Cloudflare has announced a “privacy-first” analytics service that’s open to everyone — even if they’re not already a Cloudflare customer. Many experts say this could rival Google Analytics, eventually.
Making the announcement from its official blog, Cloudflare Product Manager John Levine said, ” The most popular analytics services available were built to help ad-supported sites sell more ads. But, a lot of websites don’t have ads. So if you use those services, you’re giving up the privacy of your users in order to understand how what you’ve put online is performing.
“Cloudflare’s business has never been built around tracking users or selling advertising. We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s not our business. So we wanted to build an analytics service that gets back to what really matters for web creators, not necessarily marketers, and to give web creators the information they need in a simple, clean way that doesn’t sacrifice their visitors’ privacy. And giving web creators these analytics shouldn’t depend on their use of Cloudflare’s infrastructure for performance and security. (More on that in a bit.)”
Cloudflare analytics tool will not use any client-side state, like cookies or local storage, for the purposes of tracking users. It will not “fingerprint” individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data for the purpose of displaying analytics.
Instead, it will use the concept of a visit: a privacy-friendly measure of how people have interacted with your Website. A visit is defined simply as a successful page view that has an HTTP referer that doesn’t match the hostname of the request. This tells you how many times people came to your Website & clicked around before navigating away, but doesn’t require tracking individuals.
For existing Cloudflare customers, they need to go to their Analytics tab to avail of this service. For those who don’t, they will be able to use Cloudflare’s Web analytics without changing DNS servers by adding JavaScript.
Image credit: Cloudflare
