Companies: Stop Using Geo-IP to Determine Communications Language
About a quarter billion people live outside their home country. Over a billion travel annually. So why does any company still use geo-IP to determine the communications language? This is not only negligence in terms of UX, but as well leaves a lot of money on the table.
I invested a few minutes this morning trying to explain this to Spotify. My app settings are in English, my Windows OS is set to English… and yet in its audio ads and emails to me Spotify uses Czech language, because that’s where I’m based. I can understand/speak a bit of Czech, but mostly I tune it out.
You don’t have to be an ecommerce wizard to know that ad campaign results data and learnings get skewed because of this, as do any strategies that are set based on incorrect data. Ads are simply wasted time and money if not in the customer’s preferred language.
Geo-IP-based language is problematic for several other reasons, however. Consider for example Switzerland, which has speakers of German, French, and Italian. Or the USA, where a decent-sized percentage of the population speak Spanish as a primary tongue.
Geo-IP is fleeting! (VPNs are enough to make geo-IP almost irrelevant for communications.) If you’re going to invest money and resources communicating with customers (or potential customers!), then use the language that they’ve selected for your apps and their own OS (or, for websites, use the browser settings).
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