Remove https:// or http:// from the URL when filtering by referrer or domain
Introduced Direct / Unknown to Referrers box (Finally! It took a while as we had old data to account for. Remember, Fathom has been on the scene for many years)
Domain Stats fix (for multi-domain websites)
Deprecated pathname_raw in data export (we don't use this anywhere else). We will delete this in July as it's from the past.
An absolute TON of work on our Google Analytics Importer (coming this month)
Unfortunately, custom domains are no longer offered. Please allow us to be fully transparent about why we've removed this feature:
Custom domains were always our best guess at how we could bypass ad-blockers... whose sole intent was to block us (even though we're privacy focused too). Meaning: we could (and repeatedly did) spend 100s of development hours on adjusting how we bypass ad-blockers, only to be blocked later on by a single line of code on their part. Those 100s of hours meant no new features could be worked on for Fathom, which is what we really want to be doing.
Currently, custom domains are blocked by uBlock and a few others, meaning they don't work the way they should. And none of us at Fathom want to offer a feature that doesn't work as it should to our customers—that's not the sort of business we're interested in running.
If you’re already using a custom domain, it’ll continue to work, but no information about it will appear on your script settings. But visitor data will continue to flow into Fathom without interruption or stoppage for as long as you use it.
Finally, we're currently working on something entirely different to allow you to bypass ad-blockers and make it look like our script isn't a third-party script. We'll be sure to let you know when it's available. More on this once we get some features out the door to customers like you have been asking us to build. :)
Other updates/fixes/improvements
Introduced blocked pages and the Firewall section of site settings, allowing you to block pages, countries, IPs and allow domains.
Pushed various bug fixes, tweaks to make Fathom incrementally better.
Moved allowed domains, blocked countries and blocked IPs to ingest our end. We used to handle this in the network firewall, where we'd return a 403, but this confused people.
Fix a pagination bug where we only ordered by the aggregation. We needed to order by the aggregate and then some kind of A-Z value
Continued work on our Google Analytics importer
Dashboard CSS & font upgrades (they're beautiful)
Show 0 on email reports instead of "-" when there's been no increase
Big improvements to difference labels in the totals box
Added UTC data to our demo to show off what Fathom can do
Uptime monitoring improvements
New currency: Vietnamese dong
Improved site picker search
You can now add a LIKE filter (search filter) to your events box (well, the whole dashboard)
Extended trial length from 7 days to 30 days. This is important because people need more time to play with analytics and see how much better Fathom is than their current solution ;)
Reverted Base64 changes in script.js
Add easier way to copy API key
Improvements to how we deploy & serve our script.js (and historical) JavaScript files. We removed some rules from our CDN so performance will be even faster now too.
Cal.com created a Fathom Analytics app (to collect data from your scheduling link on Cal.com)
You can now search your sites from the dropdown on your dashboard. For those of you with lots of sites, there’s also now pagination in that dropdown.
The chart now shows a dotted line when the data is incomplete (i.e. you’re looking at today and there’s 12 hours left in the day). That way you can better see if there’s a drop in stats vs just incomplete stats.
Upgrade to goals box, allowing easier creation of goals and customization of currency
Gorgeous new tab interface for editing sites
Fixed a bug where multiple requests would sometimes fire on dashboard despite some boxes not being ready (you won't notice this one but it improves speed!)
Added ability to inject non-numeric Site ID into the ?site query string parameter on the dashboard. Useful for folks that are using our API
Upgraded the search feature in the dashboard boxes. You can now search for a value and we will filter all boxes, not just the box you search in. This has also been added to the API as IS LIKE and IS NOT LIKE
Launched gigantic codebase refactor which included all of our technical debt fixes. A huge technical achievement that most customers won't notice, but it lays the groundwork for essential development over the next few years
Worked on paying down some technical debt throughout the codebase
The Austrian DPA declared that Google Analytics is illegal, so we spent a few weeks responding to that, and dealing with a flood of new customers. We are the only analytics company on the market who offers EU Isolation without slowing down your website for US visitors, so everyone was choosing Fathom. We took the Schrems II ruling seriously back in 2020, worked hard to implement something in response to it, and our work was rewarded.
Allow Site ID to be set dynamically via fathom.setSite('SITEID') in our JavaScript file
We now offer you dedicated CDN endpoints, allowing you to block yourself, allow certain domains, and also have rapid performance around the globe. This is a huge innovation and we're so proud to have launched it
Moved our background queue back to serverless environment (so much better for us)
Launched a brand new affiliates page, with much more detail
Added error messages to our analytics API to help with development (sorry it took so long, early access folks)
Fixed bounce rate colour (🇬🇧) in emails. Again, sorry this one took so long, it's been on the list for a while
Brand new error pages, which we hope you never see
We completely migrated our ingest point to a new CDN provider. Previously, our script.js file was served globally, but the actual ingest was in the US, meaning it was slower for folks who weren't in the US. Well now our ingest point (pageview/event collector) is globally available, meaning your TTFB (nerd term, sorry) will be much lower, and you can let the local edge perform the slower request using their enterprise network. Long story short, everything is faster and more distributed. Watch this space, because we're about to launch something even more incredible.
Fixes to dashboard boxes on mobile
Deprecated user agent from being read on the client of the script.js file (ePrivacy Directive requirement)
Launched EU Isolation. A gigantic innovation in the privacy-first analytics space.
Changed terminology and added tooltips to all table headers on the dashboard.
Fixed filtering of blanks to factor in NULL values
Moved away from using updates in our pageview ingest queries, making it super scalable (it's now append only). Non-technical customers won't fully understand this but it was a HUGE upgrade for us, and ensures we can continue to scal
Dropped Redis caching and moved to a faster cache database
Fixed remember me not remembering you (sorry about that folks!)
Improved queue speed to ensure even faster real time data
Huge optimizations to current visitors performance, making it much faster for folks who don't have the box expanded. Win for users, as it means we don't load extra data that they're not needing, and it's a win for our database CPU ;)
Fixed dashboard issue where the pagination icons wouldn't change as you went between sites
Launched multi-tennant analytics BETA, meaning you can have a single site dashboard for hundreds of thousands of unique site names.
Fixed client side versioning so that it's automatic, not manual, when we deploy (huge for us, users won't notice)
Implemented profanity checker for Site ID random generator (long story)
Changed "today" comparison to compare with the previous day up to the current hour
We no longer observe replaceState in our javascript file, as it was causing problems for lots of frameworks.
BIG database migration. We now have the fastest website analytics in the game. Seriously, test our dashboard against others. Throw hundreds of millions of pageviews at us, and our dashboard will still be rapid!
Added custom social sharing graphics to public dashboards. So if you share your public dashboard on Twitter, a gorgeous graphic with your site name is used
Big refactor to the way we collect pageviews. We've been growing fast, and we've modified things to be able to handle even more pageviews. This was phase one, and the gain has been huge, but phase two is going to be the biggest leap we've ever made. Keep an eye on our Twitter & changelog, as we'll surely share more when it happens
Fix bug where boxes would flash (and reload) two times
Added locking at visitor level. Long story short, if someone was refreshing a page really fast, it could cause issues. Very rare edge case but we wanted to add in "locking" (or reserving) to improve the accuracy of your analytics
Added link back to dashboard on settings page
Fixed some dark mode color issues
Fixed legend on graph
Made it more obvious that the UTM box is... the UTM box ;)
We've redirected all V3 early access links to the main Fathom application. So if you've shared any dashboards with your clients using veethree.usefathom.com, don't worry, we've got your back!
All sites view has draggable sites again
Ditched Redis, and moved to using DynamoDB (follow @JackEllis on Twitter if you're wanting to follow our data journey, as we're very public about our work)
Chart updates from "Tiny Wings" style to a straight one
Added iOS icon (if you save your dashboard to your homescreen)
# of currents switches to # of filters when filtering
You now have an "All Sites" option in your site selector. This page lets you view all of your sites at once, change the reporting periods, and monitor current visitors
Previously, "Last 7 days" would show a breakdown by hour. We've changed it so anything that's 2+ days will group by day. You can drag & zoom in if you want to see an hourly breakdown
You can now plot Avg time on site, Bounce rate and Event completions on the graph. This is really useful to see performance over time (e.g. is my bounce rate improving on my registration page? Are my event completions on the rise? etc.). To plot these, simply click the metric in the top, black box
You can now click the figures in the totals box to switch from absolute increase mode (e.g. pageviews +10 since last period) to percentage change mode (e.g. pageviews +10% since last period)
The whole left column is now clickable to filter. Previously you had to click the text to filter
Fixes to current visitors to ensure correct use of grid system
When there are no events, we now hide "Events completions" from the top black box
Added event completions to the All Sites view
Added delta (increase or decrease) to All Sites view
Added Y axis to All Sites view
Added pagination to child rows (paths) of Referrers
Various other bug fixes & implementing customer feedback
Version 3 has entered early access. We are still finishing off various new features but we've deployed the new dashboard. Everyone can get involved. Here are the details.
After many months and hundreds of hours of work, we have migrated to a new analytics database. It's much faster and is better suited to scale as we land bigger customers. It will also enable us to run more flexible queries, which we need for V3 (UTM drill-down, page drill-down, referrer drill-down, etc.). Exhilarating times.
We've been working hard on Version 3 throughout December & January. It's coming along nicely, and we know it's going to blow your mind when we launch it. We managed to launch our new privacy law compliance section, which has gone down really well.
Most of this month, we were dealing with a malicious DDoS attack. In response, we worked with security experts to help protect our infrastructure from future attacks.
Built admin functionality for clearing spam traffic
Moved current visitors from MySQL to DynamoDB to ensure faster performance
Fixd "Not a number" error on brand new events
We received expert guidance on configuring our firewall to protect our application from DDoS attacks
Switched previous range from using -1 month to using the actual previous date range
Optimizations to event tracking
Deployed some basic spam protection
Made significant progress on one of our secret projects
Launched Phantom Analzyer - a simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Tidied up some technical debt. Specficially, we removed some excess deprecated to improve page speed.
We removed support for ?utm_source and ?ref temporarily. We never actually announced this but we were breaking out the ?ref and placing it in referrers. The downside is that you then lose the referrer value. So our recommendation, for those who noticed the experiment, is to just keep ?ref in place. We'll be "pulling it out" when we move to Version 3!
Started denormalizing hundreds of millions of stat entries ahead of our move to Elasticsearch
We now hide the events box on your shared dashboards if you don't have any events set-up
Speaking of shared dashboards, you can now hide the purple promotional banner. If you hide it, you don't get the chance to earn 25% comission on people you refer, but some people are fine with that.
You can now configure invoices to go to multiple people, not just your account email. This is great if you have an accountant or boss who needs the invoices.
Fixed an issue where Current Visitors would fire, continuously, when Fathom has logged you out. You wouldn't have noticed this, but we did, so we now redirect you to the login page once you lose your session.
Improvements to database indexing, speeding up current visitors queries etc.
Limit current visitors to 150 pages as some customers were seeing thousands of entries (first world problem!)
Improved speed of data aggregation
Added total pageviews on hover. So if you see 1.1k in one of your rows, hover over it to see the actual figure
Added extra security to outbound links (noopener)
We now have a YouTube channel. But we only have one to reach an audience that is already using it. For others, we built a privacy-focused shield page that requires your consent before you visit YouTube. Radical? Perhaps. But we like it.
We wrote a ton of automation for various things to free up development time. This doesn't affect you (or excite you) in the slightest, I'm sure, but it's a win because it allows us to spend more time building Fathom
Our Fathom cats are now fully custom, and fully owned by us. Thanks Natalie @ SaltFlat Studios!
We now grab the visitor country from the IP. Previously we used the timezone to establish it. We use a locally hosted database to match the IP to country and we never send the IP to a third party service.
Tidied the sites table up as it was getting out of control with all the new features we've been adding
Added additional configuration for uptime monitoring. You can now customize the Check Interval and Notify After setting
Deployed a gorgeous refactor to our aggregator. This will mean nothing to you, unless you're nerdy like us, but we moved our thread locks from MySQL to DynamoDB
Removed that external image from emails we send you. Our logo now comes as an attachment instead
Added the data export feature back but with so many improvements. Most people didn't care about this feature, since they have no plans to leave Fathom, but we needed to get this back online
Fixed a dashboard problem that would log you out if you clicked from another site / email
We had our application reported as malware. We quickly contacted all relevant tools that were reporting us as malware and got them to remove us from their blacklists. We've added real time SSL monitoring and this won't happen again.
You can now become an affiliate of Fathom Analytics without having a paid subscription to our software. Sign up as an affiliate (for free) and start earning money by referring folks to Fathom Analytics.
Updated logout to be current device only, not all devices
Improved "Update credit card" process for failed payments
Introduced affiliate role, allowing people to register as affiliates without opening an account
Added remember user's preference for current visitors box
New dashboard with several new features, including: event tracking, live visitor details, weekly email reports, dashboard sharing, and under-the-hood speed improvements.
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