search

PostHog / posthog.com

Official docs, website, and handbook for PostHog.
https://posthog.com
Other
417 stars 421 forks source link

Create a version of our homepage in German #2552

Closed charlescook-ph closed 2 years ago

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

An idea that came out of the marketing brainstorm last week - we should try a version of our home page translated into German. We know that Germany is an important market for us because of its particular sensitivity to data protection requirements, making PostHog a very relevant solution.

We could use this homepage in our paid ads for example, as we can target German-speaking people on Twitter, LinkedIn and google.de. Happily we already have a native German speaker on the team in @eltjehelene!

Other companies seem to take the approach of just translating the home page and then linking to English-language pages which I would suggest we follow, but I think having the initial content be in German could increase the likelihood of someone exploring further in that market.

eltjehelene commented 2 years ago

Sounds like a good approach, I think we could do super well in the German market with a German landing page.

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

Additional feedback from Hey - we should also at the same time translate a few of the short Google Ads into German as well, so we have German ads linking to a German homepage. Otherwise Google may penalise us if the two don't match up.

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

@smallbrownbike looks like Eltje is on board - do you think this is something Website & Docs would be interested in? If so, what would the most helpful next step be?

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

Here are the ad copies that we would want to translate into German as well when we go ahead with this.

smallbrownbike commented 2 years ago

@charlescook-ph Since all of the content on the homepage is baked into components; it seems like the best first step is to move all of the copy into MDX to make it easier to manage. This will also help us scale this in the future if we want to add more languages.

All I need for now is the new homepage copy in German! I can handle the rest. 😊

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

Nice! Ok so is the best way to get that to you a Google Doc or something for now then?

smallbrownbike commented 2 years ago

A Google Doc is perfect.

eltjehelene commented 2 years ago

Is there a date we have in mind to push this?

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

Is there a date we have in mind to push this?

No specific date, just as soon as we're able! Do you think you have capacity to take a look this week?

eltjehelene commented 2 years ago

Do we have any thoughts on language? German is a fairly formal language, but it depends a bit if we want to attract startups/small companies (informal would be ok), or big ones like banks (I'd go more formal). Any thoughts?

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

I'd say let's go on the more formal side - we're going for growth stage and large companies who are very privacy-focused more than startups and small companies.

corywatilo commented 2 years ago

Before we embark on this...

This isn't an insignificant amount of work to do it right:

  1. Abstracting all page copy into language files
  2. Writing all translations
  3. Support languages in page titles, meta descriptions, etc
  4. Export images in different languages, reference them (Plus what do we do about app screenshots?)
  5. Ability to switch between languages
  6. Browser language preference detection/geo-IP targeting (stretch)

Also it might be a little weird to see one page in German, then everything else in English?

For an MVP, seems like it would be significantly easier to just create a landing page. We can duplicate components and namespace them to German. We'll still need to think through what we do with images, but can just drop non-critical images from the page. Can we see if this would be an acceptable option as a test, and if it's successful, we can sink some time into doing this the right way?

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

100%, a landing page first sounds good to me! Quick notes on your other points:

In terms of how we would test this, we can run the PostHog English site vs. German for a period and see how good the clickthrough and signup rates are - should give us a pretty clear signal if this is worth pursuing further or not.

mariusandra commented 2 years ago

Not trying to be a blocker, but aren't we misleading people with this? Done well, I foresee a big increase in German support requests, and people expecting to speak to us in German, and leaving with a "this is not what I expected" feeling. Fine to test things, but please don't underestimate the scope of building a parallel german-language sales organisation.

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

aren't we misleading people with this?

It's a fair question - I was thinking about it from the perspective of 'oh it's nice that they've gone to the effort of doing this in my language so it resonates better.' But we might just piss people off.

As a developer, would you be more likely to click on an advert if it is in Estonian for a product you may have vaguely heard of before like PostHog? Would it make zero difference? And then if you clicked through, would you not care (or expect) that the rest was in English, or be annoyed?

(I know you are a sample size of one and I'd guess German speakers have a higher expectation of translations online than Estonians, but you are closer to a target PostHog user than me!)

If we think this is too much effort for a potentially low reward/pissing people off, we could also only translate the adverts into German and see how their clickthrough and conversion rates compare.

mariusandra commented 2 years ago

Estonian is probably the wrong language to talk about here. Anything that's translated to Estonian on the internet is usually a scam that's google-translated to 32 other tiny languages to increase the number of suckers clicking the link. "Leia kuumi vallalisi lähiümbruses!". So as a developer, I'm more likely not to click anything I see in Estonian. I know that nobody on the other end actually speaks Estonian (what are the odds of having 10% of your employees be Estonian?), so it'll just feel scammy. Except if it's an obviously-Estonian startup.

This probably does not translate to Germans, who are most likely used to high quality products and support in their native language... though Germans in IT/product usually speak better than average English, though not always.

So let's flip this around. Suppose we have a French ad, with a French landing page, but then nobody in sales can speak French to you, would you be pissed off as a Frenchman?

Twixes commented 2 years ago

I agree, the hypothetical concept of a globally distributed software company made up in TEN percent of Estonians is nonsensical. I mean, there are more than twice as many Berliners as there are Estonians. From a Polish perspective, I think running just the ads in the language may make more sense. Having a whole page in Polish and then being completely unable to do any business in it (let alone use the software) would definitely feel like more of a bait-and-switch than just landing on a page in English (which someone interested in product analytics probably wouldn't be turned off by much).

charlescook-ph commented 2 years ago

Ok thanks both - as someone who a) has the luxury of seeing the internet entirely in their native language, and b) basically never looks for dev tools, my imagination isn't very helpful here!

Those are both reasonable assumptions and perspectives. In that case, let's go ahead and just run the ads in German first, not translate the homepage, see what we learn and take it from there. Sound good?