Fathom Analytics vs Google Analytics

Fathom is an incredibly light-weight and privacy-focused website analytics alternative to Google Analytics (GA4).

As someone that has had Google Analytics as their go-to for over a decade (was a web developer in my past life), I've completely stopped checking GA and have moved to only using Fathom.

Google Analytics has just been this heavy anchor that was dragging us down... Worked so hard to get these PageSpeed numbers up (we use Webflow), so why should I let Google Analytics drag them right back down?

Finally surpassed 90% performance after ditching GA in favor of Fathom

Fathom gives you front-and-center the most important data in a beautiful UI/UX. As compared to Google Analytics (GA4), which is not only incredibly heavy, but also feature overload—making the most important features for some reason hidden behind layers of complexity.

With Google Analytics recent deprecation of UA (and all of your historical data with it), Fathom has gone ahead and built an incredible import from Google Analytics tool (works on UA & GA4 data):

Fathom Analytics import from Google Analytics tool

Simply click a button to authenticate into Google Analytics, and within 30 seconds, all of your historical website data is in Fathom. It's insane how well build this thing is. Just want a specific date range? Easy. Make a mistake? Press delete and you're back where you were.

Fathom should spin off a data importing company because this is one of the slickest importer tools we've ever used 🤯

With all of this, if you're using a privacy-focused analytics tool like Fathom, no longer do you need that annoying cookie tracking banner to be GDPR compliant. Just throw on Fathom and you're all set!

Fathom also has basic uptime monitoring features for the sites you have Fathom enabled for. It'll send you an email, Slack, and/or Telegram message when your site is down and when it's back up.

As someone that has been in the web development, SEO, and SEM area for over a decade now, I've had my fair share of experiences with Google Analytics.

The biggest benefit of Google Analytics is that it's free. But with that, it's because they are benefiting more from your website analytics than they would be otherwise.

They've been the go-to for over a decade now, but finally people seem to be pushing back on "being the product". That's where privacy-focused website analytics tools like Fathom Analytics have been gaining popularity of lately.

What's more is with all of this data collection that Google does, the scripts you put on your site are quite heavy (which will impact page speed and overall performance). To the extent that Google themselves don't even use Google Analytics because it would hurt performance so heavily.

The only reason we might still recommend Google Analytics would be because you rely heavily on SEM (Google Ads) and you want Google to have all of your conversion tracking data to hopefully improve Ad performance.

That said, we know many people that use a tool like Fathom alongside Google Ads no problem.

If you're using Google Analytics UA, you will have seen this banner popping up the past month:

Google UA has officially shut down

Which is the final nail in the coffin for us (but maybe not for the reason you're thinking). So why then? We couldn't even migrate the historical UA data from the past decade to GA4—genuinely wtf Google?

While some think that it might be because Google was ordered to delete all of this data by the European government as it was completely breaking GDPR (and was technically determined as illegal), the piece that doesn't make total sense is that tools like Fathom have an amazing Google Analytics UA and GA4 importer tool which allows you to pull that data out with a click of a button.

This is quite serious... All of this has resulted in Google having to actually shut down Google Analytics Universal Analytics (UA) to replace it with a more barebones and confusing GA4 version just so they were no longer breaking privacy laws. That's right, Google Analytics UA was not GDPR compliant 🤯

The thing is, GA4 is incredibly confusing to set up, and is incredibly confusing to navigate the data, and it won't have any of your historical UA data. Not to mention your current and future data is not even stored indefinitely, Google can delete it whenever they want—you're not paying for it.

And that's why we've switched to Fathom Analytics from Google Analytics 4 years ago and haven't looked back ever since!