Hi, I'm the product manager for Cloudflare Analytics. Thanks for this thorough and thoughtful review.<p>We are totally serious about building a world-class, privacy-first, free analytics product. At risk of HN cliche, this is our "early work". We are actively working to fix many of the rough edges mentioned here; if we had waited to fix all of them before shipping, we never would have shipped!<p>For folks who haven't seen it, I suggest checking out our launch blog post[0] which gives some more context around edge vs browser analytics (spoiler: we do both!), why we count visits the way we do, and how we handle bot traffic.<p>We know we have work to do on the "jagged lines" problem. For some low-traffic websites, we might show noisier, low-resolution data than is ideal. (We've artificially constrained our analytics to query a maximum of 7 days at a time because this problem is exacerbated with longer time ranges.)<p>My colleague Jamie wrote a nice blog post about how and why we sample data [1]. In short: we have an existing customer base of 25 million+ Internet priorities, whose traffic volume spans 9 orders of magnitude! Sampling data is an elegant approach that allows us to serve fast, flexible analytics for all our customers. Sampling shouldn't be feared, but we know we can do better in some cases. We've recently merged some deep-in-the-weeds improvements to ClickHouse [2] that should result in improved resolution. And we're currently working to store full-resolution data for the smallest websites.<p>Happy to address any other specific points that folks have questions about.<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for-a-better-web/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for...</a>
[1] <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analytics/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analy...</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221</a>
Two HN marketing powered companies fighting against each other.<p>Cloudflare Analytics is server side, we all know that server side analytics is good to get number of GET requests but is almost unusable for anything else. But in their case it seems they are not even trying to filter bots<p>Page views is always the biggest complains people have when they change analytics tool, "why you have 100k more/less pages views than GA, adobe Analytics?" -> "We don't count pageviews the same way" The reality is everyone is filtering bots a different way and nobody is really doing it well, as a result anyone numbers are wrong. The raw number of pageviews usually doesn't mean anything, that's better to look at difference
> Cloudflare should be serious about this or they’ll only help Google Analytics in its dominance
> The main danger I see after paying for and trying Cloudflare Analytics is that they may not believe in this at all.<p>This is so true! Hopefully, the issues mentioned in the post will be fixed soon, considering this is a quite new product. I can see high value for small personal websites, as they would be able to get something for free and focus on user privacy.<p>Meanwhile, the mentioned issues might be quite beneficial for other companies, such as Plausible or Fathom. They are quite mature on the privacy-focused analytics market, and offer things that Cloudflare analytics doesn't. People might start on Cloudflare Analytics (free) and eventually migrate to something more full-featured.
The results of cloudflare analytics look like the old awstats results: You know instantly that something is wrong because the numbers are much too high.<p>Interestingly that was the exact reason why Google Analytics got big as they had basically no bots in their statistics (in the old days running js was so complex no crawler or bot did it). And now we‘ve done a 360 degree turn and be in the same position with inflated server logs.<p>Is there any good analytics solution which is only server side? Getting some good statistics but not exposing to visitors they are tracked (even in a friendly mode) would be nice.
>15:11:37 ||plausible.io^$3p -- markosaric.com 3 script <a href="https://custom.plausible.io/" rel="nofollow">https://custom.plausible.io/</a><p>>Google Analytics has a big issue with adblockers and on this site alone more than 25% of visitors block it.<p>>Plausible avoid it by not collecting any personal data in the first place.<p>Seems like this is wrong. The default filters on ublock seem to block plausible's script just as much as google's.<p>Could likely be argued that the greater ability to filter out bots with a script makes it preferable as compared to server-side analytics. But you are definitely under-counting legitimate visitors if you go that route.
> I could talk about free never being free or the venture-funded model that allows them to lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year centralizing a big part of the internet but all that is a different conversation.<p>Cloudflare is a profitable public company.
I'm really enjoying this series of blog posts from @markosaric - on some sites I work with we've been really struggling to understand the differences in visitor counts from various analytics solutions, and some of those sites depend on those numbers for funding. I was quite excited when CloudFlare announced an analytics product as really they should know better than anything else we can install and run, exactly how much human traffic is hitting our URLs. But what we got seems to be almost useless.
"In my Cloudflare Analytics versus Plausible Analytics comparison, Cloudflare Analytics is inaccurate to the point that the data is pretty much useless as web analytics... Seems for now that the brand new Cloudflare Analytics is simply a server log tool with server log accuracy."<p>Okay, this is nice to distinguish but I would kinda like to know both numbers: what's the raw load coming through CF to my website and what are the "real human users" -- and what tools can CF provide to block the former while allowing the latter? If CF can provide easy to configure and understand WAF rules to filter more of the bots and other raw traffic that I don't want then I'm going to save on my AWS/Azure/hosting bill.
Cloudflare Analytics is not there yet then. I guess it currently resembles more like their standard analytics overview page, which currently rather looks like a summary of a server access log.<p>I actually use Clicky and self hosted Matomo for most of my properties. I would love to use something like Plausible but to me (SEO pro) the most important feat is lacking: landing pages and average amount of actions and/or time spend per visitor per landing page.
I'm working on an open-source analytics lib [0] and I fully agree with the article that Cloudflare should either do it right, or not do it at all. Filtering bots is probably the hardest part and time consuming. There is no simple approach to solve the issue, but not doing it at all makes it worthless, especially for the price.<p>Hopefully their push will make the issue more prominent to website owners and help Google Analytics alternatives to grow.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch</a>
I stopped reading when the author put “unique visitors” from one tool next to “visits” from the other tool.<p>Those are two completely different metrics that you cannot compare!
Thanks for the write up.<p>If anyone is curious, that howtotomakemyblog.com referral site in the CF dashboard seems to be a domain that redirects back to the same domain that's hosting this blog post.<p>It didn't appear in his analytics tool's referrals. I guess it's because his tool follows redirects and ignores listing same site referrals while CF does not?
I hope this doesn't turn into what their domain service became...which feels like a complete after thought. I was excited about it at first but it's been a year now and it feels the same as day 1. Incomplete and abandoned.