Fathom Analytics: Privacy-Focused Website Analytics

Senior Web Developer with experience using React, TypeScript, and Python.

I hope to provide you with the inspiration and knowledge to help you with your web development journey.

The Rise of Privacy

Stop stealing your visitors' personal information. Recently, there has been a growing trend of people starting to take their privacy more serious. They realize that they are being tracked across the entire web of internet. Imagine someone following you all day watching every little thing you do without you knowing. They watch you while you are working, reading, and playing. Tools such as Google Analytics make it easier for you to have more insight on your website but this comes at the expense of invading your user's privacy. Countries are adding laws where website need to be more transparent on their tracking or will be fined. Great news is there are tools that are privacy oriented to help keep your visitors' privacy intact while still collecting valuable metrics.

Introducing Fathom Analytics

I have been using Fathom Analytics (Referral link for $10 off) for my blog and side projects for the past couple months. It has been a great tool to collect metrics without invading my visitors' privacy.

Some great benefits using Fathom:

You don't need to display cookie notices as they do not use cookies, nor track invasive data.

No personal information is collected from my visitors. Privacy is their number one focus.

Ability to use a custom domain for tracking to prevent ad-blockers from blocking the script from loading.

Extremely light-weight script to keep load time minimal.

Add unlimited websites to my account.

Add monitoring for uptime on my websites with multiple forms of notification.

The dashboard is simple and easy to use. It displays everything I need with a clean chart and tables.

Their support has always been quick to respond and always helpful.

They also pledge 2% of their revenues to green initiatives.

Usage

Using Fathom is extremely simple. All you need to do is add a new site in your Fathom settings. This will generate a Site ID and provide you with fathom script to be added to your HTML.

 <script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" site="SITE_ID" defer></script> 

They also have JavaScript package fathom-client to make it easy to add it to your JavaScript Frameworks. I use the client inside my Next.js projects.

Example Use in Next.js:

import { useEffect } from 'react' import { useRouter } from 'next/router' import * as Fathom from 'fathom-client' export default function App({ Component, pageProps }) { const router = useRouter() useEffect(() => { // Initialize Fathom when the app loads Fathom.load('SITE_ID', { includedDomains: ['YOUR_SITE_URL'] }) function onRouteChangeComplete() { Fathom.trackPageview() } // Record a pageview when route changes router.events.on('routeChangeComplete', onRouteChangeComplete) // Unassign event listener return () => { router.events.off('routeChangeComplete', onRouteChangeComplete) } }, []) return <Component {...pageProps} /> }

Be a part of the growing privacy movement

Be a part of the growing movement of improving privacy. I know privacy is important for me. Ditch the invasive tracking tools such as Google Analytics. Switch to something that still gives you metrics awhile still providing privacy. Try Fathom Analytics! (Referral link for $10 off).

Follow me on Twitter for random posts about tech, programming, and working from home.

Fathom Analytics: Privacy-Focused Website Analytics

Comments

More from this blog

How to Focus an Input Field with a Hotkey in React

Why Neovim is My Text Editor of Choice

What is a Design System and Why Is It Important for Software Engineering?

Real-time Page Views with Next.js and Supabase

Create a Dynamic Sitemap with Next.js

The Rise of Privacy

Introducing Fathom Analytics

Usage

Be a part of the growing privacy movement

Command Palette

Comments

More from this blog

The Rise of Privacy

Introducing Fathom Analytics

Usage

Be a part of the growing privacy movement