From time to time our VP of Engineering, Yoav Shapira, tries to stump HubSpotters with questions from the worlds of marketing, analytics and technology.
We thought we'd share his most recent challenge:
When you use Google Translate to translate a web page, does it show up in the analytics for that web site (both HubSpot Analytics and others)?
And the answer?
Yes, it does.
What happens is Google translates the page into your chosen language, and then loads that page, translated, from its original site, in a frame. It uses a virtual page name, typically (your domain)/translate_n or /translate_p, for this purpose.
So it's a real page view, on your site, and it's recorded by Google Analytics, Omniture, HubSpot Analytics, and all major analytics packages.
What's more, any calls to actions, forms, etc, are still there. So the visitor can become a lead/convert on that virtual page. Therefore you might see form submissions and leads that came in this way, and you might see translate_c in the list of pages a visitor viewed.
If a customer asks, "how come I have /translate_c in this analytics report, when it's not a page on my site?" -- the above is your answer. It's a real human visitor, real traffic, real potential to convert. It just might be someone who's more comfortable in some language other than English, including the millions of US residents who prefer another language.
For an example, go to Google Translate, put in any page URL, pick your language, and go. The loaded frame container looks like this. You can View Source on this page and see the JavaScript that invokes the /translate_n virtual page.