Cloudflare protects your website, but you still need to monitor what happens on it.
Google Analytics tracks site performance and how customers interact with your articles. That tracking data needs to be accurate and timely, with no filtering.
Cloudflare and Google Analytics are straightforward to use together, though their separate roles can cause some confusion.
Before adding tracking services to your Cloudflare site, check how the two services work together.
For a mortgage-broking website, decide which enquiry actions you want Google Analytics to count. Australian brokers can assess the commission income from settled loans separately in mortgage broker software. Keeping those measures distinct helps you avoid treating website enquiries as income already earned.
Can You Use Cloudflare With Google Analytics?
Yep! Because Cloudflare doesn’t proxy traffic from Google, it doesn’t have any effect on your Google Analytics tracking, and GA will be able to monitor hits freely. Google Analytics uses a simple Javascript code that’s triggered by visitors’ browsers, and this data isn’t filtered through any Cloudflare apps in any way so they work together smoothly
Google deprecated its app for viewing GA through Cloudflare to bring Google Analytics into a single dashboard.
An error when adding Google Analytics to your Cloudflare site likely points to how you installed the tracking code.
Does Cloudflare Affect Google Analytics?
Google Analytics insight reporting can be affected by some Cloudflare apps, especially when GA-tracked requests pass through your origin web servers.
Non-HTTP requests from visitors using particular apps or systems on your website are the most common case.
Cloudflare’s automatic server proxying can stop Google Analytics from reading header information, such as unique IP addresses, correctly.
Google Analytics may exclude a visit if it cannot determine whether a real person made it. That can affect your visitor figures.
These cases are uncommon. Google Analytics reports page views in most circumstances.
Cloudflare Analytics vs Google Analytics: Why Are Unique Visitors Different?
The visitor figures can differ considerably because Cloudflare and Google Analytics use different tracking methods.
Every unique request to your web server counts in Cloudflare, regardless of its validity or intent.
Google Analytics limits which page hits count as legitimate unique connections to account for suspicious or invalid requests.
Cloudflare’s analytics figures therefore tend to be much higher because they include far more robots than Google Analytics does.
The services measure different activity: Cloudflare aims to account for all activity on your web server, while Google Analytics aims to show how people interact with your site.
Cloudflare explains the technical reasons in more detail here.
Expect Cloudflare’s unique traffic figure to exceed the figure in Google Analytics.
When using Google Analytics to monitor homepage traffic or visits to blog articles and landing pages, you want to exclude other non-HTTP requests.
Cloudflare’s built-in activity monitoring lets you distinguish traffic’s effect on your server from the unique engagement it represents on your site.
A post on the Cloudflare community forum reports seeing 3-4x higher figures in Cloudflare. Such large differences are not unusual.
Why is Google Analytics Showing Zero Traffic?
A unique Google verification code on your site can track page hits through Google Search Console.
That verification code does not communicate with Google Analytics.
Check that you have the right Google Analytics Javascript code on your site so it can start tracking visitors immediately.
If Google Analytics shows no traffic despite the correct code being installed, ask your hosting provider whether its traffic proxying interferes with GA data.
For help with your particular setup, ask in the Cloudflare community forums.
