internet & mobile device users
  Can local users access your information, products and services?
• Socioeconomic data & trends
  Will your pricing be within reach and aligned with local market expectations? Is your target consumer base growing?
• Competitor activity in the target market
  How much local competition will you face, are other international suppliers expanding into this market?
• Comparison with existing markets
  How does the target market compare to markets in which your business is already active?

Even if the data is encouraging concerning the anticipated demand for your product or service in a new target market, website localization alone may be ineffective if other areas of your strategy have holes in them.

There are plenty of factors to keep in mind when globalizing business services, all of which are essential to support the investment made in translating and adapting your online presence ready for new language communities.

Some of the most important things to consider can include:

Customer Service

• Is your business set up to receive email, phone, mail and other enquiries from potential customers?
• Can you handle product returns, troubleshooting or complaints?
• Will customer service levels match your established markets?

Regional Support Network

• Which suppliers or partners will you need ‘on the ground’ in the target market to ensure your business can function effectively? (This may include legal or financial services, warehousing, packaging, logistics or IT support).

Regulations & Compliance

• Are there any local laws, customs or governance issues which could interfere with the smooth running of your planned business operations in your target market?

(Think taxes, import/export requirements, marketing and advertising restrictions, data protection…).

 Nothing blows attempts to track localization ROI off course more than an unexpected obstacle elsewhere in the business planning. To see a full return on the time and money invested in language adaptation, it’s critical that the rest of the strategy be watertight.

 (Hint – this is where working with an experienced partner can really help, acting as an advisor to guide you through the potential pitfalls).

Localizing a site on its own won’t deliver the spike in new-market revenue you’re hoping for without the right marketing support to drive traffic to the new language versions of your online pages or e-store.

As with the original site version, thought should go into the supporting action to raise visibility and attract target visitors in the new regions.

Your marketing plan should cover:

Brand awareness

• Is your brand already known in the new target market?
• What activity is planned to build brand awareness across key channels?
  • Offline, print & broadcast media
  • Online
    • Social media
    • Email marketing
    • Affiliate advertising
    • Biddable (paid) media
    • Digital PR

Persona

How are your new target customers different from your domestic customers?

• It’s important to ‘think regionally’, and not assume that one language covers all overseas markets. For instance, Spanish-speaking users in Mexico may require different engagement strategies from users in Chile or Argentina.
• Regional nuances can include things like cultural associations, sporting references, political affiliations etc.
• Keep in mind details like national holidays and climate also, for the timing of any special offers or promotions.

Search Engine Optimization

How do your target customers search for products and services like yours?

• Designing an SEO strategy for each locale is important to provide relevant answers to customer queries and to uncover opportunities to rank for specific short and longtail keywords.
• As well as on-page content, URLs and site metadata should also be optimised.
• Customer searches and keyword usage may vary even within the same language, based on location.
• Remember, many of the world’s internet users don’t use Google as their primary search platform (e.g. Yandex in Russia, or Baidu in China), so your strategy will need to take this into account.

As well as content and support, the structure of your new-language site is also important.

First up, correct implementation of hreflang codes will help search engines display the correct language version of your site to global users, improving their native experience.

There are also some important steps to ensure that essential data for measuring performance (and calculating ROI) can be properly collected from site usage.

While there are multiple ways of achieving this, a common technique is to use a single root domain (e.g. company.com) and use a subfolder (e.g. company.com/cn/) or subdomain (e.g. cn.company.com) structure.

This has the advantage of enabling your business to create different web analytics filters (for instance in Google Analytics) and isolate site activity on a per-language level but avoids the need for multiple analytics tracking codes, which can lead to misleading or inaccurate data.

However you approach the site design, two important points are:

Do you retain clean acquisition data when a user switches language?

• Make sure your analytics is configured not to ‘reset’ if the same user changes how they view your site from one language to another – this can scramble your data and throw off your ROI calculations.

Do goals, events or other triggers register on a regional level?

• If you’re configuring your site to record key events (such as reaching a signup page, downloading materials, making a purchase etc.), it’s critical that these are set up to register in a way which is attributable to the user’s language or region. This may involve the creation of additional site sections, but it’s a vital step in correlating international site usage with essential business data.