If your company is growing and expanding its global reach, you must make sure your business objectives are aligned with the needs of your international customers.

But how do you get actionable info about what global customers want? Take a look at your website’s analytics. With a bit of digging, you can find what you need to know about your new customers. Here’s a quick guide to your most useful metrics:

Country and Language Reports

The first listing in your analytics report represents performance within your flagship market. Everything following that represents your performance in global markets.

A high number of visitors from countries you don’t currently serve shows potential in new markets. High numbers of users with language preferences beyond what your website currently provides shows a potential need for translating your website.

At a glance, this overview—combined with the metrics explained below—gives you loads of data for determining if you should localize your sites for global customers … and which markets and languages you should serve.

For a deeper dive, look at both Country and Language data at the same time. This is good for confirming secondary markets, like Spanish-speaking U.S. Hispanics or French speakers in Canada.

Metrics Breakdown: Key KPIs by Country and Language

These are the key metrics to consider by Country and Language, and what the numbers tell you about global users:

Bounce Rate and Average Session Duration

Firstly, examine the data to see if a certain country or language represents a sizable chunk of your visitors. Be sure to look for high bounce rates or time-on-site stats that are shorter than average.

This shows that global users are interested in your brand, but are leaving your website because they can’t find what they want, or—more likely—they can’t understand the language of your site. This indicates a need for website localization.

Conversions

Take a close look at conversion rates, too. For transactional B2C websites, this is usually measured by transactions, but for B2B, it can represent completed Contact Us forms, catalog downloads or other goals you’ve identified.

High numbers of visitors and low conversions are other indications that you need website translation. Customers want to engage, but can’t successfully navigate the customer experience to convert.

Dig Deeper with Secondary Dimensions and Filters

You can find more data on global customers by applying Country and Language filters to other reports, too:

Site Content

Now that you know where your global users live and what languages they prefer, add Country or Language as a secondary dimension to the site content report. Then use filters to see which content is most popular.

This data tells you:

  • What products or services global users want most
  • What information they’re looking for, and
  • What goals they’re trying to achieve on your website

This can help you prioritize countries if you’re testing out a new market, or determining the scope of a translation project.

Traffic Source

Filtering traffic sources by Country and Language tells you how global users are finding your website. If you have mostly direct traffic, this means only users who already know your brand are engaging with your website. This indicates an opportunity for market growth.

Wrapping Up

This is just a rough guide but should give you a good foundation for using analytics to understand the needs of international customers. Compare notes with your local and international sales teams, because they’re probably seeing the same gaps you are.

Got questions? Want to know more? Feel free to leave a comment.