The Browser Languages of Your Visitors

A setting every visit carries

Every browser tells the websites it visits which language it prefers. On a phone, that is usually the language the phone itself was set up in.

Analytics records it with every visit. The report sits under Audience, then Geo, then Language, and most owners have never opened it.

In a city where many customers speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Korean or French at home, it holds information worth having before anyone pays for translation.

It also misses a great deal, which matters just as much.

Reading the codes

The report lists short codes rather than names, and a little decoding goes a long way.

• en-us and en-ca are both English, wherever the visitor lives.
• zh-cn is Chinese written in simplified characters.
• zh-tw and zh-hk are Chinese written in traditional characters.
• ko and pa are Korean and Punjabi.
• fr-ca and fr are French, Canadian or otherwise.

The first line surprises most owners. Plenty of devices in Canada are set to American English, so en-us says nothing about where a visitor lives; the location reports answer that.

Simplified or traditional

Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken languages that share a written one, so a website does not choose between them. It chooses between simplified and traditional characters.

That makes the split between zh-cn and the other Chinese codes the useful figure. A translation in the script your customers do not use reads as if it was written for somebody else.

Most readers can manage both with effort. Removing effort is the reason for translating at all.

Look at what they read

The total for each language matters less than what those visitors did. Add Landing Page as a secondary dimension, or build a segment for one language, and look again.

Visitors in one language often cluster on a few pages: a particular service, the prices, the location. Those are the pages a translation would serve first.

Compare how often they reach the contact page or the booking form. If it matches everyone else, the English site may already be doing its job for them.

Check the device category too. If nearly all of them arrive on phones, any translated page has to work on a phone before anything else.

What the report cannot tell you

The report counts settings, not preferences, and the gap runs in both directions.

Many people who would rather read Chinese, Korean or Punjabi use phones set to English, because that is how the phone came or because some apps work better that way. They appear as English.

Some languages show up far less than they are spoken. A family that speaks Punjabi at home may well have every phone set to English.

And the report only counts people who found the site. Anyone who searched in Chinese and never saw an English-only page is not in it at all.

So treat the number as a floor. It shows that demand exists, never how large it is.

Check it against the counter

The best second source is the staff who answer the phone and serve customers. They know which languages come up and what gets asked in them.

A tally sheet by the phone for a month, marking the language of each enquiry, is crude and still more reliable than any report.

When the report and the counter agree, the decision is easy. When they disagree, believe the counter, and ask why the site is missing those people.

A worked example

A tailor in a busy suburban plaza does alterations, made-to-measure suits and wedding work. Two of the four staff speak Cantonese, and one speaks Punjabi.

A customer suggested translating the whole site into Chinese, and the owner had a quote for about thirty pages.

Before paying, she opened the language report for the past year. Chinese-language browsers were a steady presence, mostly with traditional characters, and nearly all of them were on phones.

With Landing Page added, they clustered on three pages: wedding gown alterations, suit alterations and the contact page with hours. The other twenty-seven pages barely saw them.

Punjabi hardly appeared, though the counter served Punjabi-speaking customers every week. The customers were there; the report was missing them.

She had those three pages translated into traditional Chinese, added a line in Chinese and Punjabi to the home page saying which languages staff speak, and kept the rest of the quote for later.

Translate the pages that do the work

Full translation is rarely the right first step. It doubles the pages to maintain, and translated pages tend to fall behind the English ones within a year.

Start with the pages that answer what people ask before they call: what you do, what it costs, where you are and when you are open.

A plain sentence saying which languages are spoken at the business is often worth more than a translated page, because it removes the worry about making the call.

Automatic translation buttons are tempting and usually read badly. A business that cares enough to translate should have a person do it.

Measure after the change

When translated pages go live, note the date as an annotation in Analytics, so the change is easy to find later.

Then watch the same segment: whether visitors in that language reach the new pages, and whether more of them reach the contact page than before.

Expect the language figures themselves to move slowly. New pages take time to be found by people searching in that language.

The counter-case

Some businesses will find almost nothing in this report, and that is a real answer. A firm whose customers overwhelmingly read English gains little from translation.

In a business where nobody on staff speaks the language, a translated page invites calls nobody can answer. Translate what you can serve.

The rest still applies: read the report first, check it against what staff hear, and translate the few pages that matter before anything else.

Before paying for translation

1. Open the language report for the past year.
2. Decode the codes that matter to you.
3. Add Landing Page as a secondary dimension.
4. Ask staff which languages customers use.
5. Choose three pages to translate first.
6. Say which languages your staff speak.
7. Annotate the launch and check the segment.

Step four is the one that corrects the report. Staff hear the customers whose phones are set to English, and those are exactly the people the numbers leave out.

Being found by people who search in those languages is covered in customers who search in Chinese or Punjabi.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.