Introducing: Cloudflare Edge Analytics For WordPress

As the first platform to take an edge-first approach to WordPress Hosting, we strive to provide our customers with as much data and insight as possible.

Today, I’m happy to share that we’re taking our reporting a step further by providing full analytics directly from the Cloudflare Enterprise edge directly inside of our portal.

Edge Analytics: How to view your Edge Analytics

One logged in to your Rocket.net account, simply click Manage on the site you would like to view your edge analytics for, then click the Reporting Icon

Once on the Reporting tab, you’ll default to our new Edge Analytics report on the Overview tab with quick access to drill down into both the CDN and WAF as well. Getting Cloudflare Enterprise reporting is an unique feature that many of our customers have asked for, we’re pleased to get this new powerful reporting added to your dashboard.

What’s the difference between Google Analytics and Edge Reporting?

Customers new to Rocket.net often ask “Why does the Rocket.net Dashboard show more visitors than Google Analytics does?”

The answer lays in how Google Analytics counts visitors versus how Rocket.net tracks visitors. In fact, you might say that Google Analytics and Rocket.net don’t track the same things exactly.

How Google Analytics Tracks Visitors

Google Analytics tracks visitors that have JavaScript enabled. This generally means that the visitor being tracked is a human who is using a standard web browser, be it on a mobile device, laptop, or desktop PC. Google is focused on helping you understand all the statistics surrounding the people that visit your website. But, these aren’t the only visitors to your website, and that’s where Rocket.net is different.

Rocket.net: Tracking All Visitors

Tracking visitors who have JavaScript enabled in their browser is a great way to track Humans visiting your site, but the truth of the matter is that it does not paint a clear picture of all visitors to your website. There are non-human visitors to your website: Bots, Crawlers, and other automations that visit your site on a regular basis.

These bots and crawlers do not have JavaScript enabled, and so Google Analytics does not count them because they are not human visitors. Google Analytics is a marketing tool that is only interested in gathering statistics about humans that can be turned into conversions.

Although these automated visitors are not the same as human visitors, they still consume similar amounts of resources that a human would. Chief among these resource is Bandwidth. For this reason, Rocket.net tracks all visitors to your site, regardless of their nature. Any HTTP GET request made to your site gets tracked. At times, bots can represent a very large percentage of traffic, which correlates directly to what you’ll see on the Rocket.net Dashboard.

After already launching Site User Roles for Selective Control Panel Access earlier this week, Edge Analytics another one of many new reports we have coming for Rocket.net.