What is Fathom Analytics?

Fathom Analytics is an independent, simple analytics platform that is privacy focussed, designed as an alternative to more invasive tools like Google Analytics. It offers a straightforward and user-friendly interface while ensuring compliance with privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. Fathom positions itself as a solution for users who want actionable insights without compromising visitor privacy or requiring cookie consent banners.

Linkly uses Fathom for its marketing analytics. We see Fathom as a natural extension of our platform. Linkly is privacy sensitive, and adopts similar policies with respect to IP addresses and user privacy.

What I love about Fathom

It’s beautiful, modern, and fast. Its immediacy and minimalism are captivating, as is the overall aesthetic, that harks back to linux terminal days, but with fonts you’d expect to see on a Mac.

The user interface is thoughtfully designed, with a view on exposing the most important metrics up-front, and allowing you to ‘drill-down’ by clicking. It’s certainly nice to see a ‘design-led’ product.

It’s probably the best example of ‘opinionated’ software I’ve ever seen. The founders are front-and-center, which is nice to see, and while I am quite sure they are making a small fortune

Where Fathom Falls Short

Some of the issues with Fathom I’ve encountered:

• It can be too simple, especially for e-commerce focussed businesses. It’s difficult to visualise the flow of users through a website.
• It doesn’t seem to track hostname (or at least, you can’t filter by it), which is problematic when you have the script across multiple subdomains/domains.
• Because of its heavy privacy focus; you know it will never end up being at feature parity with a product like Google Analytics (which may be a good thing for some users).
• One similar site, Plausible Analytics, can ingest Google Search Console data, which is an interesting twist, and I can't see Fathom doing that.

Interested in giving Fathom Analytics a go? Use Linkly's affiliate link, get a 30 day free trial, and save $10 if you sign up.

Looking for tracking links and a custom URL shortener? Try out Linkly.