Crazy analytics. How do you confirm real data?

[travis14]

What is the name of the domain?

example.com

What is the issue you’re encountering

crazy analytics

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

I manage a site that has some crazy analytics being reported from Cloudflare. It’s showing over 41,300 request per month and over 3,150 unique visitors per month. My analytics show only 6 visitors per month (request and unique visits). There are a lot of post and articles about the crazy analytics differences from cloudflare and others like google, plausable, etc. How do you confirm what traffic is real or if cloudflare is blocking any valid traffic?

I’m a free user so i cant see how much traffic cloudflare says is bots. It seems silly to upgrade just to find out how much traffic is bots when I cant validate via another third party. At this point, is the only thing left to confirm real traffic is turn off cloudflare (make dns only) and track request in server firewall?

What feature, service or problem is this related to?

Web Analytics

[hollynghiem]

It is possible that your Cloudflare metrics do not fully align with data for the same site as reported by other analytics sources, such as Google Analytics and web server logs.

For example, Google Analytics and other web-based analytics programs use JavaScript on the web browser to track visitors. As a result, Google Analytics does not record threats, bots, and automated crawlers because those requests typically do not trigger JavaScript. Also, these services do not track visitors who disable JavaScript on their browser or who leave a page before it fully loads.

We highly recommend you to read more at A quick overview of Cloudflare Analytics · Cloudflare Analytics docs.