Breaking up with Google Analytics

Not since New Coke was introduced in 1985 has a product update flopped as badly as Google Analytics update from Universal Analytics to GA4. We might be overstating that a tad bit but, as an agency that used Google Analytics every single day for a variety of reasons, the update felt that bad to us.

The update was extremely clunky, massively unintuitive, and it’s made things that used to be easily accessible require a ton of custom reporting. Paid social performance reporting has always been a struggle (and continues to be), our old dashboards are gone, and you pretty much need to be a developer to work your way around the bloated backend. Which is fine for developers but, a huge problem for marketers and small business owners.

We set up and look at analytics for all of our clients, and for the majority of them, it’s very important. Being able to quickly analyze the data and adjust is such a big part of a winning marketing strategy. We needed a new solution.

Using Fathom Analytics

Fathom Analytics is a GA alternative that’s simple and privacy focused. We’ll dive into the simplicity first.

Easy to use

When you sign up for Fathom, they provide you with a single line of code that works with every website, CMS, and framework that our clients use. It takes literally a few minutes for us to run the script and get real-time-data flowing into our Fathom dashboard.

Freakin’ awesome.

Privacy-first

Fathom is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy and PECR, giving us essential insights into our client’s web traffic sources without compromising privacy.

It also anonymizes IP addresses and other visitor data without using cookies. Which as designers, we absolutely love. No messy cookie consent banners or notices about tracking.

Hell to the yeah.

Accurate data

We’ve had a lot of trouble in the past with matching data provided by Google Analytics and other platforms (ahem, Meta). The accuracy from Fathom has been much better. Their real-time analytics blocks bots, scrapers, and spam traffic, and it does it really well. When we present to our clients, we’re confident in the data we’ve collected with Fathom.

Own your sh*t

Another moment in 2024 that made my blood boil was learning that Google Analytics is gearing up to delete historical data.

Google announced it would be turning off all Universal Analytics services on July 1, 2024. Which means that after that date, we won’t be able to use or even see our UA data. We wouldn’t even be able to export it at that point.

We’re ahead of this at Something Great, and we’re going to be fine. But that’s not true for everyone.

The simple truth is that many people are going to get screwed over by this.

Again, Fathom to the rescue. If you need to save your Universal Analytics data, it’s really easy to import it into Fathom. They have something called forever data retention, which, as you can guess, means they’ll never delete your data.

That shouldn’t be so much to ask, but here we are.

At least Fathom is looking out for us.

Also good to know

You can track ecommerce data, events like newsletter sign-ups and lead form fills, receive email reports with weekly or monthly traffic updates, and one account comes with a lot of sites. Their $15/month plan comes with 50 websites. Perfect for agencies like ours.

They have a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot if you’re in need of a Google Analytics Alternative.

And if you need a hand with strategizing or setting up your next marketing campaign, book a meeting with us. Talk soon.