After having added the Google Website Translation widget to this very blog a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be interesting to analyse its impact on the blog. Specifically I wanted to find out whether it improved the user interaction with the site by non-English speakers or more accurately – visitors who don’t have English as the default language setting.
According to Google Analytics, not surprisingly the majority of this blog’s reader base is in the UK and the US (fairly evenly split). There is however another 49 nations represented in the statistics over the last month.
In order to seek the answer to my question I created a custom Google Analytics Segment that by regular expressions excluded “en” for English.
The main finding of the analysis is that:
Non-English speaking visitors tend to spend less time on the site, reading fewer posts and have much higher bounce rate, indicating that due to the language divide they are less likely to browse around but instead are quick in and out to get what they are looking for.
As I couldn’t see any significant changes or trend in the charts since implementing the Google Translation, I can so far only conclude that its implementation hasn’t had much of an impact on the blog. I’ll keep the widget on though and will run the same analysis in a couple of months when I’ve got more data.
If you’ve got any insights to share on the topic I would appreciate your comments.
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