China Blocks Google Analytics - Are You Affected?

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On Friday, November 9th reports began to surface that the Chinese Government had blocked Google services, including, purportedly, Google Analytics.

What's the Impact of This on Google Analytics?

If the Google Analytics block remains, this has a couple fairly significant impact on users of the service.

Impact #1: Your Traffic Reports

If you have customers in China, and you use Google Analytics to measure your website or mobile apps that are visited by those customers, you won't see their activities reported in GA anymore.  Depending on how much of your traffic is from China you may not notice much of a drop, or it could be significant.  Here's a screenshot of a report showing traffic attributed to China dropping about 50% on the 9th of November: [caption id="attachment_4367" align="aligncenter" width="300"] This screenshot shows traffic from China reported in Google Analytics dropping sharply on November 9th of 2012.[/caption]

Impact #2: Access To Your Reports

Not measuring your users in China is one thing, but what if your company has  offices in China where people need to access your Google Analytics reports from?  Or, what if your staff travels to China on business and they can't access GA reports? This, to me, seems like the potentially larger issue. With globalized business and cloud-based systems, having access to a core business system blocked by something as large as the world's most populated country with a fast-growing business services sector presents a whole new challenge for "cloud" based services and applications.

What Can You Do?

Getting China to unblock Google?  We probably can't influence that.  If you need a service that works in China, there's always Baidu Analytics...!