The best countries to expand your business internationally

One of the most popular website analytics tools for companies, Google Analytics, provides information on website visitors. Did you know we can extract very useful information for an internationalisation process? Take note!

Information on website visitors in Google Analytics

For information on the origin of users or their language, go to the side menu of Google Analytics and select “Visitors”. There are two options in this sub menu: Location and languages, let's take a closer look at these two options.

Location

Here you will find information on the location of the users that visit your website. How? Google Analytics can track anonymously from the user's IP the user's country and city. If accurate information on the visitor's location is not available, Google Analytics shows an entry «(not provided)». The location of website visits is important during an internationalisation process in order to identify the countries where an expansion process would be successful, create advertising campaigns in the language of the country and adapt the language and format of the website to each market.

The tool shows a heat map tracking the countries with the most visitors, which are shaded in a darker colour. Filters can be applied to this data in order to find countries with high:

– Percentage of new sessions.
– Average session duration.
– Pages viewed per session .
– Bounce rate.
– Sessions expired.

At the bottom of the map you will find a chart showing the conversion rate of a website with reference to the established website target. This can be useful for identifying the country or countries where the conversion rate is higher and launching advertising campaigns in these markets, for example.

Likewise, we can see which countries have a higher bounce rate in order to optimise the website, translate it into the local language and generate specific content according to the market.

Language

Another important detail we can obtain from the tool is the user language. Google Analytics detects this through the web browser language and this way we will have relevant information on the languages into which our website content should be translated.

This information allows us to extract very interesting conclusions, if we analyse certain metrics: the language of users who spend longer on the website, the language of new users or the language with which we obtain a higher conversion rate.

Lets imagine that a company is launching an advertising campaign using banners in two languages, Spanish and English. Users will be able to see (filtering by page traffic) the conversion rate of these two languages and they will also see the conversion rate of other languages into which their content has not yet been translated. This means that translating the banners into languages with a high conversion rate will be an excellent strategy for directly targeting potential markets.

In conclusion, Analytics provides so much data that we need to know how to read it and use it to our advantage in order to determine the appropriate digital strategy for our company's expansion process. In these processes, professional translation services are highly recommended in order to ensure conversion rate optimisation.