How we did it: recommending mavention.com for foreign visitors on mavention.nl

Last week we launched recommending mavention.com to our foreign visitors on mavention.nl.

Mavention.nl goes multilingual

Last year we launched a new version of our website on the SharePoint 2013 platform. Having noticed the increasing number of visitors from outside of the Netherlands we decided to launch the English version of our website as well – mavention.com.

Where all of the content on mavention.nl, except for the majority of blog posts, is in Dutch, the content published on mavention.com is 100% in English. And although mavention.com has built a fair share of visitors in the last year, still quite a large number of visitors on our Dutch website is coming from outside of the Netherlands (86%). We suspect this might have to do with a couple of reasons.

Mavention.nl exists a few years longer than mavention.com and therefore ranks higher in search results than mavention.nl.

The most viewed content on Mavention websites are blog posts (63%). Because the same blog posts, both written in English, are published on mavention.nl and mavention.com, it is more likely you will get served the higher ranked post on mavention.nl rather than mavention.com when searching for information on the Internet. Unfortunately for us, even though you can read the particular blog post in English on mavention.nl, it will be difficult for you to read the rest of the content if you don’t actually speak Dutch. Thinking about how to optimize the experience for our non-Dutch visitors we came up with an idea.

Recommending mavention.com tot non-Dutch visitors using GeoIP targeting

To optimize the experience for our non-Dutch visitors we decided to leverage GeoIP information about the current visitor. If we find out that you are visiting our Dutch website from outside the Netherlands we will ask whether the English version of our website would be more suitable for you.

Whenever you’re visiting mavention.nl we try to determine the country from which you are visiting our website. We do this using the free freegeoip.net service:

jQuery.get('//freegeoip.net/json/', function(data) {
    if (data && data.country_name !== 'Netherlands') {
        // display prompt here
    }
}); 

If the country of origin detected by the service is other than the Netherlands we will display a suggestion you switch to the English version of the website. To make the transition as easy as possible we will redirect you to the same page on the English site – just as you would click the language switch button in the upper-right corner.

Should the service detect the country incorrectly and you decide on stay on mavention.nl, we will store your choice in a cookie not to nag you about it anymore during your stay on our website.

We hope that this capability will help our non-Dutch visitors discover more content on our website. Try it out at http://www.mavention.nl.