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Internationalization Increases Visitor Engagement and Conversion Rate by 1060%


Client Background

A vocabulary quiz website was suffering with extremely low visitor engagement. When a visitor arrived on the website, a vocabulary quiz was automatically started and she was tempted to answer by an extremely intuitive quiz interface. The website measured its success rate by an engagement metric which corresponded to number of questions a visitor anwers on his first visit. Their business strategy revolves around increasing the engagement rate, which will lead to eventual signup and then the visitor can be monetized by offering premium services.

Challenge

The client was extremely dissatisfied by its visitor engagement, which was around 0.5 (per visitor). In other words, on an average a visitor just attempted 0.5 words in the quiz. This meant that a majority of visitors were just going away from the website without interacting with the quiz at all. This, of course, was quite low and Wingify was hired to fix this.

Actions and Results

Wingify used its platform on the client website using JavaScript within first day of getting hired. At Wingify, the first step of improving the website conversions is to look:

  • At the website to see if there are elements which “obviously” come in the way of effectively converting visitors
  • At the website analytical data to observe and study visitor behaviour

For this particlular client, from the website analytical data, it was observed that:

  • 70% of the website visitors came from Thailand, primarily due to a prominent link from a popular Thai social network
  • 40% of the website visitors used Internet Explorer 6

Immediately, Wingify team sprang into action. As the vocabulary website used complex JavaScript for running its quiz application, we observed that the application was not working in Internet Explorer 6. After fixing the application to work for IE 6, the visitor engagement increased from 0.5 words to 1.8, an increase of 260%.

As majority of visitors were from Thailand, a country where use of local language is prominent on the Internet, we hypothesized that if quiz website is presented in Thai language, the engagement might go up. Working with the client, the entire application was translated into Thai. This included directions, answer explanations and everything else.

Using Wingify’s Split Testing framework, a split test was setup ONLY for the visitors from Thailand. Randomly, half of the visitors from Thailand were shown Thai version of the website and the other half were shown the default and old English version of the website.

It was seen that for the localized version of the application, visitor engagement went up to 5.8 words. The visitor engagement for the English version remained same (0.5 words). The client was very happy with the result as this meant an improvement of 1060% improvement.

Since 70% of the traffic was from Thailand, the client was in dilemma whether to convert entire website into Thai version or not. Wingify helped the client with its Behavioral Targeting technology, where visitors from Thailand were shown Thai version while all other visitors were shown English version of the application.

Summary

  • Vocabulary quiz website (client) suffers extremely low visitor engagement of 0.5 words
  • Wingify uses website analytics to find out that the application didn’t work on Internet Explorer 6, fixing what increased the engagement to 1.8 words
  • Wingify sets up a split test to determine the effect on visitor engagement if visitors from Thailand (70% of total website visitors) are presented the website in Thai language
  • The local language version of the website sees increase in engagement by 1060% to 5.8 words
  • After the successful results from the split test, Wingify sets up permanent targeting where visitors from Thailand see the local language version of the application

Important Lessons to Learn

  • For conversion optimization, it needs to clear what EXACTLY is to be optimized
    • In this case, client optimized for visitor engagement (which was measured by the number of words answered in a quiz per visitor). They weren’t concerned about page views, signups, etc. for this particular project
  • Segment visitors and analyze the behaviour
    • Segmentation is the key to conversion optimization. Different types of website visitors relate and interact with website differently. Leverage that by optimizing conversions separately for each segment
  • Localization and internationization of a website does work
    • Use split tests for visitors from a particular country/area to see it localization works for your website
  • After results of split tests have been analyzed and understood, use targeting wisely to implement the winning variation permanently
    • There is no need to implement winning variation for all visitors as it may be sub-optimal for other visitor segments



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