Cloudflare Announces Web Analytics, a Privacy-First, Free Alternative for All Website Owners
New solution gives anyone a more accurate way to track website performance without compromising visitors’ privacy
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today launched Cloudflare Web Analytics to provide accurate, clear, and free analytics for anyone who cares about how their site is performing and doesn’t want to sacrifice their visitors’ privacy. Cloudflare Web Analytics is built on top of Cloudflare’s existing network, giving site owners insight into key traffic metrics at the edge. Now site owners have control over their own site data, eliminating the need for third-party scripts that can track their users and help retarget them with advertising. Cloudflare Web Analytics will be available, for free, to any website owner, whether they are an existing Cloudflare customer or not.
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For website owners and businesses, analytics are the backbone of their online strategy. This data helps them understand how people find a website, what types of devices they are using, and what they do once they get to a website–critical information for creating a better experience for their online visitors. Before today, getting access to that data came at a price when using popular analytics tools created by ad-tech companies. Advertising-driven business models help ad-supported sites sell more ads and are gleaning lots of visitor and site data in return for site analytics. As a result, website owners have to trade user privacy for data on how their own sites were performing. What’s worse, the tradeoff doesn’t ensure that site owners get accurate data because visitors with ad blockers often aren’t counted. With Cloudflare Web Analytics, any web creator—not just Cloudflare customers—can get the information they need in a simple, clean, and accurate way that does not sacrifice their visitors’ privacy.
“Website owners deserve access to analytics that are transparent and accurate, and that don’t force them to pay with their users’ privacy,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “With Cloudflare Web Analytics, website owners can help protect their visitors’ privacy, and focus on what really matters–clean, simple metrics to understand how their site is performing. We believe this is an important step in helping to build a better, and more private Internet for everyone, not just Cloudflare customers.”
Unlike ad-supporting analytics companies, Cloudflare’s business model has never been about tracking individual users across the web. Cloudflare does not track where visitors are going online, and can help web owners get clear and accurate information about how their sites are performing without the need to profile users. Cloudflare already processes the requests for sites on its network and can collect analytics at the edge without adding third-party analytics scripts to a website. This privacy-friendly approach measures a ‘visit’ by looking at the source of each request, rather than tracking individual user behavior. Cloudflare Web Analytics is also able to deliver accurate insights because this method does not conflict with ad blockers, which frequently block third-party analytics tools from measuring anything at all. When combined with Cloudflare’s Bot Management tool, automated bot traffic that could skew analytics is also filtered out for improved accuracy.
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