There are many Website Analytics tools available in the market, ranging from free to paid, and Fathom Analytics is one of them.
Marketers and website owners always want to know how many people visit their website and the details about them. Although the actual need is very limited for most of us, the current analytics tools provide countless reporting screens and can be overwhelming.
If you are looking for an alternative to the complexity of Google Analytics, read on in this post.
1. Why use Fathom Analytics?
Begin, let’s find out what Fathom Analytics is?
Fathom Analytics is a simple web analytics solution that provides clear data, an easy-to-understand interface and is easy to use. It displays only the metrics that matter in a single dashboard.
Two reasons you might consider using Fathom Analytics:
The first is simple and easy to use
Without the cumbersome and complex data layers of Google Analytics, Fathom focuses on simplicity. They allow you to analyze your traffic quickly and easily.
The metrics I care about most including visits, time on page, event completions are all displayed above the fold.
Right below the summary information, I can easily see the most viewed pages and referring sources.
Fathom also cleverly gives the background color corresponding to the number from high to low for visualization. For me, this is a plus.
Next, the data event and UTMs are clearly displayed. This is useful for measurement, making it easy for me to see meaningful user actions on the website and the performance of campaigns.
I don’t have a lot of time to wade through multiple pages of fragmented reports in Google Analytics to see the data I need, so Fathom’s simple dashboard is what I look for when analyzing my site.
The Second is efficiency.
Fathom’s website embedded tracker script is super lightweight (1.6 KB) and loads extremely fast, without slowing down the website, which is good for user experience and SEO.
The reason Fathom can make your site faster is because you don’t need to load, display, and store cookie notifications (which can require additional JavaScript and more).
Meanwhile, Google Analytics adds 17.7 KB of page weight per page load, which is many times more than Fathom.
For websites that use additional analytics tools like Hotjar, Mixpanel, the difference may not be as significant.
But I’m a performance guy, I’ll keep things minimal for the best user experience. Nowadays, no one waits more than 10 seconds to access a website.
2. How to install and use Fathom Analytics
Setting up Fathom Analytics is simple. Once you’ve signed up for an account, all you need to do is add a single line of code to the Head of your website (where “ABCDEFGH” is your actual site ID):
<script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" data-site="ABCDEFGH" defer></script>
If you use WordPress like me, you can install Fathom via a plugin developed by them.
In case you do not want Fathom to record your visit, do not check this box. Track Administrators (WordPress administrators will access their site with a logged in status).
To view the report directly in your WordPress dashboard, you need to enter your password. Fathom Share Password and check in Display Analytics Menu Item. You can set a password in Fathom Site sharing settings area.
Fathom Analytics is much easier to use than Google Analytics because their data focuses on key metrics that make it easy for you to make informed business decisions about your website and marketing campaigns.
Fathom’s dashboard is a page that contains valuable data about what’s popular on your site: number of visitors, popular content, referral sources, conversions, campaign performance, and devices.
You can also see how many people are currently visiting your site in real time and which pages they are staying on.
Fathom’s dashboard filters let you drill down into reports by clicking on any data.
It is important that all the data is displayed on a single page and does not force you to redirect.
3. Who is Fathom Analytics not for?
I’m not sure if Fathom Analytics will be right for you because it depends on your needs.
If you are one of the following, Fathom Analytics is probably not for you:
- You need more advanced features similar to Google Analytics.
- You are not making money or have no intention of making money from your site. Fathom is a paid service, if your site is not making money, you will not be able to use Fathom long term.
- You don’t value paying for software and want to use it for free.
In short, if you are looking for an analytics tool that focuses on simplicity and delivers better website performance, you might consider giving Fathom Analytics a try.
In fact, Fathom Analytics has always had two goals running in parallel, focusing on privacy and simple analytics. However, the protection of website visitors’ privacy in Vietnam is not as strict as in Europe, so I have limited this information in the post.
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