Managing and Budgeting a Multilingual Website Promotion

This article discusses the value of quantifying the value of web site visitors. It has become increasingly clear that simply attracting large numbers of visitors to an organization's E-Business site is not sufficient in and of itself. Rather, companies are motivated by attracting qualified customers who will drive revenue growth. Thus, the critical business need for an E-Business is to be able to quickly and easily identify which customers are its most valuable, which E-Marketing campaigns (such as search engine optimisation, online promotion, etc) are successful driving qualified visitors and returning positive ROI, and how much revenue can be forecasted as a result of each Web traffic activity. Global Reach provides this information in simple, easy to read tables and graphs, enabling companies to make the critical business decisions that maximize the ROI on their internet based systems.

You will need to determine if your advertising and marketing dollars are driving positive earnings growth. We calculate ROI on E-Marketing campaigns and detail the level of success various campaigns have in bringing in qualified visitors by language group and by Web promotion technique used. Website promotion is an ongoing process, and an experimental one at that. One has to continue promoting a Website every week, every month, and measure one's most recent successes (in terms of traffic). This permits more marketing investment that is based on proven ROI.

It is becoming more common to see multilingual Websites, and for cause. The issue is not whether are not people online can read English or not. It's a marketing issue.

Marketing always takes place in the language of the target market. Always.

Instead of dividing the world into country markets, it is more useful to talk in terms of "language zones". A language zone is a market that has been unified by the use of the same language, even though countries in this zone are far away from each other. After all, in e-business, distance does not count. Communication does. Each language zone can be addressed with one language branch of a Website. The latest figures (http://glreach.com/globstats) at the time of writing show that there are around 95 million people online in non-English-speaking countries, which is nearly the online population of the U.S. alone. Most statistic estimates consider that 2000 will be the year when the non-English online population bypasses the English language online population. And when you consider that there are only 322 million English speakers in the world (according to the Ethnologue), out of a total 6 billion population, you see that within a few years, English will only represent one-third of the world's online population. At a recent IDC European IT Forum in Paris, top pundits predicted anywhere between half a billion and one billion people online in 2003. So when you position your company's site for mid-term business, you will need to take into account the non-English speaking world, if you want to survive against your competition that takes globalisation seriously.

It is not enough simply to have a multilingual Website. Each language branch has to be promoted in the countries speaking that language, just as the English Website has to be promoted if it wants to build traffic. Traffic is, finally, the only thing that counts about a Website, since Web revenues are in direct correlation to traffic.

A site grows in time like a tree. Its various language branches start small, and with success, they are added to and deepened. More content is added to each of the language branches as the years move on. Furthermore, languages of lesser importance are added after the initial language design.

There are three axes that need to be kept in mind when analyzing a multilingual Website promotion: - time - language - Web promotion technique

Let’s concentrate on a concrete example in order to work our way through this analysis. Say we are promoting an online clothing store, and the initial languages used are English, German, French and Spanish. Let's discuss how to allocate a budget to promoting this site in each of these language zones. The first question that needs to be addressed it what percentage to allot to each language. Our first "take" on this promotion will be purely objective, assuming no outside factors. If we add up the number of people in each of these four language zones, it gives 142 M people, with the following proportions:

English - 74%
German - 10%
French - 6%
Spanish - 10%

But then other historic factors enter in. Perhaps the online clothing store is already happy with their US online marketing, and has always had a problem of penetrating the French market. Then they would want to increase the percentage alloted to French promotion. They might observe that the Spanish-speaking market doesn't have the strong buying power than the German-speaking market has, so the percentages might be altered in favor of the German market.

Now we need to analyze how the budget is spent, according to language and to Web promotion technique. Here is one way of analyzing a multilingual Web promotion campaign: 

                        English      German	French	Spanish	TOTAL

Regis./verification     $   500     $   300     $   200     $  250      $ 1,250
S.E. optimization	      $10,000     $ 3,000     $ 2,000     $1,500      $16,500
PR                      $ 2,000     $ 1,500     $ 1,500     $1,000      $ 6,000
Online promotion	      $10,000     $ 6,000     $ 4,500     $2,500      $23,000
Banner ads              $23,000     $ 6,000     $ 4,000     $3,000      $36,000
TOTAL                   $45,500     $16,800     $12,200     $8,250      $82,750
                            55%         20%         15%        10%

Then, after this budget has been spent (one or two quarters), the results have to be analyzed, in terms of visitors and sales: 

                       English      German      French    Spanish        TOTAL	
Number of Visitors					
Regis./verification        500         300         200        250        1,250
S.E. optimization	      30,000       9,000       6,000      4,500       49,500
PR                       1,000         600         400        300        2,300
Online promotion        10,000       6,000       4,500      2,500       23,000
Banner ads              10,000       3,000       2,000      1,500       16,500
TOTAL                   51,500      18,900      13,100      9,050       92,550

And it is a simple calculation to determine how much it cost to attract visitors from each language zone to the site in question, segmented by Web promotion technique. 

                      English    German   French   Spanish    TOTAL
Cost per visitor					
Regis./verification     $1.00     $1.00    $1.00     $1.00    $1.00
S.E. optimization       $0.33     $0.33    $0.33     $0.33    $0.33
PR                      $2.00     $2.50    $3.75     $3.33    $2.61
Online promotion        $1.00     $1.00    $1.00     $1.00    $1.00
Banner ads              $2.30     $2.00    $2.00     $2.00    $2.18
AVERAGE COST            $0.88     $0.89    $0.93     $0.91    $0.89

It becomes quite useful to be able to track how many visitors come from each language by each Web promotion technique. One can maximize profits easiest by concentrating on what works best (and cheapest). But, to keep it simple, let's assume that we have seen the promotion of this Website through several months, gathered the statistics from the various home pages, and assembled these statistics. Conclusion: it costs an average of $0.89 to acquire each new visitor to the Website.

Now how much is that visitor worth in sales? Let's make some more assumptions:

Hence we arrive at the final figure:

ROI: $71 invested to yield $100-300 in sales (one time/customer lifetime)

Once you can come to this point and be sure of your figures, then it makes perfect sense to invest signficant amounts of marketing budget, as one can be sure of sales afterwards. Of course, the figure of $0.89/visitor is an overall average, and the analysis can become more granular, so that you can calculate the cost per visitor acquisition in each language and segmented by promotion technique. This will probably result in you shifting more of your budget into one technique in Spanish and another technique in German. Banner advertising will always remain expensive, but ultimately, banner ads are for branding, not for gathering sales leads. That's why most banner ads that you see on Websites come from recognizable companies.

In conclusion, your Website can start attracting large amounts of traffic from abroad. You need to institute various Web promotion actions in each language of your target markets, watch your log files carefully and calculate your cost of visitor acquisition. Once this figure has been settled, get more budget to bring in more visitors, and you will probably see that figure diminish. The longer you promote your Website, the snowball effect comes into play, and you can expect increasing results per dollar.

Sept., 1999


Written by Bill Dunlap
Managing Director, Global Reach

Global Reach
Tel./fax: 1/415/252-6426 (U.S.) or 888/942-6426 (toll-free)
+331/5301-0741 (Europe)
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Last revised on 17 Sept., 1999
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