Will Matomo Analytics measure visitors from China on my websites and bypass the Great Firewall?

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People’s Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic.

Google Analytics blocked and slowing down websites in China

Many popular foreign tools such as Google search, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc. are blocked and inaccessible in China. Google Analytics is also mostly blocked or quite slow in China. Although many chinese websites use GA, they do encounter data loss (at least 50% of visitors and pageviews are missed), performance issues (website slowing down for foreign visitors and latency increasing).

Using Matomo Analytics to bypass the Great Firewall of China

To bypass the Great Firewall on China and track all visitors from China accurately (or track all visitors to a .cn chinese website), the ideal solution is to use Matomo Analytics. If your Matomo runs on a Chinese server, it will be behind the great firewall and therefore will track all users for sure (chinese users and those outside the country). But even if you run Matomo on your own servers for example in Europe or anywhere in the world (or using the Cloud-hosted Matomo), you will also be able to track Chinese users because your Matomo URL won’t be affected by the Great Firewall. So when using Matomo Analytics, you will get accurate web analytics tracking independently of where your Matomo servers are located.

Learn more about using Matomo On-Premise.