I came across the same issue recently and found the answer in the Cloudflare help. Unique visitors on CloudFlare are different from unique visitors of Google Analytics. Google Analytics expects the client to execute JS (most bots don’t do that) and Google Analytics excludes known bots from the unique visitor count. The relevant Cloudflare article:
<a href="https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037684111#4lt2VoRUorCudxN1xzxpOt" rel="nofollow">https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411...</a>
Or is that 80% of HN uses adblock?<p>> Is GA still relevant today?<p>Of course it is. While a large part of HN audience might use adblock, very few regular users do and almost no mobile users.<p>Looking at my logs, however, I get a similar proportion. ~25k in GA, ~100k in logs.
I had the same thing when my game https//termsandconditions.game got to #1 spot on HN.<p>I was using <a href="https://plausible.io" rel="nofollow">https://plausible.io</a> which I presume has a higher success rate than GA, but I still saw actual usage of resources (requests to the CDN) about 4 times higher than reported.<p>I guess you couldn't pick more ad-block-heavy audience than HN though right?
We see around the same thing and our audience is totally NOT from HN or hacker like. Mixpanel and Cloudflare both report around 886k uniques (mixpanel being 5% less) for yesterday's Friday traffic... while GA reports 129k... that's a solid 80%+ too.
It's not just Google Analytics, but any other alternative be it plausible, Matomo, or any other JS analytics solution.<p>I would also say cloudflare doesn't count uniqu visitors accurately. Also recently there is big uptick in bots which server logs show, but are not real users.
Dealt with this recently. Something like half of Americans are using some sort of privacy blocker on desktop [1]. It's not as high on mobile but still sizable. My guess is it's higher with the HN crowd.<p>I dealt with something similar so I had my back-end fire server-side events to compare to Google Analytics and other client-side reported data. Sure enough, 50% loss on desktop and 30% on mobile.<p>1. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-of-consumers-are-blocking-ads/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-o...</a>
I think that GA samples the data anyway (unless you pay?), so it might not be a reliable "hit counter" these days.<p>I guess the value comes from seeing "trends" in your site content - I.e. how people move around within the site, which sites are sending traffic etc rtlather than seeing absolute 100% accurate counts<p>Log analysis will always be much more accurate counter if you just need a hit counter.
> <s>80% of my traffic is excluded from Google Analytics</s> Unique visitor count on Google Analytics is 80% lower than the one on Cloudflare.<p>FTFY.<p>Cloudflare’s unique visitor count always felt inflated to me, compared to both GA and non-GA analytics solutions.
If you want real numbers just parse your server log. I stopped using analytics years ago because in average it would only show half of my actual traffic. Goaccess works great.
You can actually use cloudflare workers to mitigate this. You use a worker to act as a proxy so that most blockers won't block the tracker. More details:<p><a href="https://blog.garble.org/using-cloudflare-to-increase-analytics-accuracy/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.garble.org/using-cloudflare-to-increase-analyti...</a><p>I don't believe it would scale well to a big site though ($$)
It definitely depends on the audience you have and the adblocker adoption for each country.
"mainstream" websites still show a 5-10% gap. That for marketing usages it's still ok.
Safari also blocks GA by default, also plausible have some versus articles about Cloudflare analytics (both server and client side)<p><a href="https://plausible.io/vs-cloudflare-web-analytics" rel="nofollow">https://plausible.io/vs-cloudflare-web-analytics</a>
<a href="https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis" rel="nofollow">https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis</a>
Firefox has built-in tracking protection since a while and would block Google Analytics. Similarly, Adblock extensions would also block GA (usually behind a strict setting).<p>Considering we're talking HN visitors, this wouldn't be representative of visitors in general.
I don't know the answer but with my smartphone I'd rather connect to a website through a VPN running on my own server (with pihole and dns sinkhole), than actually browsing any website directly.
Same, and the strongest reason why I stopped using GA altogether.<p>People don't talk much about that, I suppose, but to me it's clear GA is completely dead as a product.
I made a similar observation with Plausible and Cloudflare and wrote about it: <a href="https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnalytics" rel="nofollow">https://rugpullindex.com/blog#HowPlausibleareOurWebsiteAnaly...</a>
Hey guys, I’m the founder of Darwin (free analytics) <a href="https://www.darwin.so" rel="nofollow">https://www.darwin.so</a><p>There are a lot of ways to measure traffic depending if you care about all visits, https requests or just real users. For example, in our research we've found that around 56% of internet traffic is actually headless bots (bots pretending to be human).<p>If you not only count headless bots but also count http requests as users then you'll have 5/1 ratio as Eric mentioned here on twitter.<p>- Cloudflare uses cache hits and so on to measure traffic and therefore use http requests. Most of which are coming from data centers. This means their numbers are highly inflated.<p>- GA allows HTTP requests as well but this traffic can be easily filtered. They allows most/all bots and provide no tools to fight this.<p>- Darwin we exclude everything we can to try and ensure the best measure of "real" users. This we believe is more helpful to marketers.<p>tl;dr<p>your real traffic is 10% of what you see in cloudflare,<p>30% of what you see in unfiltered GA.<p>With Darwin around 85% of traffic is real.