When you localise a SaaS product, some words are easy.
“Dashboard” gets translated.
“Settings” gets translated.
“Budget” gets translated.
Then you reach:
CTR
CPC
CPA
CPM
CVR
ROAS
And suddenly the obvious approach stops being obvious.
Should the acronyms stay in English?
Should the full metric names be translated?
Should both appear?
Does a Japanese PPC manager expect to see CTR?
Does a Turkish marketer?
What about Traditional Chinese?
We ran into exactly this problem while localising PaceWise, a PPC budget pacing and management platform, for multiple international markets.
What looked like a translation issue turned out to be a much more interesting product-design problem.
The Initial Assumption: Everyone Uses the English Acronyms
Our starting assumption was simple:
PPC professionals everywhere already know CTR, CPC, CPA and ROAS.
That assumption is mostly correct.
But “mostly correct” is not enough when you are building a multilingual product.
Digital advertising terminology is unusual because much of it developed inside global platforms.
Google Ads, Meta Ads and other advertising systems introduced English terminology that was then adopted internationally.
Terms such as:
- CTR
- CPC
- CPA
- CPM
- ROAS
- ROI
- API
- SaaS
- KPI
often survive translation.
A marketer reading a completely Japanese article may still recognise CTR.
A French PPC report may use ROAS.
A German agency may comfortably discuss CPC.
But once we looked more closely, we found that the behaviour is not universal.
Japanese: Translate the Meaning, Keep CTR
Google's Japanese Ads documentation provides a useful example.
The Japanese term for click-through rate is:
クリック率
But Google also presents the acronym:
クリック率（CTR）
So the reader gets both:
local-language terminology + globally recognised PPC shorthand
This is the pattern we like for a localised SaaS interface.
For example:
クリック率 (CTR)
rather than:
CTR
or only:
クリック率
The first version works for experienced PPC professionals while still making the interface feel genuinely Japanese.
When developing PPC budget pacing in Japanese, this became an important consideration: the product terminology needs to feel familiar to Japanese performance marketers without unnecessarily replacing internationally recognised PPC terminology.
Korean Follows a Similar Pattern
Korean paid-media terminology follows a similar pattern.
The local term for click-through rate is commonly displayed alongside the international abbreviation:
클릭률 (CTR)
This gives marketers both the Korean description and the metric shorthand they already recognise from global advertising platforms.
For a PPC budget pacing software for agencies, that matters because Korean teams may work across multiple markets and platforms.
A Korean marketer might work internally in Korean while sharing spreadsheets, platform screenshots and performance reports containing English PPC abbreviations.
That is one reason we built a dedicated experience for PPC budget pacing in Korean, rather than assuming an English interface and English marketing page would be equally effective for Korean users.
Simplified Chinese Also Retains Familiar PPC Acronyms
Simplified Chinese presents another interesting hybrid.
A metric such as CTR can be displayed as:
点击率 (CTR)
The Chinese terminology explains the meaning, while the acronym retains its connection to the global advertising vocabulary.
This is useful because one localisation mistake is assuming Chinese users want every technical term translated completely.
In practice, many professional and technical interfaces use a mixture of Chinese terminology and familiar international abbreviations.
For example:
点击率 (CTR)
can be more immediately recognisable than either:
CTR only
or:
点击率 only
The same principle influenced our approach to PPC budget pacing in Simplified Chinese.
Traditional Chinese Needs Its Own Localisation
Traditional Chinese deserves separate treatment.
It is tempting to think:
We already translated Simplified Chinese, so we can simply convert the characters.
That isn't really localisation.
Traditional Chinese markets have their own vocabulary, writing conventions and interface expectations.
Even where the underlying PPC metric is identical, the preferred terminology can differ.
Traditional Chinese users may also expect a different localisation experience from users in mainland China.
For this reason, we created a separate experience for PPC budget pacing in Traditional Chinese, rather than treating Simplified and Traditional Chinese as interchangeable variants of one page.
For metric-heavy products, this distinction matters.
Then Turkish Broke Our Assumption
Turkey was one of the most interesting examples.
The assumption that every PPC market simply uses CTR, CPC and CPA unchanged does not always hold.
Turkish digital-advertising terminology includes established local abbreviations.
For example:
TO — Tıklama Oranı
can be used for click-through rate.
Likewise, CPC-related terminology can use:
TBM — Tıklama Başına Maliyet
rather than simply reproducing the English acronym everywhere.
That immediately disproved the simple localisation rule:
Never translate PPC acronyms.
Sometimes local terminology is already established.
If SaaS software ignores it, the interface can feel less native than the advertising platforms customers already use every day.
This was therefore an important consideration when developing PPC budget pacing in Turkish.
ROAS Is Different Again
ROAS behaves somewhat differently.
Even in markets where some other abbreviations are localised, ROAS is frequently retained as an international performance-marketing term.
The same is often true of:
ROI
KPI
API
SaaS
These terms have effectively become part of international professional vocabulary.
So localisation cannot simply mean:
Translate every acronym.
Nor should it mean:
Keep every acronym in English.
The correct approach depends on the metric and the market.
The Better Model: Separate the Metric From Its Label
From a software architecture perspective, the cleanest solution is to stop treating the English label as the metric itself.
Internally, the application should use a stable identifier.
For example:
metric.ctr
metric.cpc
metric.cpa
metric.cpm
metric.roas
The internal identity remains constant.
The display layer changes according to locale.
Conceptually:
{
"en": {
"metric.ctr": "Click-through rate (CTR)"
},
"ja": {
"metric.ctr": "クリック率 (CTR)"
},
"ko": {
"metric.ctr": "클릭률 (CTR)"
},
"zh-CN": {
"metric.ctr": "点击率 (CTR)"
},
"tr": {
"metric.ctr": "Tıklama oranı (TO)"
}
}
Now the analytics logic never needs to care what the user sees.
The calculation remains the same:
clicks / impressions
while the presentation layer decides whether the user sees:
CTR
クリック率 (CTR)
클릭률 (CTR)
点击率 (CTR)
or:
Tıklama oranı (TO)
That separation makes internationalisation much easier to maintain.
Full Metric Names Matter More Than Acronyms
Another lesson was that localisation is not only about abbreviations.
Consider:
Cost per acquisition
Depending on the product, advertiser and market, users might encounter:
- CPA
- cost per conversion
- acquisition cost
- conversion cost
The underlying technical metric may be identical while familiar product terminology differs.
That suggests a useful architecture.
Layer 1: Internal metric
Stable and language-independent.
Example:
metric.cost_per_conversion
Layer 2: Local display label
What the local user expects to see.
Layer 3: Industry acronym
Displayed where it improves recognition.
This approach is much safer than building application logic around English strings.
Don't Use Machine Translation Alone for Metric Dictionaries
Generic translation works surprisingly well for prose.
It is less reliable for specialist product terminology.
Imagine translating:
Underpacing
literally into 14 languages.
The result might be grammatically correct while sounding completely unnatural to a PPC professional.
The same applies to:
- overpacing;
- spend velocity;
- projected spend;
- remaining budget;
- billing cycle;
- rollover budget;
- portfolio pacing;
- conversion value.
These aren't ordinary sentences.
They're domain terminology.
That means they should be treated more like API names or database fields than blog copy.
Build a terminology dictionary.
Review it once.
Reuse it everywhere.
PPC Budget Pacing Itself Also Needs Localisation
The localisation issue goes beyond performance metrics.
Even the phrase PPC budget pacing does not necessarily translate neatly across every market.
A direct translation may be technically correct but not match the terminology performance marketers actually use.
That is why we created separate market experiences rather than simply translating one English landing page word for word.
For example:
- PPC budget pacing in Japanese
- PPC budget pacing in Korean
- PPC budget pacing in Simplified Chinese
- PPC budget pacing in Traditional Chinese
- PPC budget pacing in Turkish
Each page can use the terminology, examples and language appropriate to that market while describing the same underlying budget-management platform.
This also creates a useful SEO experiment.
Instead of assuming where localisation will generate demand, we can observe which markets begin generating:
search impressions → visits → trials → paying customers
and use that data to guide deeper product localisation.
We Now Think of Localisation as Three Layers
Working through this problem led us to separate three different concepts.
1. Application language
What language does the user interface use?
2. Campaign language
What language are the campaign names, keywords and ads written in?
3. Reporting language
What language should the client receive?
These don't necessarily need to match.
Imagine an agency based in Germany.
The internal team works in German.
They manage:
- English Google Ads campaigns;
- French Meta campaigns;
- Spanish Microsoft Advertising campaigns.
One client wants reports in French.
Another wants reports in German.
The software should not assume one account equals one language.
This became particularly important when we developed multilingual PPC reporting.
PaceWise currently generates white-label client reports in 15 languages:
- English
- French
- Spanish
- German
- Portuguese
- Italian
- Dutch
- Polish
- Turkish
- Swedish
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese
- Indonesian
- Japanese
- Korean
The report language can therefore reflect the client rather than the internal working language of the agency.
Campaign Language and Budget Data Are Separate
PPC budget-management software has another useful characteristic.
Budget pacing does not need to understand the meaning of an advertisement to understand:
- budget;
- spend;
- conversions;
- CPA;
- ROAS;
- pacing;
- projected spend.
Those values come from advertising-platform data.
So a Japanese campaign can be monitored by the same pacing engine as a Korean, Chinese, Turkish or English campaign.
This separation is important:
campaign language ≠ reporting language ≠ application language
Thinking about those three layers independently creates much more flexible international software.
There Is Also a Product Consistency Problem
Suppose the website says:
CTR
the dashboard says:
Click-through rate
and the report says:
クリック率
Now the same product has three naming conventions for one metric.
That creates unnecessary friction.
A localisation glossary should ideally be shared across:
- website;
- application;
- onboarding;
- help centre;
- reports;
- automated emails;
- AI-generated summaries.
One metric.
One approved local term.
Everywhere.
AI Makes Translation Faster — but Not Automatically Correct
AI is extremely useful for localisation.
It can dramatically accelerate initial translation.
But the workflow shouldn't be:
English → AI translation → production
A safer process is:
English source term
↓
AI translation
↓
Check advertising-platform terminology
↓
Check real industry usage
↓
Approve glossary term
↓
Reuse across product
The important part is checking how professionals in that market already communicate.
In a specialist area such as PPC, a technically accurate translation can still be the wrong product terminology.
Localised SEO Needs the Same Discipline
Metric localisation also affects SEO.
Suppose an English page targets:
PPC budget management software
A direct translation may not be the phrase marketers actually search in another country.
The same issue applies to:
paid search
PPC
SEM
SEA
budget pacing
budget management
Different markets use different combinations of English and local terminology.
That's another reason localisation needs keyword research rather than simple translation.
For PaceWise, the first stage is building localised acquisition pages and observing which markets generate meaningful search demand.
The idea is simple:
Let demand determine where deeper product localisation happens next.
If PPC budget pacing in Korean starts attracting qualified agency traffic and trials, that creates a stronger commercial argument for deeper Korean UI localisation.
If PPC budget pacing in Japanese generates even stronger demand, Japan might receive higher product-localisation priority.
SEO can therefore become part of the market-expansion research process.
Don't Translate Brand Names
One rule turned out to be much simpler.
Generally:
Google stays Google.
Meta stays Meta.
Microsoft stays Microsoft.
TikTok stays TikTok.
For example, Simplified Chinese platform labels can use the recognised brand name alongside the local word for advertising:
Google 广告
Meta 广告
Microsoft 广告
TikTok 广告
Traditional Chinese uses:
Google 廣告
Meta 廣告
Microsoft 廣告
TikTok 廣告
Trying to translate recognised global brand names usually makes an interface harder rather than easier to understand.
Localisation should reduce friction.
It does not require every English word to disappear.
Our Practical Rule Today
After working through these markets, our approach is roughly:
Keep the internal metric universal
CTR, CPA, ROAS and the underlying metric IDs remain stable internally.
Translate the human-readable meaning
Give users the local terminology they expect.
Preserve international acronyms where they are familiar
Japanese:
クリック率 (CTR)
Korean:
클릭률 (CTR)
Simplified Chinese:
点击率 (CTR)
Respect established local abbreviations
Turkish:
Tıklama oranı (TO)
rather than forcing CTR everywhere.
Treat individual metrics separately
CTR may behave one way.
ROAS may remain ROAS.
CVR may be better shown primarily through a translated full label.
There is no reason every metric has to follow exactly the same localisation rule.
What We'd Recommend to Other SaaS Teams
If you're internationalising analytics, martech, fintech or any other metric-heavy SaaS product, create a metric localisation specification.
For each metric, define:
Internal key
English name
English acronym
Local name
Preferred local acronym
Whether the English acronym should also appear
Formatting rules
Tooltip definition
For example:
Internal key: metric.ctr
English: Click-through rate
English acronym: CTR
Japanese: クリック率
Display: クリック率 (CTR)
or:
Internal key: metric.ctr
English: Click-through rate
English acronym: CTR
Turkish: Tıklama oranı
Local acronym: TO
Display: Tıklama oranı (TO)
That small amount of structure prevents hundreds of inconsistencies later.
The Bigger Lesson
Localisation isn't about eliminating English.
It's about making a product feel familiar.
Sometimes that means translating a word.
Sometimes that means keeping the English acronym.
Sometimes it means showing both.
And occasionally it means recognising that the local industry already has a different abbreviation.
The right question isn't:
“How do we translate CTR?”
It is:
“What would a PPC professional in this market expect to see?”
That change in thinking produces much better multilingual software.
About the Project
PaceWise is an AI-powered PPC budget pacing and management platform for agencies and performance teams managing Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Advertising and TikTok.
PaceWise supports campaigns regardless of campaign language and provides multilingual PPC reporting in 15 languages.
As part of our international expansion work, we are developing local experiences for:
PPC budget pacing in Simplified Chinese
PPC budget pacing in Traditional Chinese
If you're working on localisation for analytics, ad-tech or another metric-heavy SaaS product, I'd be interested to hear which technical terms created the biggest localisation surprises for your team.
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