The same Google gadget can be displayed in different languages depending on who is looking at it and what country thay are looking at it from.

Gadget usage is reported differently depending on where you are looking at it and what language is specified. You may have a million people using your widget in another language or country and you would not see that represented in the gadget usage numbers displayed by Google. Unless you look for it the right way.

This post will show you how to see how many people are using your gadget in different countries and languages.

How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other countries…

We will use my Panda Virtual Pet as an example. First go to your gadget description page on Google, here is a screenshot of the panda one in english…

The number of users displayed by Google is entirely dependent on where you are looking at the gadget from and what language you are using. The above screenshot is from USA with a default language of English.

Lets change the url we are looking at a little to see how many people are using this gadget in the United Kingdom…

The panda description page url is…

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

The url can be changed in two ways to get more info about how many people are using our gadgets. The first way is to change the country. Let’s change the part of the url where it says “google.com” to read “google.co.uk” (United Kingdom)

http://www.google.co.uk/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

Notice the change? Now Google is telling us that there are 5,572 users of this gadget. This means that in the UK among english speakers, there are 5,572 users of this gadget.

tip: If you have many gadgets, you can do this from your Google gadget author page and still see usage numbers.

Try other English speaking countries like google.ie (Ireland) or google.com.au (Australia) or google.co.nz (New Zealand) and watch the numbers change. This also works with any country so try some others too google.fr (France) google.it (Italy) etc.

tip: To see a full list of countries Google is being used in go to their language tools page and scroll down to the bottom where they have the flags and urls of each country.

What about language?…

How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other languages…

Okay, we just changed the country by changing the url, let’s change the language by examining the url again. Here is the original url of the panda virtual pet in the USA with a language of English…

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

To change this to another language we must change the variable of “hl=en”. This variable is saying “hl (language) = en (English)”

We can change this variable to read “hl=it” and we will now see the gadget usage numbers of Italian language (it) users within the USA (.com) ….

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=it&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

By changing the countries and languages you can get a much better picture of who is using your gadget and where it is popular. Just remember that the country variable is king. In the above example the usage number only displays the amount of Italian language users within the USA. To see how many Italian language users there are in Italy, we would need to change the country url to “google.it”…

http://www.google.it/ig/directory?hl=it&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

There are 8,783 Italian language users of this gadget in Italy, compared to the earlier number of 364 Italian language users of this gadget in the USA.

In the above examples you may have noticed that the title and descriptions of the Panda gadget changed when we changed the language. This is because I have used the Google gadgets and Internationalization spec called i18n. This is a great place to start learning about how Google uses countries and languages.

To learn how to make your gadget appear in all the different languages that iGoogle offers try my tutorial on how to internationalize you Google gadget.

Or just have some fun seeing where your users are

Related posts:
Google gadgets usage and pageview numbers
UK Google Gadget Directory Has New Look
How To Internationalize Google Gadgets