The difference between Cloudflare analytics and Google Analytics

There is a big difference between Cloudflare Analytics Unique Visitor numbers and Google Analytics’. Cloudflare showed my unique visitors to be 5,000. Google Analytics showed the number of unique visitors I have to be 2,000.

According to this forum post, Cloudflare tracks the unique visitors by the number of requested for the DNS. This number will include all request from threats, bots and web crawlers. It also includes requests by visitors who decided to hit the back button before the page is loaded.

Google Analytics is driven by Javascript. According to the post, some websites are not javascript enabled. Hence it will include visitors who have javascript on their browser turned off. I googled the possibility of a visitor who turned off javascript and found that it is highly unlikely. This is because most websites including reputable ones like Netflix are driven by Javascript. They will not function without Javascript. I googled that because I wanted to put in ads that are not driven by Javascript. After reading the post, I think it is not viable.

So where does the difference of 3,000 unique visitors come from? If they are really from visitors who hit the back button before the page is loaded, then the potential to get more traffic is high. I will work on loading the page so that they are able to read the page before hitting the back button. If this is true, I am looking at an increase of 2,000 to 3,000 more visitors.

Another possibility is that the visitor requested for the page and before the page is delivered, the connection is lost. That could have generated a request for the page without Google Analytics actually load and run.