Your CDN or Sites Like Similar Web
 

Who do you trust more for accuracy in counting visitors and countries?

I'm leaning towards my CDN.

Whoa, don't all rush in at once. LOL.

Original thread title should have been, "Your CDN or Sites Like Similar Web?"

I guess nobody knows. :1orglaugh

Why would you use SimilarWeb for your own properties?

That doesn't make any sense, which is probably why nobody bothered replying.

Hey, Trevesty. Thanks for that answer.

I use my CDN's analytics because they are quite detailed. That is true.

Just, a huge sponsor of mine tried to use similarweb as a case study. I had asked them why my stats dropped like 95%+ overnight. Literally from one day to the next. Clicks have not recovered. They told me I was losing traffic. That was their reason. I checked my CDN and traffic is the same or increasing and from totally different countries than similarweb has. Mostly target or Tier 1 countries. Similarweb had recorded total armpit countries. Tier 4 if that exists.

I used to respect similarweb's data/traffic analytics. Now, not so sure.

Then the sponsor started asking about our use of iframes. We don't use iframes on our sites unless they are used by a company that creates iframes tools for their afiliates.. So, the company in question does use them to deliver videos in feeds. Waiting to see how they respond to this one.

Why are you checking CDN for traffic analytics? Even if it's Cloudflare, this shouldn't be used for anything analytical. You're using a spoon to slice meat, when you should be using a butcher knife. CDN won't answer your question. Use Google Analytics and track your outbound clicks.

Your CDN "traffic" could be skewed by one person posting an image on some forum or a sub-reddit, but it's not any "real" traffic that can be monetized - just hits to the CDN's edge network.

I also don't know why you'd ask a sponsor why YOUR traffic to them is down, unless they had some outage or you do track outbound clicks and there's a data discrepancy.

Exactly.

Are there no alternatives to GA? I like 2nd opinions.

I also didn't answer because it was a stupid question that made no sense.

There are dozens. I like Matomo (formerly piwik).

It wasn't a stupid question. It was not a choose the only options we have but it was a question about choosing between the two.
I will check out Matomo and see if it makes any sense. Thanks.

Thanks for the Matomo link. Am trying it out.

Matomo is the best non google stat analytics I have used.

Pretty impressed so far.