Recently, I received the following question from a blog reader:
We offer our website in multiple languages, as such we want to track which language a user was viewing on a particular page. There is no URL difference, as that value is stored in session. What is the best practice for recording this metric, and reporting on it? Can the real time reports in SC 14 make use of this metric as well (example: Page view per day by language)?Therefore, I thought I would answer this question here in case any of you out there are in a similar situation and offer website content in multiple languages.
Se Habla Español? Parle Italiano?
As we move to a global marketplace, providing content in multiple languages is becoming more and more common. However, adding foreign language capabilities to your website can be a difficult, time-consuming effort. Hence, over time, you might want to use SiteCatalyst to see if these efforts are paying off or if adding this functionality is contributing to the bottom line. The following will show how I have dealt with this in the past.
Pagenames and Pathing
The first item in this area I tackle is the Pagename variable since it is so important and drives page-level pathing. Obviously, the first question here is whether you should have a different page name for each page in each language. While I can see reasons for doing this, I am a strong believer that you should have only one pagename for each page — regardless of which language it is in. This allows you to see the true pathing of pages irrespective of language. Another reason I advocate this is based upon the simple fact that you may have 20,000 pages on your site and if you translate them all into 10 languages you will now have 200,000 pages to deal with in your pages and pathing reports!
However, I concede that there may be cases where you want to see how visitors looking at pages in Spanish differ from those looking at pages in Chinese. The easiest way to do this is to use Omniture Discover where you can easily segment on a language variable (see below) and then view the pathing reports differently for each language (or even combine a bunch of languages together!). But if you are not fortunate enough to have Omniture Discover, there is still a way to see pathing differences by language. To do this, simply concatenate the language and the pagename (i.e. spanish:home page) and place that value into a new custom Traffic Variable (sProp) and enable pathing. Doing this will allow you to find any page in any language and then view pathing behavior taking place before/after that page as shown here:
Success Events by Language
The next question I get from customers is to show them which of their website Success Events take place in each language. For example, of all lead forms that are filled out, how many were submitted by a user using the Spanish language pages. While you can derive this information by looking at various page reports as described above, the easiest way to do this is through the conversion area. On each page, simply set a custom Conversion Variable (eVar) with the value indicating in which language that page is being viewed. By having this value in an eVar, you can the open up that eVar report and add any Success Event metric you wish and see the percentages associated with each language as shown here:
Pages by Language
There are two other “traffic” related items that I like to show clients related to languages. The first is which pages are most often viewed in multiple languages. To do this, I pass the language the page is being shown in to a Traffic Variable (at the same time it is passed to the eVar mentioned above) and then create a Traffic Data Correlation between it and the Pagename variable. Once you have done this, you can use the correlation to find any page on your site and then break it down by language to see how often it is viewed in each foreign language as shown here:
Also, since correlations go both ways, you can easily open the Language sProp report, find the “Spanish” row and see what pages are most often viewed in Spanish for your entire site.
The final thing you can review is how many pageviews and/or visits involve foreign languages. Using the same sProp describes above, you can open up the sProp report and use Pageviews or Visits (if enabled) as metrics to see the overall usage of each language as shown here:
Any other cool things you have done to answer questions related to foreign languages? If so, please comment here…
Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst? Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how? Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share? If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or company name!). If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.
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