For anyone marketing products in some of the world’s largest e-commerce stores like Amazon, iTunes, or the Microsoft Store, link translation is one of the most sophisticated and beneficial features being offered by intelligent link management services.
What is Link Translation?
Many of the world’s top e-commerce stores are made up of multiple country and region-specific storefronts scattered throughout the globe. Amazon, for example, has 14 different storefronts worldwide and continues to open new ones every year.
Because of things like language, currency, and shipping restrictions, people want to purchase in their “local” store. This presents marketers promoting products within these storefronts with a very unique challenge: how do you ensure that everyone clicking on your links to purchase your products is arriving at the correct online storefront?
Well, luckily, link translation is here to fix this problem. By automatically localizing these product links for each individual customer, the link is “translated,” ensuring they are sent to the correct item within their own local storefront.
Why is This Important?
Imagine you’re a consumer in the market for a better way to make bacon. You comb the internet for reviews and articles and come across a kitchen gadget that promises to change your bacon-eating life forever. You read through a glowing review of this miracle product, and then notice an Amazon link to it at the end of the article. With Amazon Prime, you know you’re only a few clicks and two day shipping away from delicious, salty bacon.
You click on the link and are flabbergasted when you arrive at this page:
“Amazon.de?” You ask yourself, “but I’m not in Germany, I’m in the US. I can’t buy here. Why is this website sending me to Amazon in Germany?”
This inconvenience in your purchasing experience is just enough of a distraction for your better judgment to kick in. You decide not to purchase the Microwave Bacon Cooker because you were not pointed to the right product page for your region. Dreams and hopes were broken! Back to regular bacon.
This is exactly the kind of experience you’re likely creating for a good portion of your audience, by using links that send everyone to the same store without considering where they are.
Using an intelligent link service with link translation prevents this experience from happening. Such services automatically route your customers to the appropriate item within their local storefront. This means that customers coming from Germany are sent to that specific product in Amazon.de, UK customers to Amazon.co.uk, French customers to Amazon.fr, and so on. It all happens automatically in the blink of an eye and you don’t have to worry about your customers being sent to a store where they can’t buy.
Furthermore, this problem isn’t just isolated to Amazon. iTunes has over 150 different country and region-specific storefronts, and e-commerce giants like Google Play, Microsoft, NewEgg, and eBay are also geographically fragmented.
Translation and Affiliate Marketing
For people earning referral commissions as affiliate marketers for major e-commerce storefronts, link translation can also increase commissions.
Consider this case study from a British newspaper, the Independent. They use affiliate links in their IndyBest reviews section as a way to further monetize the newspaper’s content. After they began powering their Amazon affiliate links through Geniuslink with translation, they saw an immediate and significant increase in conversions and affiliate commissions.
Ranker.com, a site hosting crowdsourced rankings on just about everything, was able to increase affiliate commissions by 15% by doing nothing more than switching their regular affiliate links to intelligent links powered by Geniuslink.
Affiliate marketing guru, Pat Flynn, also recommends Geniuslink as a tool every affiliate marketer needs in their toolbox due to the huge upside that can be realized through link translation.
Translation and Product Marketing
When someone clicks on one of your links with the intention of purchasing your product, it is critical to minimize friction at all costs. By getting the consumer as close as possible to the point of purchase when they click on a link, you are ensuring that geographic obstacles won’t destroy all of your marketing efforts that got that them to that point. Link translation eliminates these obstacles by getting your customer in front of your product in their local e-commerce storefront, where they are likely only a few clicks away from purchase.
How Does it Work?
Link translation is one of the most sophisticated features of intelligent link management services, and there is a lot more to the process than it may appear on the surface.
While it varies with each service, the process typically starts when someone clicks on an intelligent link. Let’s use an example of a US Amazon product link being translated for someone in the UK. Upon click, the intelligent link performs an IP lookup of the user to verify what country they’re in. Since the user is in the UK, the service determines that this user needs to go to Amazon.co.uk instead of Amazon.com. Then some translation logic is used to find that same item in the Amazon UK store to send the user through to that item.
For the technically savvy, here is how the Geniuslink translation algorithm works for this process.
Sounds complicated huh? Surprisingly, all of this translation happens in a fraction of a second with the end user being completely unaware of the process. All they know is that they are now only a few clicks away from getting their hands on that amazing bacon cooker that you were promoting! Bon Appetit my friend!
Note that link translation is a completely automated process that differs from link targeting. Link targeting is a manual process where you specify specific destinations based on things like country, device type or operating system. Link translation happens automatically for storefronts supported by the intelligent link management service.
What Services Offer Link Translation?
Services currently offering link translation for major e-commerce storefronts include Geniuslink, BookLinker, SmartURL, and Linkredirector. If you’re pursuing an intelligent linking service for link translation, be sure to pick a service that supports this feature for the e-commerce stores you’re linking to.