For a website to grow, the people behind it must have an understanding of how their website operate. And this includes the access, and knowledge of using analytics tools.
One of the most popular analytics tools out there, is Google Analytics. Most websites on the web use it, and there is no apparent reason for any website to not use it. But there are others options to choose from, with some are better than the other.
And Cloudflare, the web-infrastructure and website-security company, has jumped into the bandwagon by introducing its own web analytics tool, but tries to deliver things rather differently.
On its blog post, the company announced that is is introducing a "free, privacy-first analytics for a better web."
"There are 'free' analytics tools out there, but they come at a cost: not money, but your users’ privacy. Today we’re announcing a brand new, privacy-first analytics service that’s open to everyone — even if they're not already a Cloudflare customer. And if you're a Cloudflare customer, we've enhanced our analytics to make them even more powerful than before."
According to Cloudflare, popular analytics tool available in the market, without ever mentioning Google Analytics as one of them, were built to help ad-supported websites to sell even more ads.
But not all websites on the web sell ads. Many provide services, sell products, or others.
For those sites, using ad-focused analytics tools is like essentially giving up the privacy of their users, in order to understand how what they've put online is performing.
Cloudflare wants to put its analytics tool, as an exact opposite of those tools. Cloudflare's analytics tool "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"
"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."
To make this work, Cloudflare's analytics track users based on counting visits, and without even tracking users.
Cloudflare said that its analytics tool doesn't use any client-side state, like cookies or localStorage. It also doesn't collect "fingerprint" data, User Agent String, or any other data for the purpose of displaying ads.
"We consider fingerprinting even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out," said Cloudflare.
This is where Cloudflare uses the concept of a visit.
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 information tells how many times a person come to users websites, and clicked around to navigate the site before going away.
Tracking this "doesn’t require tracking individuals," Cloudflare explained.
"Our analytics deliver the most important metrics about your website, like page views and visits. But we know that an essential analytics feature is flexibility: the ability to add arbitrary filters, and slice-and-dice data as you see fit. Our analytics can show you the top hostnames, URLs, countries, and other critical metrics like status codes. You can filter on any of these metrics with a click and see the whole dashboard update."
The advantages Cloudflare boasts of its analytics tool, is its use of edge data. The advantage of this is that, the analytics tool can track usage even when visitors of websites have JavaScript disabled in their browser, for instance. There is also the drag-and-zoom feature that allows users to focus on a specific time period as well as investigate changes in traffic.
Cloudflare has made the tool available to all of its users using Pro, Biz, and Enterprise plans. They just have to go to their Analytics tab, and start.
Cloudflare has even put a banner, where users can opt-in to the analytics experience.
For those who aren't Cloudflare users, they can use the analytics tool by adding a Cloudflare analytics JavaScript to their site’s code.