: Analytics: CloudFlare vs Google - What discrepancy is too big? Been using CloudFlare for one of our sites for about a week now, and CloudFlare reports 450% more real visitor page views than
Been using CloudFlare for one of our sites for about a week now, and CloudFlare reports 450% more real visitor page views than Google Analytics (so that's not bots or blocked threats).
I understand that there will be discrepancy because CloudFlare is measuring all page requests, Google Analytics is firing off a JavaScript request once the page has downloaded, so I was prepared for a 20-30%, maybe 50% difference, but 450%?
Seems like there is a problem somewhere. I have used the Google Analytics debugger for chrome and everything seems to work fine. The GA code is in the head so should be fired quite promptly.
Is such a big gap normal? If so, why, and if not, what on earth is causing it?
updated
Sorry, I don't think I was clear, I understood the differences between the CF and GA stats before I started with CF, and expected them to be different. It is the size of the difference that is concerning.
CF clearly separates bots & crawlers from regular visitors, so the figure I am comparing with GA is just the regular visitors; so the difference says that only 1 in 5 of visitors trigger Google Analytics?
"your CloudFlare visitor number is most likely higher"
Doesn't do it justice!
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I have observed similar differences when comparing Apache logs with analytics and have seen a (one day) ratio of 1000:1. It is remotely possible that you have some userbase that blocks Google-Analytics with products like NoScript and Ghostery, or doesn't run any javascript at all. I have found that Piwik gives better reports and can be setup such that tracker blockers do not block its script and users with no javascript can still be tracked via a 1x1 pixel image tracking scheme. However, I have no actual experience with CloudFlare or CDNs in general, so I don't know if it impacts Piwik's reporting.
I've never looked at my Cloudflare Analytics until now, but yours are actually closer to Analytics than mine are. Cloudflare reports 20x the number of unique visits compared to Google, and it's approximately the same for Pageviews.
CloudFlare acknowledge this and provide the following explanation:
CloudFlare Analytics vs. Other Services
Google Analytics and other web-based analytics programs track visitors
that trigger JavaScript. As a result, threats, bots and automated
crawlers are not recorded since these visitors typically do not
trigger JavaScript. These services also don't track visitors who leave
a page before it is fully loaded or have Javascript disabled.
CloudFlare tracks all of your traffic by requests, so your CloudFlare
visitor number is most likely higher.
Keep in mind: CloudFlare can only track visitors that go through the
CloudFlare system, which is represented by an orange cloud on your DNS
settings page.
They claim that their own analytics "are often more accurate than other services that rely on JavaScript."
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