Fathom Analytics is a simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. It shows you how many people visit your shop, where they come from, and what they do — all on a single, easy-to-read dashboard. Because Fathom doesn't use cookies or collect any personal information about your visitors, there's nothing to consent to: full GDPR compliance out of the box. If Google Analytics feels like more than you need, Fathom is a great way to keep an eye on your shop's performance at a glance.
How to Set It Up
You'll need a Fathom account (it's a paid subscription with a free trial). Once you've signed up, create a site in Fathom for your shop. Fathom will give you a Site ID — a short code of letters and numbers (something like ABCDEFGH). You can find it at any time in your Fathom dashboard under Settings → Sites.
Then, in your shop's Settings, look for the Fathom Site ID field in the Website section. Paste in your Site ID and save — that's it. Fathom will begin tracking visitors and pageviews automatically, and there's no code to install.
Who gets tracked: Fathom only tracks visitors who aren't signed in to your shop. New customers are followed all the way through their first checkout — including their purchase — but once a customer signs in, their activity (like managing a subscription or editing an order) isn't counted. Most analytics tools struggle to represent ongoing subscriptions, so we leave this to the internal platform reporting.
What We Track
Beyond pageviews, we automatically send Fathom a set of events covering the full journey from browsing to purchase. You'll find them in the Events section of your Fathom dashboard, under the same names listed here:
Product: Viewed - Recorded when a visitor views a product detail page.
Cart: Add item - Recorded when a visitor adds a product to their basket or increases the quantity of an item, along with the value of what was added.
Cart: Remove item - Recorded when a visitor removes a product from their basket or decreases the quantity of an item, along with the value of what was removed.
Checkout: Begin - Recorded when a visitor clicks the checkout button from their basket, along with their basket total.
Checkout: Shipping info - Recorded when a visitor completes their account and delivery details.
Checkout: Payment info - Recorded when a visitor clicks the final checkout button, just before they're sent to the Stripe payment page.
Checkout: Purchase - Recorded when a visitor successfully completes an order, along with the order value.
Together, these events give you a complete picture of your customer journey - from first visit through to purchase - so you can see where visitors are dropping off along the way.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Fathom
Set your currency. The checkout events include order values, and Fathom displays these in the currency configured for your site. In your Fathom dashboard, open your site's settings and make sure the currency matches the one your shop trades in.
Measure conversions per visitor. In your Fathom site settings, set the Event conversion formula to Site visitors. Conversion rates for each event are then calculated against the people who visited your shop — rather than raw pageviews — giving you a truer picture of how many shoppers actually add to their basket and check out.
Read the revenue as new-customer revenue. Because Fathom only tracks visitors who aren't signed in, the purchase totals you see reflect first orders from new customers — repeat orders from your existing subscribers aren't included.
Don't expect the numbers to match Google Analytics. If you run both, Fathom's visitor counts will differ from Google's — the two tools measure visits in different ways. That's normal; each is best used for comparing your own numbers over time.