How can I be sure that new users are seeing their native language?

[brubros]

I am using keywords and Google Adwords campaign targeted towards China. In one day of testing, I received a little over 300 hits from the campaign but experienced a 80% bounce rate (percent of people that spent less than a few seconds on the web site before exiting). The high bounce rate might be due to any number of different issues (landing page needs to be improved, advertising content needs to be altered, etc.) but the first issue I need to explore is whether or not those new visitors are seeing my site in their native Chinese. Do you have a suggestion on how I can determine what language an unregistered visitor actually sees when they first land on my site? Can I look at server logs and see if pages like http://**********/lang=cn were generated for example? Or is there an easier method? This will help me decide how best to set the translation language detection strategy as well in vBET settings. Thanks!

[tavenger5]

If the users are going to the translated URL then they should be seeing the translation. I've noticed a higher bounce rate from Chinese and Japanese traffic in general. This may be in part because the Google translation isn't as good as some languages and the visitors can tell.

[brubros]

If the users are going to the translated URL...

First, thanks for important insight regarding your experience with traffic from China and Japan. That could explain a great deal - and save me some headaches in advance!

Second, please bear with me (newbie and "junior member" and all), but the URL I use is the primary domain and not any language-specific URL. I'm not sure I even would know how to do that (www.domain.com/lang=cn ?). I was under the impression that vBET deduces as best as it can the local language of the user "automatically" (that's what I'm betting on when I link from an AdWords ad now, but I want to verify) or takes the registered user's profile language preference if it exists (the definitive method).

Perhaps this is just a feature request for a reporting capability that informs me that X people visited the site using Y language for a given time span and that way I can both correlate traffic as well as, separately, develop a better idea of readership language volume which, in turn, might enable me to de-clutter the interface of languages rarely/never used by my readership.

Thanks again!

[tavenger5]

I see what you mean - It depends on the setting for "Redirect to user language". I have mine set to Forced, which is based on their browsers language setting.

To see if this is working you can look in your analytics software for the language code. I use Google Analytics and vbSEO, so this process is relatively simple; I just search under content for /code/. In analytics you can also divide users based on language and origin.