Someone over at the PIP thread asked an interesting question about whether Google's difficulties with China have shown up in poor early-day numbers. Could this explain the very poor metrics I've noticed since mid-month?
incrediBILL
11:46 pm on Mar 25, 2010 (gmt 0)
Dunno.
I block China (and a couple of other countries) from my server to stop abuse so it never mattered to me in the first place.
acac
5:59 am on Apr 2, 2010 (gmt 0)
It may have an effect for international sites. Third party ad-networks may be a contributing factor too.
tim222
7:42 am on Apr 3, 2010 (gmt 0)
China has never been a significant source of traffic for me. Japan sends more visitors than China, with less than 1/10 the population. India has almost as many people as China, but sends me five times as many visitors.
Someone mentioned in a previous thread that China doesn't use the same payment system that we do (i.e., credit cards). That being the case, traffic from China seems fairly useless anyway. It's just a bunch of static noise if it's not worth any money.
IanCP
12:08 pm on Apr 3, 2010 (gmt 0)
I don't know my China metrics, nor do I care, but I will say that those who ignore China do so at their peril.
At the moment, it's the only power-house in the universe.
I'm speaking as an Australian where we don't have a recession and are motoring along courtesy of China trade.
I believe we are actually the only OECD country to never be in recession?
tim222
1:53 pm on Apr 3, 2010 (gmt 0)
Ian, if Australia's economy is being helped by trade with China, and even *you* don't care about Chinese web metrics, then that's saying a lot.
I think we're going to find that China is less relevant than we had previously thought. Sure they can make stuff for us cheaply, but then so can about 20 other countries. I just learned that Dell and GoDaddy are following Google out of China. So it looks like China is losing ground in this economic battle.
Now about that Australian traffic - YEAH! According to the 2008 census, Australia's population is less than 2% of China's. Meanwhile (according to Analytics). I am looking at more than 25 times the traffic from Australia over China. In fact, Australia barely exceeds UK traffic, even though the UK population is triple. Something about those Australians... they LOVE the internet!
So in my situation, China has no impact. What I've found is that the size of the country really has less impact than other factors. I'm not sure yet what those factors are, but I can see the results in Analytics, so I just go off of that. Needless to say, I am not advertising in China :)
