Cloudflare announced “Free, Privacy-First” web analytics at the end of September, which I immediately signed up for. We’ve been using it to track visits and requests to MostEpic.win since then.
It’s not quite the same as Google Analytics or other cookie-based tracking systems, but I think it’ll be useful and interesting nonetheless. I’ve signed up for access to Cloudflare’s JavaScript-based analytics, but haven’t yet received an invitation to test it out.
This means the statistics we’re getting right now are somewhat limited, but that’s OK. It’s a start.
The biggest limitation is the fact that we can’t yet see how much traffic is going to the news site and how much is coming to the forum. However, we can make some educated guesses based on the stats we do have.
Below are MEW’s stats for the last 30 days, according to Cloudflare. It shows that we’ve seen 7,207 visitors and served 1,175,263 requests in the past month. The vast majority of these requests come from South Africa.
That’s actually pretty impressive. We’re still small, but it indicates that there are at least 70× more people reading the site than there are participating in the forum. Which makes sense. It is typical that far more people are interested in lurking than participating.
Forum statistics — 3 Oct – 2 Nov 2020
Now let’s try to figure out how many of those visitors are coming to the forum, versus how many are going to the news site.
According to our forum software, we’ve had 57,500 pageviews in the past 30 days. There were roughly 1,100 user visits over that same period.
Now it should be noted that the metrics from our forum are not directly comparable to Cloudflare’s measurements. But it’s the best we’ve got for now, and I’m curious to see if we can actually gain some insight by comparing the two.
Subtracting the forum pageviews from the Cloudflare requests indicates that around 95% of the traffic to MostEpic.win went to the news site. That doesn’t look accurate and I don’t think there is any way to compensate for the mismatch between the statistics, so we’ll have to disregard it for now until we get a better measurement.
I’m also not convinced that the forum “user visits” metric is directly comparable to Cloudflare’s unique visitor number, but taking the ratio suggests that around 85% of visits to MostEpic.win went to the news site.
While combining the two sets of statistics from the forum and Cloudflare should not be taken as totally accurate, I think it is fair to say that there is a significant amount of traffic on our news website, perhaps even more than the forum, despite the fact that there may not be a huge amount of social media activity on our articles at the moment.
In short: I was pleasantly surprised by our visitor statistics. Can’t wait to get the full suite of web analytics from Cloudflare for MEW. I’ve been tempted to spin up an open source analytics system for us, but I think this Cloudflare-based stuff will be better in the long run.
P.S. At the start of the year I did a community health check-up looking at our site’s stats from the past 2+ years. If you missed that, here’s the link to that post and discussion:
