Want to know the real added value of your localised content? Track these KPIs

Why content localisation matters

A recent major international study revealed a crucial insight: 65% of consumers across 29 countries prefer content in their native language. At the same time, two-thirds of B2B buyers say they are willing to spend more on localised products, which they find more reliable and user-friendly. 

Despite the market's clear preference for localised content, a staggering 59% of online marketing content remains available only in English. Companies that invest in localisation now are better positioned to grow their market share. Yet to truly leverage the power of localised content, it's crucial to monitor the right metrics. In this article, we'll show you how.

The Real Value of Localisation

Many marketing teams mistakenly see localisation as a mere cost factor rather than a strategic asset. They focus entirely on operational questions:

• How much does it cost?
• How do we increase efficiency?
• How do we use tools and technology?
• How long does content localisation take?
• How many words do we localise per time period?

These questions are all important questions, no doubt. Metrics like these are essential for project timelines, annual resource planning, product launches, and market expansions… However, they are purely operational, and focusing solely on them sends the wrong message to the broader organisation: “This unit costs money and needs to become more cost- and time-efficient.”

While this conclusion makes sense from a business standpoint, these metrics only highlight one side of the equation – the investment in localisation – without showing the returns. Fortunately, there's a better way. It's all about tracking and understanding the metrics that truly reflect how localisation contributes to your business's success...

Measuring localisation's strategic impact

To truly understand localisation’s return on investment (ROI), it's important to align your localisation activities with your organisation's strategic goals. Here’s how you can measure localisation's performance when it comes to achieving common business objectives:

Boosting brand awareness

If one of your objectives is to raise brand visibility, keep track of these KPIs:

• Website traffic by country and language (excluding your native market)
• New website visitors from target locales
• Social Media impressions and engagement for localised content
• Media mentions outside your native market
• Search performance (organic and paid) from target locales.

Growing your customer base

To see how effective your localisation efforts are in expanding your customer base, focus on:

• Conversion rates in target markets
• Trial signups in different countries
• Sales contacts per market and/or language
• Returning website visitors from target locales
• Click-through rates from localised content

Increasing revenue

For revenue growth, the best localisation KPIs include:

• Average sales volume by country and language
• Retention rate of localised users
• Net revenue per market
• Active monthly users per country
• Upselling and cross-selling rates of localised vs. non-localised products

As you can see, many of these are common content marketing KPIs that you are probably already tracking in some form, except now they are focusing clearly on specific markets, countries and languages. This approach helps you to clearly see how localisation fits into your organisation's broader strategy.

Above all, by focusing on these metrics, you can help transform your marketing team's mindset: instead of seeing localisation as just another cost item, you can now see how it contributes to your company's overall performance in real time. This insight can also help you to direct your localisation budget and resources to where they'll have the biggest impact.

Localisation is a problem solver

One of the reasons why companies struggle to accurately calculate the ROI of their localisation activities is that it's not always possible to link localisation directly to revenue growth. Instead of focusing on purely monetary KPIs, remember to look at how localisation adds value for your customers and for various teams throughout your organisation, such as sales and support.

Here are a couple of use cases along with KPIs that show the real added value of localisation:

Customer support contact rates

If your customer support teams are receiving a high number of contacts from a particular country or language, you can benefit by stepping up your localisation efforts in that market. If you devote budget to localising more support content in one language, then you also have a clear KPI to help track the ROI and performance of this project: change in the customer contact rate (%).

A/B testing for marketing content

To optimise social media engagement, your marketing teams can benefit by running A/B tests for different versions of localised content. Users from different locales often have varying preferences. Some markets prefer short, snappy posts with visualised statistics, while others favour more elaborate and insightful posts, perhaps accompanied by a selfie instead of a graph or product picture. 

By dedicating resources to finding the right blend of copy style and visuals for different markets, you can significantly boost impressions and engagement. This approach provides a clear KPI to track the ROI and performance of this project: increased social media engagement per market (%).

Rethinking localisation, one project at a time

The use cases above are just a few of the many ways localisation can help your organisation achieve more, whether it's raising awareness, reaching new customers or enhancing customer relations and retention. Since the true added value of localisation is often tied to very specific KPIs, it can be easy to overlook or underestimate. 

Without a clear view of the ROI, many companies may be reluctant to invest in localisation. Yet with the right metrics, you will see that localisation plays a major role in any international business's success. Strong localised content can help your company thrive in new markets where you don't even have a local sales or marketing team.

When you consider the benefits and potentially enormous ROI of localisation – not to mention the relatively low entry hurdles and initial investment costs – you start to realise that it is far too great of an opportunity to miss out on, no matter the size, industry or scale of your business.

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