
If you’ve made your website available in one language, it’s natural to assume that your visitors will also speak that language. But do they all?
The global nature of the World Wide Web means that anyone in the world with an internet connection can visit practically any website in existence – even websites in a language foreign to them. For all you know, you may be getting a significant number of such visitors who speak different languages from you, but they don’t stay on your website for long because they can’t understand it.
To avoid wasting potential sales opportunities in this way, it pays to:
A report in the Google Analytics platform known as the language report can help with the initial investigation. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, take a moment to sign up and connect this web analytics platform to your website – it’s free.
With that out of the way, let’s explore the language report in Google Analytics – what it is, the data it offers, and how you can use it to expand into new markets.
The language report is one of the standard reports available in Google Analytics. It can help you understand issues such as:
If you are using a Universal Analytics property to track data in Google Analytics, you can access the language report by clicking the “Audience” option in the left sidebar, followed by Geo > Language.
If you’ve just connected Google Analytics to your website, you may need to wait a few days or weeks for your language report to start populating with data. That’s because Google Analytics starts to collect data from the date you’ve installed it on your website, and not before.
As you browse your language report in Google Analytics, you may notice values with the “[two letter code]-[two letter code]” formatting in the Language column. Such as:
The first two letters in the value are language codes that represent different languages. For example, “en” represents the English language, while “fr” represents the French language. These language codes aren’t specific to Google Analytics but are adopted from the ISO 639-1 language codes drawn up by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Meanwhile, the second two letters in the value are country codes based on the ISO’s set of ISO 3166-1 country codes. For example, “us” refers to the United States, while “ca” refers to Canada.
Putting both codes together, you’ll have a good idea of which country a user is from and the language they speak. If you see “en-us” in the language report’s Language column, for example, you are likely receiving English-speaking users from the United States.
(We say “likely” because the data may not be completely accurate. More on this in a bit!)
That said, values in the Language column may also consist of only the language code, such as only “en” or “ja.” This indicates that Google Analytics managed to capture only the user’s language and not their country.
Wondering why? This next section has the answer.
Google Analytics references a user’s language settings in their web browser to determine their preferred language and the country from which they are browsing a website.
Since users have a hand in selecting their language settings, these settings may not accurately represent their language and country. For example, an English-speaking user from the United Kingdom may have accidentally set their language to “English (United States)” instead.
Alternatively, a German speaker from Germany may be trying to brush up on their French. In this case, they may temporarily switch their language setting to just “French” (without a country indicator), and send an inaccurate signal to Google Analytics on the language they typically use.
Keep this limitation in mind as you evaluate your Google Analytics language report data!
Apart from displaying the languages that users in certain countries are using, Google Analytics’ language report can also provide data on metrics such as:
The above sounds like a lot, but we’ve only just scratched the surface here! By customizing your language report, such as adding a secondary dimension or advanced segments and filters, it’s possible to get even more detailed insights into how users all over the world interact with your web pages.
It’s worth learning how every feature of Google Analytics works – and there are many of them – if you want to make the most of this powerful platform.
When you view your language report with the default settings enabled, your users will be split into separate groups based on their specific language and country settings. For example, you’ll have one group of “en-us” users, one group of “en-gb” users, and so on.
But if you want to focus on just your users’ language settings for the time being, you can create a Google Analytics view with a regular expression filter that groups different language variants into just one language category, such as “en.” (This blog post goes into the steps in more detail.)
With this setup, you can get an overall view of the languages your users speak without getting bogged down by their country settings. This is helpful if your priority is identifying which languages to translate your web pages to, before you undertake language localization based on your users’ countries of origin.
When you’ve used the insights from your Google Analytics language report to decide on your next steps, use a website translation solution like Weglot to take action on them.
For example, if the language report suggests that many users from Korea are visiting your website, you may want to translate your web pages to Korean to better serve this user segment. Using a proprietary mix of machine learning translations, Weglot can help translate your website content into Korean (and over 110 other languages) instantly and with a high degree of accuracy.
These translations are stored in a central Weglot Dashboard for your refinement before you add them to your website. For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, Weglot also adds hreflang tags to each translated page. These bits of code help search engines better direct searchers to the appropriate language versions of your web pages.
Finally, if you’re setting up your translated pages in subdirectories (instead of subdomains), these pages will automatically appear in your Google Analytics reports – including your language report. You’ll be able to analyze the performance of your translated pages as you work on expanding your brand presence in new markets.
The Google Analytics language report provides essential intel on the languages that visitors to your website use and the countries they’re from. As you review the report, adding advanced segments and filters can help you drill down on the precise data you need for your analysis. And once you’ve got a good picture of whether your website caters to your users’ language preferences, you can go on to take action.
If the findings call for translating your web pages into multiple new languages, Weglot’s website translation solution is just what you need. It detects, translates and displays the content of your website using a first layer of machine translation coupled with full edting control and translation management tools, significantly cutting down launching a multilingual site. You can then use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic to these translated pages, the average time spent on them, and more, to ensure that you’re providing the best possible user experience on your website.
Weglot is compatible with leading website platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow, and you can try it on your website for free here.