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Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare show 3.5x more unique users than Google Analytics?

10 points by spalas ↗ HN
When looking at my site's analytics, the nubmer of unique visitors tracked in Cloudflare is approximately 3.5 times the number tracked in Google Analytics.

Is this mostly due to:

- Adblockers preventing the GA javascript from executing?

- Bots making requests that get picked up by Cloudflare?

- User error on my part? (something misconfigured)

5 comments

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FaisalAbid
It's most likely the first two, with a high probability of being you are seeing traffic that would normally get blocked by Adblock. I would assume CloudFlare has the bot filtering in place
spalas
Thanks for the response -- that is what I assumed by wanted to see if I was missing something.
C1sc0cat
How have you got you account properties and views set up?

The main view you use for GA reporting will have the bot filterer turned on.

You do have the standard three view per property setup.

You need to look at the unfiltered view.

I must admit I haven't really looked at our cloud flare -

I am the bus factor guy who gets to stand-in for our main GA/GTM person - Large Multinational 50+ properties in one account, nearly 100 Containers.

Oh a final thought check your GA reports are not being sampled - you can get discrepancies.

XCSme
As Faisal mentioned, it's most likely the first two, but it could also be:

* User having JavaScript disabled

* Users leaving before page and JavaScript loads, or before GA request is sent (CF would track the visit, GA not)

135792468
Not traffic too. On the free plan I don’t think CF breaks this out