Your website is running. People are visiting. Here’s how to understand what Fathom is telling you — and what to actually do with it.
If you’ve worked with OGAL, your website is connected to Fathom Analytics. Every week you’ll get a simple email summary of how your site is performing, and anytime you want to look deeper, you can log into your dashboard and explore.
This guide walks you through exactly what you’re looking at — in plain English, no jargon. You don’t need a marketing degree to understand your analytics. You just need to know what questions to ask.
Why Fathom and not Google Analytics? Good question. The short answer: Google Analytics is free because Google monetizes your visitors’ data. Fathom is paid software ($14/month) that doesn’t track or sell anyone’s information. It’s also significantly easier to use. I include it on every site I build because I think every website should respect the people visiting it. Read the full explanation here.
The big picture: what you’re measuring
Before getting into the specific numbers, it helps to understand what you’re actually trying to learn from analytics. For most small business websites, there are really only a few questions that matter:
- Are more people finding my website over time?
- Where are they coming from?
- Are they looking at the right pages?
- Are they taking action (calling, contacting, buying)?
Fathom answers all of these. Let’s go section by section.
Visitors and pageviews
At the top of your dashboard you’ll see two numbers front and center: visitors and pageviews.
A visitor is a unique person who came to your website. A pageview is every page they looked at. So one visitor might generate five pageviews if they read your homepage, checked your services page, looked at a couple of case studies, and then found your contact page.
Pageviews being higher than visitors is a good sign — it means people are sticking around and exploring. If they’re roughly equal, most people are landing on one page and leaving.
The number to watch over time is visitors. Is it trending up month over month? Seasonality affects most businesses, so compare the same period year over year rather than just the last 30 days.
The date filter
[Screenshot: date filter dropdown open]
Replace with current screenshot of the date range selector.
Everything in Fathom can be filtered by date. By default you’ll see the last 30 days, but you can change this to any range you want.
A few useful comparisons to run:
- This month vs. last month — basic health check
- This month vs. the same month last year — accounts for seasonal patterns
- The two weeks after you launched something new — did a promotion, blog post, or email campaign actually move the needle?
Top pages
This is one of the most useful sections on the dashboard. It shows you which pages people are actually visiting — and how many.
A few things to look for:
- Is your homepage getting the most traffic? That’s normal and expected. But if a blog post or services page is close behind, that’s a good sign those pages are getting found in search.
- Are people visiting your contact or services pages? Traffic to those pages suggests intent. Someone reading about your services is further along than someone who just landed on your homepage.
- Are any pages getting almost no visits? A page with 3 visitors in 30 days might mean it’s not easy to find, or it’s not relevant enough to attract search traffic. Worth a conversation.
Referrers: where your visitors come from
The referrers section tells you how people found your website. Common sources you’ll see:
- google.com — found you through a search. This is organic search traffic, and growing it is the goal of SEO.
- Direct — typed your URL directly, or came from somewhere Fathom couldn’t identify (like clicking a link in an email). Often includes people who already know you.
- facebook.com, instagram.com, etc. — came from a social media post or link.
- Another website — someone linked to you. This is valuable both for traffic and for SEO.
If Google is your biggest referrer, that’s healthy for most small businesses. If “Direct” dominates everything else, it means most of your traffic already knows you — which is great for existing business but suggests room to grow your discoverability.
Devices
Fathom shows you what percentage of your visitors are on mobile phones, tablets, or desktops. For most local service businesses, mobile is the majority — often 60-70% or more.
This matters because it tells us how important your mobile experience is. If most of your visitors are on their phone and your site is hard to use on mobile, you’re losing people before they ever get a chance to contact you. It’s one of the reasons we build and test every OGAL site for mobile first.
Goals and events
If your site has been set up with goal tracking, this section shows you the actions visitors are taking — things like clicking your phone number, submitting a contact form, or downloading a resource.
This is the closest thing to a direct line between your website and your business results. Traffic tells you people showed up. Goals tell you what they did when they got there.
Not every site has goals configured out of the box — if you’d like to set these up, it’s something we can add to your site. Just ask.
What to actually do with this information
Analytics are only useful if they inform decisions. Here’s a simple way to think about it: check your dashboard once a month, answer these four questions, and flag anything that surprises you.
- Are visitors trending up, flat, or down compared to last month and last year?
- Where is most of my traffic coming from — and is that where I want it coming from?
- Which pages are getting the most attention — and does that match my goals?
- Is anything unexpected showing up — a spike, a drop, a page suddenly getting a lot of traffic?
You don’t need to become a data analyst. You just need to stay curious about your numbers and bring your questions to whoever manages your website. That’s what I’m here for.
Get your weekly report by email. Fathom can send you an automated summary of your site’s performance every week or month — so you stay informed without having to remember to log in. If you’re not receiving these and want to set them up, reach out and I’ll get it configured.
