Fathom Analytics is simple website analytics

Analytics have become complicated. From Google Analytics to other third-party analytics, there are a lot of complicated analytics solutions out there. Each analytics solution provides infinite screens of reports and neverending ways to overwhelm even the savviest website owner. Yet, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Fathom Analytics is a simple website analytics solution that delivers clear and concise data. It doesn’t invade your privacy but prides itself on an easy user experience with all the metrics you need in a simple dashboard.

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Why choose Fathom Analytics?

Fathom Analytics has always had 2 goals, which run in parallel

  1. Focus on privacy. We do this by anonymizing visitor data and being GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant. We’re the best privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative. (Plus, no need for GDPR/cookie banners on your website!).
  2. Be very simple analytics for our users to get the data they need from a beautiful single dashboard powered by scalable tech.

In the past, website analytics tools gave you pages and pages of reports to sift through to get the data you needed to make business decisions with metrics that you may need a data scientist to understand. Some even required complicated training, certification, or hiring experts to better analyze the data.

Fathom Analytics has changed all of this. We are the first website analytics company to be both simple to use & completely privacy-focused

What are website analytics?

Website analytics is the process of looking at how visitors find your website, and then behave once on it. There are numerous ways this is done, but most (like Fathom) use a small javascript file which sends data to website analytics software.

The reason website analytics are important is because they can help website owners make better informed decisions about their website. By using simple website analytics, a business or website owner can see what content is doing well, what referrers are sending them the most traffic and even look at how well specific events are working to make adjustments and generate more traffic to their websites.

Fathom Analytics is the antithesis of Google Analytics and most enterprise website analytics tools.

Google Analytics is free because they’re an advertising company who uses personal data to target people with advertising, while Fathom Analytics sells software (so we don’t need to sell data, plus we can’t, since we don’t collect any personal data).

Why not use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is both free and popular. According to research, more than 85% of all websites use Google Analytics as their website analytics tool. While free and popular can be a great trade-off, there are definitely downsides.

  • Google Analytics tracks and stores personal information about your website visitors. That data can then be used for advertising, or even subpoenaed by lawyers and used in civil cases.
  • It’s not simple to get the information you need out of Google Analytics and not simple to find anything relevant. Their software is busy, generating reports after reports that make it feel like you’d need a full-time job to use it properly (in fact, there are many people who make a living as Google Analytics experts).
  • Many users of Google Analytics are forced to learn how to and then create their own custom reports to get the information they need.
  • Google Analytics is overkill for most businesses. Our goal with Fathom Analytics has always been to provide only the data needed to make important decisions. All personal data about visitors remains completely uncollected.
  • Google Analytics is sunsetting their current version and forcing users to move to GA4 which requires setup and know-how to get the information you need out of it. It’s also a whole new tracking model, which is the complete opposite of simple analytics.

Fathom Analytics is simple website analytics

Fathom Analytics is simple website analytics software because we only show important metrics on our dashboard. There are not 125 pages of reports with hundreds of metrics that you need to understand. There is a single page with the data you need to help your website or business track the website analytics that matter.

Fathom Analytics was the first website analytics tool to show all the information you’d need on a single page in a dashboard. Instead of tracking everything, our software tracks the data you’d need to make business decisions, and keeps the privacy of your website visitors intact.

Fathom’s simple analytics dashboard includes

  • Right beside your site name, you’ll see the number of live visitors. That shows you who is on your site right now. If you click it, you’ll see what pages they’re on and what referrer they came from.
  • The top section of the dashboard shows you the most important overall stats including how many people have visited your site, how long they’ve spent there, bounce rates and events completed, which you can easily click on/off to layer into your data.
  • Choose the date range you’d like to analyze, in the top right. There’s a graph that will update and show you the number of unique and total page views for that time period.
  • Below the graph, you’ll see a column for top content and a column for top referrers. These are by far the most important pieces of data a website analytics tool can provide, because it shows what’s popular and why it’s popular.
  • Below that, there are columns for devices, browsers and countries to give you an idea of where your visitors are coming from and what they’re using to view your site.
  • Finally, you can see a list of custom events and how well they’re converting. You can create goals to track things like product sales, newsletter signups or even external links clicked.
  • We have a simple UTM builder to create and track any campaign you want.
  • Outside this dashboard, we send out email reports. We want you to spend less time looking at your analytics and more time on your website or business. These email reports can go to the account owner but also to anyone else you want to give access to (on a site by site basis).
  • We have a powerful API, available to our customers.

With Fathom Analytics, you get everything you need quickly, so you can learn from the data and get back to the important parts of running your website and growing your business - all within a single dashboard.

Read more about Fathom in our dashboard explainer or take a walkthrough of our dashboard via a short video.

Import your Google Analytics data

Google will stop supporting UA (Universal Analytics) properties in Google Analytics by the end of 2023. They'll stop processing pageviews on July 1, 2023, and soon after, they’ll be deleting all of your historical data. And note there is no way to import UA data in their new GA4 product.

This means if you want to keep your historical data from Universal Analytics, you've got to save it somehow. That's why we offer a GA importer to all our customers, where you can import your data from Google Analytics into Fathom Analytics (at no extra cost).

The best part is this: Fathom Analytics has infinite data retention: meaning we do not ever delete your data and it will keep loading on your dashboard for as long as you're a customer.

Fathom Analytics is a great GA alternative because it is focused on protecting visitors’ privacy and does not bog down loading times.

Nathalie Lussier Nathalie Lussier
Founder of AccessAlly.com

I value my time and my website visitors’ right to digital privacy. That’s why I’ve switched to Fathom Analytics.

Marshall Shorts Marshall Shorts
Founder of Artfluential

Privacy-protections aside, I love the beautifully simple interface. Fathom Analytics is now part of my default stack.

Derrick Reimer Derrick Reimer
Founder of SavvyCal

Fathom is simple analytics in other ways as well

Fathom Analytics is simple from the start. Our user friendly analytics dashboard shows you everything you need, but our core is simple analytics so we ensure your website is privacy focused, fast, and forward thinking.

By using Fathom Analytics, you’re supporting independent software development, and not lining the pockets of rich investors or CEOs who remove “don’t be evil” from their company’s mission statement.

“I feel like more and more folks will start moving towards simpler tools, especially because of the increase in the value of privacy and users having a more technical understanding of their favorite products/sites they use” Shaan

“I'm pretty sure 90% of people only need to know about page views, referrers, and a simple geographical/device breakdown. Fathom shows all of that. And, it supports events, too.” Alexey

Fathom Analytics is a simple privacy-focused web analytics solution for your website visitors that remains fully GDPR, PECR and CCPA compliant.

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Compare Cloudflare web analytics to Fathom Analytics

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Fathom Analytics: GDPR, CCPA and cookie law compliant website analytics

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Fathom: website analytics for European companies

Fathom Analytics was built from the ground up to be fully compliant with privacy laws in Europe. And, since we have intelligent routing, our script loads up to 50% faster than EU-only infrastructure.

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Fathom: website analytics software for agencies

Fathom Analytics is a simple-to-use, privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative created with agencies in mind. And as an agency, you can add up to 50 client dashboards (if you need more, you can quickly add more for a small additional fee).

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Fathom: a website analytic tool for creators

We understand independent creators because we belong to that group as well. Fathom Analytics was started by two creators (we're: course makers, book writers, podcasters and musicians).

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Fathom Analytics is simple website analytics

Analytics have become complicated. From Google Analytics to other third-party analytics, there are a lot of complicated analytics solutions out there. Each analytics solution provides infinite screens of reports and never-ending ways to overwhelm even the savviest website owner. Yet, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Learn more

Fathom: a privacy focused Google Analytics alternative

By using Google Analytics, website owners are allowing Google (the largest advertising company on the planet) to track and store information about every website visitor to their website. To avoid this, learn why Fathom is a great Google Analytics alternative.

Learn more

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Switch to a better Google Analytics alternative

Fathom Analytics is simpler, more accurate and privacy-first. Import your Google Analytics data (UA and GA4), add our single line of code, and watch real-time analytics from your site pour in.

Start a 30-day, unlimited free trial to see how simple analytics can be.

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