I work in website analytics. Cloudflare's numbers are laughably bad. Really, they are not even tracking visits, they are tracking times the link is requested. So everytime the HN page gets updated, that link is getting clicked by the dozen or so bots that trawl <i>that</i> page.<p>It's a remarkably bad way to do tracking. At the very least, a page view shouldn't be tracked until the page is finished loading for the user. Otherwise you are collecting garbage data.<p>But fwiw, the specific number of page views is never that important in the grand scheme. You should really be looking at trends, and so long as you pick a number that is consistently measured as your baseline, you can leave well enough alone.
The advice I give more and more to my clients is to stop focusing on absolute numbers. Instead, pick a decent analytics package and use it to monitor changes over time. Focus on the relative, not the absolute. (You still need to be careful to make sure your changes over time aren’t because of an increase/decrease in bots.)<p>Similarly, focus on a few core metrics and don’t go down the rabbit hole that something like GoogleAnalytics tends to compel. Usually those metrics are a few basics (uniques) plus a small number of domain/operation specific conversion metrics.
> It's likely lower on mobile, where Firefox is the only major browser that has any sort of adblocker integration (that I know of).<p>Note to author, iOS Safari has adblockers available via the App Store. I believe the same is true for whatever browser(s) Android uses.
I use goatcounter, self hosting the script and proxying the metrics endpoint through my website's server. This way there are no 3rd party assets to block. Also, there's a noscript image tag in case js is disabled that just lets me know how many times the page was accessed. The script prevents most bots, but the noscript probably causes a bunch of bots to count.<p><a href="https://kar.goatcounter.com" rel="nofollow">https://kar.goatcounter.com</a>