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China digital

Measuring a China-facing site without Google Analytics

If your analytics is blocked, you are not measuring a smaller audience — you are measuring a biased one, and the bias points away from the visitors you care about.

France → China

This is worse than having no data. A dashboard that under-reports mainland visitors tells you China is not working, and the conclusion looks evidence-based.

What the alternatives actually are

  • A local analytics service. Works from the mainland, and is the natural choice if China is a primary market.
  • Self-hosted, privacy-first analytics. Runs from your own domain, so nothing third-party can be blocked. Lighter, and often enough.
  • Server logs. Unfashionable, free, and immune to blocking or ad blockers. For a site with modest traffic, genuinely sufficient.

What is actually worth measuring

Traffic volume is the least useful number on a site like this. What matters is which pages precede a contact, how deep people read the long pages, and which topics bring conversations rather than visits. Those questions are answerable with very simple tooling — and they are the ones that change what you publish next.

Whatever you choose, keep it on your own domain or on a service reachable from China. An analytics script that times out also slows the page for the visitor you were trying to count.

Keep reading on this.

China digitalIs your site actually reachable from mainland China?Before any strategy, a practical test. Most sites fail it for reasons that take an afternoon to fix.China digitalSearch in China: what changes when Google is not the answerBaidu is the obvious difference, and the least important one. The bigger change is that a large share of discovery never touches the open web at all.China digitalMarketplace or your own channel: how brands actually sell online in ChinaThe platforms give you traffic and take your customer relationship. Your own channel gives you the relationship and no traffic. Most brands need both, in an order.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

Audit your China presence →Read the full guide