Talk the Talk: Maximizing International Profits through Translation

By Andrea Kaduk, Account Supervisor

In the US travel industry, it’s not a shocker that targeting international markets is a wise and profitable decision. However, when targeting to different countries it’s important to “talk the talk”. From my experience on various travel accounts I have found this statement could not be truer.

A few years ago, we ran an English paid search campaign in Brazil for one of our account and it failed – low volume, even lower conversions. We failed to connect with our demographic, completely ignoring their language and assuming English campaigns would suffice. With increasing business from Brazil this year, it was decided to test this market again, however this time we wanted to see success. We utilized Google’s free translation service (professional translators, not automated) to translate our English campaigns to Portuguese. We then launched both English and Portuguese campaigns and saw quite an improvement. The vast majority of clicks and revenue volume stemmed from the translated campaigns and proved to be a solid investment for the account.

In addition to Google’s free translation service for paid search, the Google Translator Toolkit allows users to upload documents for automatic translation and apply the human touch to automatic translation. Google also offers a website translator gadget that translates entire websites, making your site’s content available in 51 languages. If a user visits your site and their language differs from that of the site, the website translator gadget will determine their language preference by their browser setting and automatically prompt the user (through a banner) to translate the page to their preferred language.

So always remember to talk the talk, there is no reason not to with the many tools available to help.

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