What does Cloudflare Web Analytics tell you?

Where do the numbers come from?

Cloudflare Web Analytics uses a small browser beacon on pages where measurement is enabled. Cloudflare says it does not use cookies or local browser storage to collect usage metrics. It calls a “visit” a page view reached from another website or a direct link. One visit can include several page views within the site.

Our current reports use Cloudflare’s visit count: recorded entries to the site, including direct and external arrivals. It is not a count of all page views or unique people. We should show page views separately when available. Neither figure counts every request for images, fonts and code.

What can the report miss?

The beacon only records pages where it runs and activity it is allowed to collect. A visit may be excluded by the site's measurement setting, a blocked beacon, or a departure before it runs. Some of the sites we manage currently exclude visitors routed through Cloudflare data centres in the UK and EU. That depends on the data centre handling the visit, not simply the visitor's home address.

For those sites, a monthly figure is a partial count of recorded entries, not total traffic or a count of people. A quiet day in the chart is not proof that nobody came.

What can we learn from it?

It can help us see which measured pages drew entries and whether a comparable pattern changes over time. A country breakdown can show broad geography; this dataset does not tell us which town a visitor came from. We report the dates, metric and measurement setting so each number has context. We do not call a visit an enquiry, a sale or a unique person. To understand enquiries, we need evidence from the form or booking system; to understand whether the page worked for someone, we also need their feedback.