Google Analytics uses regional data centers to ensure your web and mobile app user measurements are sent to Google Analytics as quickly and securely as possible.
How it works
When Analytics establishes a connection with the closest available Google data collection center, measurement data is sent to Analytics over an encrypted HTTPS connection. At the collection centers, the data is further encrypted before it's forwarded to Analytics processing servers and made available to you in the Analytics platform.
IP addresses are used to determine the optimal local data center.
In Google Analytics 4, IP addresses are used at collection time to determine location information (country, city, latitude and longitude of city) and then discarded before data is logged in any data center or server.
In Universal Analytics, you can opt in to IP masking. When IP addresses are masked, the masking takes place before the data is ever logged in any data center or server.
Learn more about IP masking
Learn about our data center locations
Benefits
Regional data collection improves the performance of your sites and mobile apps by minimizing the distance and total time required for data to be sent across a secure connection to Google’s data centers.
Additionally, regional data collection and Google’s data center infrastructure enables redundancy so that in the unlikely event that one local data center becomes unavailable, another data center in the region can continue to fully serve and support users.