Zaras

Every serious ad blocker and privacy browser extension keeps a list of scripts to stop, and Google’s own tracking domains are near the top of every one of those lists. That is the practical problem behind measurement on the modern web: the tool doing the counting is also the tool most actively hunted by the software sitting between it and your visitors. Cloudflare’s answer to that problem is a feature usually called Zaraz, referred to in some client conversations by the shorthand “Zaras,” which moves the loading of those scripts off the visitor’s browser and onto Cloudflare’s own servers.

Instead of a visitor’s browser reaching out directly to Google to fetch a tracking script, the request goes to your own domain first, through Cloudflare’s network, and Cloudflare handles the rest server side. A blocker watching for requests to Google’s domains never sees one, because there isn’t one to see. The tracking still happens, just routed through infrastructure the blocker has no reason to flag.

Why it matters to you

You are paying for advertising and for a website on the assumption that you can measure what they are doing. If a meaningful slice of visitors run something that blocks the measurement itself, you are making decisions off an undercount, and you usually will not know by how much. Routing analytics this way closes a real gap between what actually happens on your site and what your reports say happened, without changing anything a visitor sees or does.

How I set it up

I turn this on inside the Cloudflare account that already sits in front of the site, since it depends on traffic already passing through Cloudflare’s network rather than a rented server elsewhere. Once it is configured, Google Analytics is set to load through it rather than as a direct script tag, which is the setup behind the description of loading analytics “through Cloudflare instead of Tag Manager.” A conventional Google Tag Manager container can still sit alongside it for tags that do not need the same protection, but the analytics traffic that matters most for judging advertising gets routed the sturdier way.

Nothing about this changes what Google Analytics collects or how consent settings work. It changes the path the data takes to get there, and whether a blocker along that path ever gets the chance to interfere.

What it looks like in practice

You will not see this feature directly. It runs quietly inside the Cloudflare account, and the only evidence it exists is in the numbers: fewer gaps between what your booking calendar shows and what analytics reports, and a smaller drop in tracked visits than you would expect from the share of browsers now running ad blockers by default. That gap closing is the entire job.