Cloudflare have recently launched their free web analytics tool. What’s different here is that Cloudflare web analytics will focus on privacy instead of ad tracking for monetization.
Cloudflare Web Analytics Aims At Privacy
In a recent post, Cloudflare has announced the release of free web analytics for all. This facility will be available to everyone, including non-Cloudflare customers.
As elaborated, Cloudflare’s web analytics won’t be tracking users as it won’t focus on ads. In this way, the toll would respect the privacy of a site’s visitors. That too, for free – unlike most other free web analytics.
As stated in their post,
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.
Explaining why they came up with this idea, they described that most analytics track site visitors’ data for advertising purposes. While this might be useful for those site creators that rely on ads for monetization, those sites which defy this practice seemingly remain at a loss as they fail to protect their visitors from being tracked.
However, since Cloudflare negates data monetization and ad tracking and respects user privacy, their web analytics will work differently.
They won’t be tracking site visitors via intrusive means, such as IP tracking, UserAgent string, or cookies. Rather they will rely on HTTP referrer which will show the number of visits to the site instead of unique visitors.
Describing visits, the blog reads,
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 and clicked around before navigating away, but doesn’t require tracking individuals.
Also, there’ll be more interesting features that they have elaborated on in the post.
How Is It Available?
Cloudflare’s JavaScript-based analytics will be available to everyone globally. Current Cloudflare users can simply find this feature as a separate tab.
Whereas, non-Cloudflare users can add their JavaScript even without the need to change their DNS servers. Interested users can sign-up here to have the service whenever fully available.