Does Cloudflare Web Analytics track UTM parameters and custom events?

What Cloudflare says

Two answers in the Cloudflare Web Analytics FAQ settle it:

• UTM parameters: “Not yet.” Web Analytics does not log query strings “to avoid collecting potentially sensitive data”, and Cloudflare may add support later.
• Custom events: “Not yet, but we may add support for this in the future.”

The same FAQ says Cloudflare does not support sending your own data straight to the beacon endpoint: “all requests should originate from our beacon JavaScript”. So you cannot post a signup to it yourself.

What it does count

Page views and visits, where a visit is a page view whose referrer is not your own hostname (Cloudflare: High-level metrics), plus page load time and Core Web Vitals. You can filter by country, host, path, referring site, device type, browser, operating system and a bot filter (Cloudflare: Dimensions). Data can be read for the previous six months, per the FAQ.

That is enough to see which pages are read and which sites link to you. It is not enough to tell your newsletter from your Reddit post when both arrive without a referrer, or to count who clicked “Sign up”.

Why tags on a link don’t help here

A UTM tag is part of the address (?utm_source=newsletter). Most of the value of tagging is for exactly the visits whose referrer is missing: email clients, apps, copied links. With query strings dropped, those visits show only a page path and no source.

Workarounds

1. Run a second analytics tool beside it. Any tool that reads UTM values and records named events. Keep Cloudflare for speed data if you like it.
2. Use Cloudflare Zaraz for events. Zaraz has zaraz.track(eventName, properties) for events such as signups and purchases (Cloudflare: Zaraz track). It hands those events to third-party tools you load through Zaraz (Cloudflare Zaraz), so you still need a tool that shows them. Web Analytics itself still has no custom events.
3. Log it yourself in a Worker. If your site runs on Cloudflare, a Worker can read the query string on the first request and write it with Workers Analytics Engine, which has an API to write data points and a SQL API to read them (Cloudflare: Workers Analytics Engine). This is real work: you build the reports.
4. Record the source in your own database at signup. Read the UTM values on the landing page, keep them for the visit, and save them with the new account. This answers “where did my paying users come from” without any analytics tool, but only for people who sign up.
5. Use a separate path per campaign. A landing page at /from-newsletter/ shows up in the Path breakdown. It works, but every campaign needs its own page.

Before you switch

Check what you actually need. If it is “which sites send visitors”, Cloudflare already answers that. If it is “which of my posts, emails or ads led to signups”, you need tags and events, and that means one of the options above.

With Nordva Launch

Launch’s script is one line and reads UTM values and ?ref= on the first page, so a tagged newsletter click counts as that newsletter. A goal is a named action: add data-nordva-goal="signup" to a button, or call nordva('goal', 'signup'), and every goal carries the source of the visit that completed it. It works on the Free plan, next to Cloudflare if you want to keep both. Start free.