23 ms·

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

266 points by f311a 6y ago

ethor 6y ago
I don’t know if it’s already known, but I guess this will provide useful data against webcrawlers and scrapers.
frankzander 6y ago
Couldflare and privacy ... good joke ;)
- f311a 6y ago
  I think it's definitely better than Google Analytics. It also does not require cookies, so you don't need to display the GDPR banner.
  - simonmales 6y ago
    I think you mean does not*?
  - nanna 6y ago
    s/does/does not/
  - biryani_chicken 6y ago
    Until they update the GDPR to prevent cookieless tracking.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      > Until they update the GDPR to prevent cookieless tracking. No need. Cookies are irrelevant, tracking is. Cookieless tracking already falls under the GDPR. This doesn’t seem to track users so it’s fine.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      It's already about tracking/storing/sharing PII; not about your technical implementation of that. It's just generally very narrowly interpreted as 'if you use cookies you need to plaster your site in a ridiculous banner and options menu'.
- fretn 6y ago
  can you explain this a bit more ? I'm not up to date on what cloudflare has been doing lately or in the past privacy wise
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  Are you going to make a substantive claim or just throw around accusations with no foundation?
  - throwaway77384 6y ago
    Particularly in a topic specifically about a product competing with google. Like, GOOGLE! It's almost impossible not to be more privacy respecting / enforcing.
  - orthecreedence 6y ago
    Running effectively a MITM service for SSL then blasting private keys all over the internet might be a good example.
    - eastdakota 6y ago
      Blasting private keys? [Citation Needed]
      - orthecreedence 6y ago
        Not that hard to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed EDIT: Wait, you're the Cloudflare CEO and you don't know about Cloudbleed?
- dragonelite 6y ago
  Its a US company, you have to trust them on their words no logs are being shared with NSA etc. Also seems cloudflare is becoming one of the bigger nodes that if cloudflare does go down. It might shut down big sections of the internet.
zaroth 6y ago
> The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we can simply count the number of page views that come from a different site. This provides a perfectly usable metric that doesn’t compromise on privacy. Say that again please? Is this tracking unique Referrer’s? What if a significant amount of traffic is direct?
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Also I thought browsers didn’t browser a referer for https?
  - tonyhb 6y ago
    Assuming here we mean individual "sessions", eg. session cookies which are removed after you navigate away from the site. Will have to read their JS to see what they're doing.
    - baggy_trough 6y ago
      Session cookies don't have to do with whether you stay on the site or not. They are tied to browser processes.
      - tonyhb 6y ago
        TIL, thanks!
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    Just hit F12 and check in the network tab what is sent on both XHR and navigation. It does send the referer in general.
- severak_cz 6y ago
  using referrer to detetect unique visits is standard trick of those privacy-oriented analytics services (plausible.io, Simple Analytics). I also do it in my own counter script - https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/millions_v1.js#L40 https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/mill...
D13Fd 6y ago
Anyone know how this compares to simpleanalytics.com? The data looks pretty similar. I've been using Simpleanalytics, which is pretty good overall, but they keep messing with their site and breaking things...
WayToDoor 6y ago
Even tho I'm septic about Cloudflare privacy-first policy, this sounds like a great alternative to "giving all your users data to Google". Also, if your site is already behind CF, it's not like you give them much more information than they already have.
- nallerooth 6y ago
  > it's not like you give them much more information than they already have. My thoughts exactly. I'm hoping that we'll see a move from Google Analytics towards more privacy friendly services as they improve. Then again, I'm not sure marketing people will want to move away from Google Analytics. And I don't think marketing people will read news from cloudflare.. so we'll have to educate them.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    A move away from google to a new private entity offering seemingly friendly service? That reminds me of why I installed Google Analytics in the first place. What's the point? You could go with good log parsing programs like awstats.
quyleanh 6y ago
What will be its key advantage over Google Analytics? Privacy and speed?
- f311a 6y ago
  Since it does not require cookies, you don't need to display the GDPR consent banner. I think it's a good solution for small side projects when you don't need very accurate analytics.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    > Since it does not require cookies, you don't need to display the GDPR consent banner. Marketers sadly don't seem to give a shit about that.
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    I think this is conflating two things. The cookie banner is required due to the ePrivacy law which predates GDPR. GDPR consent would still be needed in what concerns personal managements and the reasons for collecting, storing and processing said information.
jgrahamc 6y ago
Also on the subject of not setting cookies. We're killing the __cfduid cookie for all customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729
- buildbuildbuild 6y ago
  This is a great move, thank you. Options to purge analytics data and visitor logs would also be handy to give us more control over our users’ privacy, as well as the ability to transparently see how much of our user data you have collected and for how long it will be retained. And while I have your ear, please consider supporting web servers hosted on non-default ports, and the setting of custom Host headers behind your reverse proxy. (in self-serve - hosting on privileged ports shouldn’t be a requirement of using your service for both security and IPv4 exhaustion reasons) Love Cloudflare. It’s good to see your team self-aware about privacy concerns and working to mitigate some.
  - jgrahamc 6y ago
    Thanks. I've passed all this on to the right people.
  - prdonahue 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on the "custom Host headers" ask? Are you looking to rewrite the Host header as the request gets passed to the origin (without changing the resolution of the origin)? Or something more like domain fronting? An example or two would be great so I can share with the team.
    - buildbuildbuild 6y ago
      A custom Host header passed to the origin that differs from the actual Cloudflare-hosted subdomain, without changing its DNS resolution - correct. This would be helpful when the origin is hosted by an inflexible third party, or as a time saver to quickly switch between environments without needing to modify other parts of the infrastructure. Example 1: A third-party service does not support custom domains, only responds to "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". For a clean user experience, I want "support.my-domain.com" to reverse proxy to "my-company.saas-helpdesk.com" while rewriting the Host header to their origin as "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". (I realize CSP headers and all sorts of pain might happen here - perhaps not the best example - but would be great flexibility to have around) Example 2: My startup's origin only responds to "Host: beta.mydomain.com", and the developer with access to its code is on vacation. I want to release my product. I point "www.mydomain.com" to the IP hosting "beta.mydomain.com" but since that origin does not respond to "Host: www.mydomain.com" - it does not work. I need a Host header rewrite. Thank you for your time!
kmfrk 6y ago
Can you have multiple trackers set up? I get the same tracking code for each domain I try every time I set it up, which isn't great for keeping relations between websites private. The token makes it seem like it's per-user rather than a general one everyone gets.
- jplevine 6y ago
  (PM for Cloudflare Analytics here.) At launch, we just support one token per account. We are already working on supporting multiple analytics tokens in one account though!
  - kmfrk 6y ago
    I see, thanks for making sense of it for me! :)
samat 6y ago
Is it really free? In my cloudflare dashboard it shows 'Upgrade to Pro' in 'analytics' tab.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  Yes. It's really free. Sign up is here: https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up/web-analytics https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up/web-analytics
  - nso 6y ago
    Thank you for providing a great service. Hosting on the web was super stressful in the past, with having to worry about script kiddies disagreeing with you and causing your bandwidth bill to soar. Small issue; when clicking the link you provided I just get redirected to my accounts dashboard. Edit: There was a link to web analytics in the right pane, and that worked for me
  - cluoma 6y ago
    Is this not available in the EU? I get forwarded to my dashboard page.
    - nso 6y ago
      Click the link in the right pane
    - jplevine 6y ago
      Sorry to hear that - can you try again at this link? https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/web-analytics https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/web-analytics (We actually did have a replication issue where some folks in the EU had trouble accessing this page)
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    It’s currently broken. I have a free account and wanted to have a look at it. First it didn’t show at all in my dashboard, after a while it showed up, and I was able to complete onboarding and look at the (empty) results page. When I then refreshed it, I got 404 and now the web analytics button is gone again.
heipei 6y ago
As much as I applaud every alternative to Google services, I would think about these kind of analytics twice when running any kind of developer-centric service. Chance is that your target audience is running an adblocker / DNS blocker of some sort and that this will heavily skew the analytics results: The absolute numbers will be a lot lower and you will only capture folks not savvy enough for adblockers. I removed any external analytics about a year ago when I realized that more than 50% of visitors to my service were blocking Google Analytics and that GA numbers had become meaningless (cross-referenced against access.log).
- fastest963 6y ago
  If you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Boy, is your company's product nicely done but annoying! :) Any plans to make the "continue without disabling" button harder to click in the future?
    - fastest963 6y ago
      The design and functionality of the Engage modal is actually up to the publisher.
    - programbreeding 6y ago
      One of the local news stations uses them on their website. They have a tiny "continue without supporting us" link that blends in nicely with the text around it. The weird thing is I always see that link while my wife never does. I don't mean she can't find it; it simply isn't there. This is using Chrome on Android. No root or anything special. Doesn't matter if her phone is on wifi or mobile. On the other hand, I see that link every time. It's been that way for about a year and I have never been able to figure it out -- although admittedly, I haven't tried that hard.
ddevault 6y ago
Privacy-first analytics is a contradiction in terms. Do not spy on people. Do not build software that spies on people. It's that easy. This project is despicable, and this company is despicable.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  What is despicable about an analytics product that doesn't track people?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    "An analytics product that doesn't track people" is nonsensical. It's like "water that isn't wet". Importantly, real trust on the internet is built on math and logic, not on faith. And faith, in this case, in a corporate institution which has spent years expending its fullest effort to direct as much of the flow of internet traffic through its servers as possible. I am never going to take you at your word that you won't write any of this data down, I promise, for real, no subpoenas or subversion going on here, no sir! And yes, I know who you are, and that it's no use convincing you that the company that you built is a net evil on this world.
    - dang 6y ago
      No personal attacks please. We ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - superkuh 6y ago
    Because it does track people. Cloudflare tracks people. Cloudflare excludes people. It is it's very purpose for existing as you well know. These feel good marketing campaigns and services you do are just to centralize more of the internet into cloudflare and that's a bad thing.
    - jgrahamc 6y ago
      It is it's very purpose for existing as you well know. No, that's not true. And stop claiming you know what I think or believe.
fastest963 6y ago
What happens to "visits" in Brave or other browsers that strip the Referer header in top-level navigations [1]? Also, what about direct traffic? They shouldn't even try to report "visits" if it won't be accurate because now they're just going to have a bunch of confused publishers asking why the numbers are so different than GA. [1] https://www.cookiestatus.com/brave/#referrer https://www.cookiestatus.com/brave/#referrer
zmxv 6y ago
I've just integrated it with my pet project at varten.com. It's a very smooth experience, and data points started to show up on the Cloudflare dashboard within a few minutes. One minor downside: it doesn't work on clients with JavaScript turned off.
- jplevine 6y ago
  (PM for Cloudflare Analytics here) Thanks! If you do end up "orange clouding" and proxying your site through Cloudflare, we can show you lots of stats about your website, even from clients that don't support JS :)
  - Fiveplus 6y ago
    My website, like many, uses Cloudflare's CDN. I occasionally spend time going through the analytics section inside the dashboard. I suppose those are data points gathered by your edge servers (?). If true - how is that different from what is launched today?
    - MrStonedOne 6y ago
      what launched today allows you to use it even if you don't proxy your traffic, hell even if you don't have your nameserver pointed to cloudflare at all.
  - marc_io 6y ago
    How to prevent my own visits to appear on the dashboard?
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
Again, not analytics. Traffic stats. Blurring meaning here again, packaging data lying around from CF ops. Same as a stats counter from 2001. Veiled comparision to Google, who's in a different category for the most part - they're more like 'business analytics' where ('privacy' aside) you can see how users surf, improve UX, make decisions to help goals.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  What you call Traffic stats is what most people are concerned with and the reason they add analytics. That Google Analytics offers more in depth features is irrelevant for most people.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
blindm 6y ago
YAAS [Yet Another Analytics Service]
PanosJee 6y ago
I only get values in buckets of 100. Really inaccurate. Is it thr case with others?
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  It scales the sampling rate at data collection time based on your active view counts and at crunch time based on the time range you are looking at.
bamboleo 6y ago
Not a single mention of GDPR on the launch of a “privacy-focused” analytics. I’m disappointed. I just need an analytics solution that somewhat guarantees I do or don’t need to use a cookie banner. I need to know how many people visit my website without bothering them with annoying popups.
mikesabbagh 6y ago
Nice to see those numbers, but in addition to that, Why not show us the page load time. Come-on Cloudflare!! This is definitely being collected from our browsers! You always get what you pay for!
Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
This looks compelling - I've been wanting a simple way to track traffic volume on my static site. I don't have ads or anything and don't want to be creepy. Basically just want to know roughly how many people are reading my blog posts and if any old posts are getting big upticks in traffic. Hopefully this fills that need!
rozenmd 6y ago
Is it possible to "self-host" the script? Particularly looking to add a CNAME record in my DNS to point to the script's domain and have it effectively served from a subdomain of my site.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
Still only lets you look at week long slices, not a competitor to GA. Also browser/device/viewing environment info is a key piece of GA and not something anybody has replicated as well. (the ability to intuitively drill down and compare is second to none with GA. you have to create segments in omo witch is a like 10 click long process with 3 processing pauses vs clicking on `windows` to drill down by family to os version or clicking on a referrer to see the pages they refer traffic to by visit)
DidISayTooMuch 6y ago
Doesn't look like it tracks conversions? Will this be available in the future?
XCSme 6y ago
If you really want privacy-first analytics, go self-hosted, don't share your website and visitors data with 3rd parties.
corobo 6y ago
I want to know which pages are performing the best but for the life of me I can't find anything to do with pages. Even just a table of "page | views" would do it. Am I just being completely incompetent? This feels like it should be a front and centre stats table somewhere e: oh I was still on the old stats, same bug others reported. Side note I don't believe for a second my personal blog has had 500 unique visits in the past 24h. I've never really trusted Cloudflare's ability to count visits properly, gotta be miscounting assets as unique visits or showing me Google bots or something there.
Seb-C 6y ago
It is great that they provide an analytics without tracking or ads, but then if it is free what is the business model behind it? Is it only an entry-point to attract people on other paid services?
- eastdakota 6y ago
  We hope you’ll see all the things Cloudflare can do and sign up for our other services. Lead gen. Simple.
  - nojvek 6y ago
    Cloudflare offers a ton of free services in hopes you get attached to it and like it enough to try out their paid stuff. So far Cloudflare cdn in my experience is much faster than google or Amazon. Google cloud cdn really disappoints me. Cloudflare v8 isolate based edge workers are pretty phenomenal too.
jitbit 6y ago
I'm confused. So CF currently has 2 analytics products: 1) JS-based analytics (the free one, advertised in the blog post) 2) Edge server logs based one (available on Pro+ plans only) Am I right?

266 points by f311a 6y ago

ethor 6y ago

I don’t know if it’s already known, but I guess this will provide useful data against webcrawlers and scrapers.

frankzander 6y ago

Couldflare and privacy ... good joke ;)

f311a 6y ago
I think it's definitely better than Google Analytics. It also does not require cookies, so you don't need to display the GDPR banner.
- simonmales 6y ago
  I think you mean does not*?
- nanna 6y ago
  s/does/does not/
- biryani_chicken 6y ago
  Until they update the GDPR to prevent cookieless tracking.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    > Until they update the GDPR to prevent cookieless tracking. No need. Cookies are irrelevant, tracking is. Cookieless tracking already falls under the GDPR. This doesn’t seem to track users so it’s fine.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    It's already about tracking/storing/sharing PII; not about your technical implementation of that. It's just generally very narrowly interpreted as 'if you use cookies you need to plaster your site in a ridiculous banner and options menu'.
fretn 6y ago
can you explain this a bit more ? I'm not up to date on what cloudflare has been doing lately or in the past privacy wise
jgrahamc 6y ago
Are you going to make a substantive claim or just throw around accusations with no foundation?
- throwaway77384 6y ago
  Particularly in a topic specifically about a product competing with google. Like, GOOGLE! It's almost impossible not to be more privacy respecting / enforcing.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Running effectively a MITM service for SSL then blasting private keys all over the internet might be a good example.
  - eastdakota 6y ago
    Blasting private keys? [Citation Needed]
    - orthecreedence 6y ago
      Not that hard to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed EDIT: Wait, you're the Cloudflare CEO and you don't know about Cloudbleed?
dragonelite 6y ago
Its a US company, you have to trust them on their words no logs are being shared with NSA etc. Also seems cloudflare is becoming one of the bigger nodes that if cloudflare does go down. It might shut down big sections of the internet.

zaroth 6y ago

> The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we can simply count the number of page views that come from a different site. This provides a perfectly usable metric that doesn’t compromise on privacy. Say that again please? Is this tracking unique Referrer’s? What if a significant amount of traffic is direct?

stingraycharles 6y ago
Also I thought browsers didn’t browser a referer for https?
- tonyhb 6y ago
  Assuming here we mean individual "sessions", eg. session cookies which are removed after you navigate away from the site. Will have to read their JS to see what they're doing.
  - baggy_trough 6y ago
    Session cookies don't have to do with whether you stay on the site or not. They are tied to browser processes.
    - tonyhb 6y ago
      TIL, thanks!
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Just hit F12 and check in the network tab what is sent on both XHR and navigation. It does send the referer in general.
severak_cz 6y ago
using referrer to detetect unique visits is standard trick of those privacy-oriented analytics services (plausible.io, Simple Analytics). I also do it in my own counter script - https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/millions_v1.js#L40 https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/mill...

D13Fd 6y ago

Anyone know how this compares to simpleanalytics.com? The data looks pretty similar. I've been using Simpleanalytics, which is pretty good overall, but they keep messing with their site and breaking things...

WayToDoor 6y ago

Even tho I'm septic about Cloudflare privacy-first policy, this sounds like a great alternative to "giving all your users data to Google". Also, if your site is already behind CF, it's not like you give them much more information than they already have.

nallerooth 6y ago
> it's not like you give them much more information than they already have. My thoughts exactly. I'm hoping that we'll see a move from Google Analytics towards more privacy friendly services as they improve. Then again, I'm not sure marketing people will want to move away from Google Analytics. And I don't think marketing people will read news from cloudflare.. so we'll have to educate them.
- wolco2 6y ago
  A move away from google to a new private entity offering seemingly friendly service? That reminds me of why I installed Google Analytics in the first place. What's the point? You could go with good log parsing programs like awstats.

quyleanh 6y ago

What will be its key advantage over Google Analytics? Privacy and speed?

f311a 6y ago
Since it does not require cookies, you don't need to display the GDPR consent banner. I think it's a good solution for small side projects when you don't need very accurate analytics.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > Since it does not require cookies, you don't need to display the GDPR consent banner. Marketers sadly don't seem to give a shit about that.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  I think this is conflating two things. The cookie banner is required due to the ePrivacy law which predates GDPR. GDPR consent would still be needed in what concerns personal managements and the reasons for collecting, storing and processing said information.

jgrahamc 6y ago

Also on the subject of not setting cookies. We're killing the __cfduid cookie for all customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729

buildbuildbuild 6y ago
This is a great move, thank you. Options to purge analytics data and visitor logs would also be handy to give us more control over our users’ privacy, as well as the ability to transparently see how much of our user data you have collected and for how long it will be retained. And while I have your ear, please consider supporting web servers hosted on non-default ports, and the setting of custom Host headers behind your reverse proxy. (in self-serve - hosting on privileged ports shouldn’t be a requirement of using your service for both security and IPv4 exhaustion reasons) Love Cloudflare. It’s good to see your team self-aware about privacy concerns and working to mitigate some.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  Thanks. I've passed all this on to the right people.
- prdonahue 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "custom Host headers" ask? Are you looking to rewrite the Host header as the request gets passed to the origin (without changing the resolution of the origin)? Or something more like domain fronting? An example or two would be great so I can share with the team.
  - buildbuildbuild 6y ago
    A custom Host header passed to the origin that differs from the actual Cloudflare-hosted subdomain, without changing its DNS resolution - correct. This would be helpful when the origin is hosted by an inflexible third party, or as a time saver to quickly switch between environments without needing to modify other parts of the infrastructure. Example 1: A third-party service does not support custom domains, only responds to "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". For a clean user experience, I want "support.my-domain.com" to reverse proxy to "my-company.saas-helpdesk.com" while rewriting the Host header to their origin as "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". (I realize CSP headers and all sorts of pain might happen here - perhaps not the best example - but would be great flexibility to have around) Example 2: My startup's origin only responds to "Host: beta.mydomain.com", and the developer with access to its code is on vacation. I want to release my product. I point "www.mydomain.com" to the IP hosting "beta.mydomain.com" but since that origin does not respond to "Host: www.mydomain.com" - it does not work. I need a Host header rewrite. Thank you for your time!

kmfrk 6y ago

Can you have multiple trackers set up? I get the same tracking code for each domain I try every time I set it up, which isn't great for keeping relations between websites private. The token makes it seem like it's per-user rather than a general one everyone gets.

jplevine 6y ago
(PM for Cloudflare Analytics here.) At launch, we just support one token per account. We are already working on supporting multiple analytics tokens in one account though!
- kmfrk 6y ago
  I see, thanks for making sense of it for me! :)

samat 6y ago

Is it really free? In my cloudflare dashboard it shows 'Upgrade to Pro' in 'analytics' tab.

jgrahamc 6y ago
Yes. It's really free. Sign up is here: https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up/web-analytics https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up/web-analytics
- nso 6y ago
  Thank you for providing a great service. Hosting on the web was super stressful in the past, with having to worry about script kiddies disagreeing with you and causing your bandwidth bill to soar. Small issue; when clicking the link you provided I just get redirected to my accounts dashboard. Edit: There was a link to web analytics in the right pane, and that worked for me
- cluoma 6y ago
  Is this not available in the EU? I get forwarded to my dashboard page.
  - nso 6y ago
    Click the link in the right pane
  - jplevine 6y ago
    Sorry to hear that - can you try again at this link? https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/web-analytics https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/web-analytics (We actually did have a replication issue where some folks in the EU had trouble accessing this page)
- Semaphor 6y ago
  It’s currently broken. I have a free account and wanted to have a look at it. First it didn’t show at all in my dashboard, after a while it showed up, and I was able to complete onboarding and look at the (empty) results page. When I then refreshed it, I got 404 and now the web analytics button is gone again.

heipei 6y ago

As much as I applaud every alternative to Google services, I would think about these kind of analytics twice when running any kind of developer-centric service. Chance is that your target audience is running an adblocker / DNS blocker of some sort and that this will heavily skew the analytics results: The absolute numbers will be a lot lower and you will only capture folks not savvy enough for adblockers. I removed any external analytics about a year ago when I realized that more than 50% of visitors to my service were blocking Google Analytics and that GA numbers had become meaningless (cross-referenced against access.log).

fastest963 6y ago
If you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Boy, is your company's product nicely done but annoying! :) Any plans to make the "continue without disabling" button harder to click in the future?
  - fastest963 6y ago
    The design and functionality of the Engage modal is actually up to the publisher.
  - programbreeding 6y ago
    One of the local news stations uses them on their website. They have a tiny "continue without supporting us" link that blends in nicely with the text around it. The weird thing is I always see that link while my wife never does. I don't mean she can't find it; it simply isn't there. This is using Chrome on Android. No root or anything special. Doesn't matter if her phone is on wifi or mobile. On the other hand, I see that link every time. It's been that way for about a year and I have never been able to figure it out -- although admittedly, I haven't tried that hard.

ddevault 6y ago

Privacy-first analytics is a contradiction in terms. Do not spy on people. Do not build software that spies on people. It's that easy. This project is despicable, and this company is despicable.

jgrahamc 6y ago
What is despicable about an analytics product that doesn't track people?
- ddevault 6y ago
  "An analytics product that doesn't track people" is nonsensical. It's like "water that isn't wet". Importantly, real trust on the internet is built on math and logic, not on faith. And faith, in this case, in a corporate institution which has spent years expending its fullest effort to direct as much of the flow of internet traffic through its servers as possible. I am never going to take you at your word that you won't write any of this data down, I promise, for real, no subpoenas or subversion going on here, no sir! And yes, I know who you are, and that it's no use convincing you that the company that you built is a net evil on this world.
  - dang 6y ago
    No personal attacks please. We ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- superkuh 6y ago
  Because it does track people. Cloudflare tracks people. Cloudflare excludes people. It is it's very purpose for existing as you well know. These feel good marketing campaigns and services you do are just to centralize more of the internet into cloudflare and that's a bad thing.
  - jgrahamc 6y ago
    It is it's very purpose for existing as you well know. No, that's not true. And stop claiming you know what I think or believe.

fastest963 6y ago

What happens to "visits" in Brave or other browsers that strip the Referer header in top-level navigations [1]? Also, what about direct traffic? They shouldn't even try to report "visits" if it won't be accurate because now they're just going to have a bunch of confused publishers asking why the numbers are so different than GA. [1] https://www.cookiestatus.com/brave/#referrer https://www.cookiestatus.com/brave/#referrer

zmxv 6y ago

I've just integrated it with my pet project at varten.com. It's a very smooth experience, and data points started to show up on the Cloudflare dashboard within a few minutes. One minor downside: it doesn't work on clients with JavaScript turned off.

jplevine 6y ago
(PM for Cloudflare Analytics here) Thanks! If you do end up "orange clouding" and proxying your site through Cloudflare, we can show you lots of stats about your website, even from clients that don't support JS :)
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  My website, like many, uses Cloudflare's CDN. I occasionally spend time going through the analytics section inside the dashboard. I suppose those are data points gathered by your edge servers (?). If true - how is that different from what is launched today?
  - MrStonedOne 6y ago
    what launched today allows you to use it even if you don't proxy your traffic, hell even if you don't have your nameserver pointed to cloudflare at all.
- marc_io 6y ago
  How to prevent my own visits to appear on the dashboard?

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

Again, not analytics. Traffic stats. Blurring meaning here again, packaging data lying around from CF ops. Same as a stats counter from 2001. Veiled comparision to Google, who's in a different category for the most part - they're more like 'business analytics' where ('privacy' aside) you can see how users surf, improve UX, make decisions to help goals.

ogre_codes 6y ago
What you call Traffic stats is what most people are concerned with and the reason they add analytics. That Google Analytics offers more in depth features is irrelevant for most people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

blindm 6y ago

YAAS [Yet Another Analytics Service]

PanosJee 6y ago

I only get values in buckets of 100. Really inaccurate. Is it thr case with others?

MrStonedOne 6y ago
It scales the sampling rate at data collection time based on your active view counts and at crunch time based on the time range you are looking at.

bamboleo 6y ago

Not a single mention of GDPR on the launch of a “privacy-focused” analytics. I’m disappointed. I just need an analytics solution that somewhat guarantees I do or don’t need to use a cookie banner. I need to know how many people visit my website without bothering them with annoying popups.

mikesabbagh 6y ago

Nice to see those numbers, but in addition to that, Why not show us the page load time. Come-on Cloudflare!! This is definitely being collected from our browsers! You always get what you pay for!

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago

This looks compelling - I've been wanting a simple way to track traffic volume on my static site. I don't have ads or anything and don't want to be creepy. Basically just want to know roughly how many people are reading my blog posts and if any old posts are getting big upticks in traffic. Hopefully this fills that need!

rozenmd 6y ago

Is it possible to "self-host" the script? Particularly looking to add a CNAME record in my DNS to point to the script's domain and have it effectively served from a subdomain of my site.

MrStonedOne 6y ago

Still only lets you look at week long slices, not a competitor to GA. Also browser/device/viewing environment info is a key piece of GA and not something anybody has replicated as well. (the ability to intuitively drill down and compare is second to none with GA. you have to create segments in omo witch is a like 10 click long process with 3 processing pauses vs clicking on `windows` to drill down by family to os version or clicking on a referrer to see the pages they refer traffic to by visit)

DidISayTooMuch 6y ago

Doesn't look like it tracks conversions? Will this be available in the future?

XCSme 6y ago

If you really want privacy-first analytics, go self-hosted, don't share your website and visitors data with 3rd parties.

corobo 6y ago

I want to know which pages are performing the best but for the life of me I can't find anything to do with pages. Even just a table of "page | views" would do it. Am I just being completely incompetent? This feels like it should be a front and centre stats table somewhere e: oh I was still on the old stats, same bug others reported. Side note I don't believe for a second my personal blog has had 500 unique visits in the past 24h. I've never really trusted Cloudflare's ability to count visits properly, gotta be miscounting assets as unique visits or showing me Google bots or something there.

Seb-C 6y ago

It is great that they provide an analytics without tracking or ads, but then if it is free what is the business model behind it? Is it only an entry-point to attract people on other paid services?

eastdakota 6y ago
We hope you’ll see all the things Cloudflare can do and sign up for our other services. Lead gen. Simple.
- nojvek 6y ago
  Cloudflare offers a ton of free services in hopes you get attached to it and like it enough to try out their paid stuff. So far Cloudflare cdn in my experience is much faster than google or Amazon. Google cloud cdn really disappoints me. Cloudflare v8 isolate based edge workers are pretty phenomenal too.

jitbit 6y ago

I'm confused. So CF currently has 2 analytics products: 1) JS-based analytics (the free one, advertised in the blog post) 2) Edge server logs based one (available on Pro+ plans only) Am I right?