Options for finding the location of your visitors

There are four options for considering where your visitors are from. These options are at dashboard >> ⚙️ >> System >> Geolocation :

1. DON'T TRY AT ALL. Don't detect any location. Matomo will still work fine. This is very private but much of the reason for using web analytics at all is eroded if you don't know the location of the visitor.
2. GUESS, FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THE VISITOR: detect location using the requested language (such as FR-CA) set by the visitor's operating system and guess the country based on that. This is the least accurate. You will not be able to distinguish Lyons from Paris, or Los Angeles from New York. And site traffic from a visitor located in Los Angeles, but who has CN-TR language on their computer will be attributed as being located in Taiwan.
3. IN MATOMO, COMPARE THE IP TO A THIRD PARTY DATABASE OF LOCATIONS BY IP. From the arriving http request, use the IP address*. Map the IP to a physical location using one of our recommended third party services. This is by far the most popular option. Almost everyone does this.
4. IN YOUR WEB SERVER DO 3. Same as 3, but instead of doing it in the PHP code, do it in a module that you add to the Apache/nginx server. This is more work but it is fast. Do this way if you have a high traffic site which needs fast processing.
   
   * The IP address can be used as is (eg 255.255.255.255) or it can be set to consume the anonymized address (see below).

Beware of saying yes to the anonymized address
In Option 3, above, you have a cool option. You can:

• use the full IP address (255.255.255.255) during geolocation (more accurate!) but then scrub as many of the places as you want and store it like this in your database, (255.0.0.0), so that you don't know your user's exact IP address.
• otherwise, you can use the scrubbed address (255.0.0.0) during geolocation (and get terrible results), and store the scrubbed geolocation in your database too.

To get the first way, say No, here:

If you say No, you get the data on the left. If you say Yes, you will get the data on the right in this screenshot.