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I have a static website on Cloudflare Pages, for which Cloudflare Web Analytics is enabled. This is the only thing I am hosting on Cloudflare, and I set it up less than 24 hours ago. On the Cloudflare Dashboard, I see 403.96k visitors in the last 7 days, whereas in Cloudflare Web Analytics it is 152.08k, a relative difference of 2.68. (In both cases, the number of page views is very close to the number of visits.) What could be the reason for this?

黄雨伞
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The Cloudflare Dashboard shows server-side analytics, meaning it will record every request to your domain (bots, utils, users, etc.)

On the free plan, their Web Analytics solution is client-side, and relies on Javascript to run and report data. This leaves is susceptible to being blocked by browser extensions. It will also not record all bot requests, particular if they are just requesting a specific page / resource, and not running in a browser.

More info - https://developers.cloudflare.com/analytics/faq/web-analytics#the-analytics-beacon-is-blocked-by-ad-blockers-including-adblockplus-brave-duckduckgo-extension-etc-why-is-that

David
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  • That would mean that around 62% of users have an analytics-blocking extension or browser. (I am assuming that bots can't make up a very large fraction of ~1M visits/day.) Does that sound realistic? Unfortunately I don't have enough experience to tell. – 黄雨伞 Feb 17 '22 at 14:10
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    Bots + Users with blocks could very easily make up 62% of traffic. It will really depend on your particular site though. Any discrepancy between server-side and client-side analytics is usually explained by such traffic however. – David Feb 17 '22 at 14:33