It's not a surprise that an increasing number of companies are on their second- or third-generation content management systems (CMS). For these savvy organizations, it's usually standard practice to publish and manage content across 10, or even 20 different languages for 30 or more locales -- with worldwide marketing teams supporting the daily updating of content and information across time zones around the world.
However, 2009 is not shaping up as a year of flexible global budgets, or where general expansion of services online is typically being planned. Yet in these difficult economic times, improving efficiencies in your global web ecosystem process can actually help justify expansion into new markets -- or at the very least, foster your web ecosystem to have the opportunity to sustain itself while the worldwide economic forecasts remain uncertain.
This article provides five recommendations for evaluating and adding greater efficiency to your global web ecosystem. For the sake of these recommendations, let's imagine the following scenario:
- A Fortune 1000 company, publishing in 12 languages across 15 locales
- Marketing and IT are distributed locally
- All teams publish through a centralized CMS
- Translation services are completed by regional vendors, except for Japan, where a local vendor is preferred
- Web analytics are managed inconsistently, with only quarterly reporting to the central web teams
1. Measure and evaluate current effectiveness
Begin with a baseline consistent evaluation of local site performance to date. To establish a baseline, start with two key metrics: traffic and cost. The two questions to answer are: "How much did that site cost (last year or even last month)?" and "What did we get out of it (in terms of traffic or in terms of new sales or leads)?"
Given the scenario -- more than 12 unique languages across 15 locales -- we would most likely see variances in terms of site performance. For instance, the Spain/Spanish site might receive thousands of visits from Google.es, but 65 percent of those visitors may just visit the homepage and leave. Compare and contrast behavior trends and patterns to identify standard key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to evaluate individual locale sites against one another.
Overlaying this top-line KPI data against revenue and overall market opportunity (e.g., population/client base/number of partners), you will quickly develop a standard checklist of mapping language/locales with expected performance.
What should begin to emerge is a grouping, or "tiering," of sites and countries. Within three to five groups for approximately 10 to 20 sites, you should start to see trends where "large," "medium," "small," and "questionable" buckets appear. These standard groupings will help you place in context -- and in appropriate priority -- the evaluation criteria necessary to make decisions for budgeting and investment across your global sites.
2. Get a handle on your content
Companies are often very good at putting up content, but very poor at taking it down. It's a myth that web content is free, particularly when the base content is sent out for translation across 10 or more languages, where translators, copy editors, reviewers, and approvers are engaged across every language.
To get a better handle on how much content you have and how much you really need, start by evaluating the total number of pages per global site and the number of pages that have received traffic over the past year or month.
You can measure the total number of pages currently either by "crawling" your site or querying your CMS. Next, compare the total number of pages against the number of pages that are actually receiving traffic. In another invocation of the 80/20 rule, we oftentimes find that only 20 to 25 percent of content will receive 80 percent or more of the traffic -- and for some global markets, this proportion may touch 90/10 or higher.
Figure 1: Sample comparison of percentage of total site content receiving traffic
Figure 2: Sample mapping of total number of pages, compared to percentage of total page views for a local site
By the time you compare content assets available against the initial traffic/cost baseline established earlier, you'll be able to better prioritize content decisions for sites based upon standard KPIs and currently available content and functionality.
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