How well does Cloudflare analytics work?

Question

Hey HN!Has anyone used Cloudflare's web analytics[1] product? Specifically, I'm referring to the analytics product which requires you to switch over to Cloudflare managing your DNS.How accurate are these DNS level analytics?I've added client-side javascript based analytics tools to my site (specifically: Heap, Google Analytics), and there's a huge difference in the data. Cloudflare says I've got over 1k hits, and heap says I'm at 10. I'm not sure what to believe! Could the difference be due to web crawlers, adblockers, or something else?Thanks!1: https://www.cloudflare.com/web-analytics/

bobbiechen · Accepted Answer

Yes, the DNS-level analytics will measure a totally different number from the client-side Javascript stuff. I saw some similar results myself (using Cloudflare vs Squarespace analytics) and wrote about it in https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/12/21/counting-website-visi... and https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/12/23/follow-up-to-counting... . As a more recent data point, https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2022/7/20/being-on-call-sucks was on the front page of HN earlier this week - Squarespace Analytics shows around 17k page views last week, while Cloudflare shows over 250k.You can pick one metric or the other to track. I'll point out that since Javascript analytics are typically blocked by adblockers, if you optimize for them, you might be driving away tech-savvy people who do use adblockers (since they're basically invisible to you).