What's requested:
This is a request to determine the impact of automatic SERP translations on pageviews, as well as, if possible, search impressions. The launch of automatic inlined SERPs of translated content for Indonesian search results in Google search is the first launch of this functionality, although there will be more examples in the future.
Why it's requested:
This is requested to validate that the feature has a positive impact on pageviews (and to the degree it's measurable, impressions) and take any pertinent action or adjust when testing other interventions such as T93213: Improve access to local language wikis by fixing bug in generation of hreflang tags in <head> of article pages.
Practically speaking, the analysis approach should also be made forward compatible so that it's easier to determine impact for future launches of the feature.
When it's requested:
As soon as possible.
Other helpful information:
T212414: Measure the impact of externally-originated contributions contains a bunch of supplementary information and so do other tickets on ExternalGuidance bearing the handle @dr0ptp4kt or @chelsyx. There are multiple ways to draw inferences at the wiki level and article level (e.g., referral ratios such as in P8156), and there may be some information in the search console as well.
As a reminder, as discussed in T116678: Country mapping routine for proxied requests geocoding is not reliable if attempting to reconstruct pageview data for requests via proxies such as the Google Translate proxy; that is to say it's possible to reconstruct this with a relative degree of confidence when the full XFF data are available, but not after the current state refinement.
Generally, the automatic translation functionality is shown, and only on certain content verticals, when:
- Only the post-translated corpus has a hit, OR
- The native wiki language result is somehow lacking in sufficiency. This is where there's co-mingling of both the native wiki language and autotranslated SERPs. It's conceivable there's some cannibalization although in general regular search results have higher clickthrough rates so it seems unlikely the effect would be negative...but this would be interesting to understand.
When content on a given topic in the native wiki improves or the ranking strategy adjusts generally, it's conceivable that this might in turn result in what had been automatic translation flow based traffic to dry up. This shouldn't be taken as a sign of failure per se, in fact this represents closure of a content gap. There are two points here, in any case: (1) it may be necessary to join data from the editing data lake with with the pageview data lake, and (2) there's a chain of events which may have a sequencing that can be modeled.
As usual, surges on particular subjects may commonly be the source of traffic spikes on any sort of search-referred traffic, autotranslated SERP or not.
