Cloudflare Web Analytics is a new privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics

Cloudflare is best known for its security and DNS services, but now the company is branching out with a new tool to rival Google Analytics.

The site traffic analytics offered by Google are used by millions of people around the world, but Cloudflare wants to unseat the search giant with its own Cloudflare Web Analytics. What makes the services stand out is a focus on privacy, with Cloudflare neither storing not profiting from data gathered about site visitors.

See also:

• Google Maps adds new COVID-19 layer so you can track coronavirus trends
• Google gives the people what they deserve -- affordable devices and respect
• Google Web Designer 9 adds powerful image-processing tools, custom keyboard shortcuts

Cloudflare's offering comes as there is ever-increasing interest in and demand for privacy, and increasing skepticism and fear of big data gathered by the likes of Google. What many people do not like about Google Analytics is the fact that the company uses the data it collects from sites to profile users for advertising purposes. This is something that Cloudflare Web Analytics will not do.

Just like Google Analytics, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free of charge. Initially the service is being made available to the company's existing customers who pay for other tools and services, but in due course it will be made available to anyone who wants to integrate it into their website.

Writing about the new, "free, privacy-first analytics for a better web", Cloudflare's Jon Levine says:

Cloudflare's business has never been built around tracking users or selling advertising. We don't want to know what you do on the Internet -- it's not our business. So we wanted to build an analytics service that gets back to what really matters for web creators, not necessarily marketers, and to give web creators the information they need in a simple, clean way that doesn't sacrifice their visitors' privacy. And giving web creators these analytics shouldn't depend on their use of Cloudflare's infrastructure for performance and security.

What does it mean for us to make our analytics "privacy-first"? Most importantly, it means we don't need to track individual users over time for the purposes of serving analytics. We don't use any client-side state, like cookies or localStorage, for the purposes of tracking users. And we don't "fingerprint" individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data for the purpose of displaying analytics. (We consider fingerprinting even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.)

Cloudflare says that the stats it generates will be slightly different to other analytics tools because of the privacy-centric way in which it works. The company explains: "Analytics tools frequently show counts of 'unique' visitors, which requires tracking individual users by a cookie or IP address. We use the concept of a visit: a privacy-friendly measure of how people have interacted with your website. A visit is defined simply as a successful page view that has an HTTP referer that doesn’t match the hostname of the request. This tells you how many times people came to your website and clicked around before navigating away, but doesn’t require tracking individuals".

Existing Cloudflare customers on Pro, Biz, and Enterprise plans can jump right in by heading to the Analytics tab of their dashboard where they will find they can opt in. It's not clear exactly when Cloudflare Web Analytics will be made available to everyone, but it will happen in due course.