I don’t understand why CloudFlare gives me two different measures of how many people have visited my website. The reasons for this don’t seem to b

Validating CloudFlare analytics - John Mathews

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2021-06-30 10:30:05

I don’t understand why CloudFlare gives me two different measures of how many people have visited my website. The reasons for this don’t seem to be explained anywhere obvious.

I made some screen shots at 11pm on June 29\(^{th}\) and compared the results from the CloudFlare Analytics, CloudFlare Web Analytics, and my own analytics tool.

Why are they so different? I can understand that one measure might be including bots and another might only be reporting real people using normal browsers, but the difference seems too high for that.1 I’d also expect real usage to fall when its night in the countries I get most traffic from, which I don’t see.

My own analytics tool can’t give results from a rolling 24 hour window, it only groups data by day. Therefore I recorded the values at 11pm, which should be close enough. My simple method of logging IP addresses when a page is loaded and counting the unique IP addresses each day says that I’ve had 12 unique users. Much closer to the CloudFlare analytics beta result.

If it were as simple as concluding that my own results agree with the CloudFlare analytics beta then that might be enough. But they only agree on this particular metric. I’ve logged 47 page views today using my own tool but the CloudFlare Analytics beta reports only 11 page views2.