---
title: Alternatives to Google Analytics
date: 2021-03-30T05:00:00-04:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-8/alternatives-to-google-analytics/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Angie Herrera
Angie Herrera is a UI designer & front-end developer from Portland, OR with nearly 20 years experience in branding & web design.
[ ](https://twitter.com/angieherrera)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/angieherrera/)[ ](https://facebook.com/block81PDX)
Season 04 Episode 8 – Mar 30, 2021
32:53 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Alternatives to Google Analytics
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[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-04/so4-e08-alternatives-to-google-analytics.mp3)
Returning guest Angie Herrara discusses alternatives to google analytics for tracking website visitors. We discuss Fathom Analytics and Stat Counter.
### Show Notes
Reasons to consider using an alternative to google analytics include concerns about privacy and a simpler, easier to understand interface.
- Google is very complex and difficult to understand
- Fathom Analytics is privacy oriented
- Fathom and Stat Counter have a simpler easy to understand interface
- Things that you want to understand and know how to track with whichever analytics you use
- If it's free (google analytics) then you are the product
### Show Links
- [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/)
- [Company of One](https://www.amazon.ca/Company-One-Staying-Small-Business/dp/1328972356)
- [Use Fathom](https://usefathom.com/)
- [How Fathom tracks without cookies](https://usefathom.com/data)
- [Stat Counter](https://statcounter.com/)
- [Hot Jar](https://www.hotjar.com/)
- [Crazy Egg](https://www.crazyegg.com/)
- [Full Story](https://www.fullstory.com/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi and welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith your co-host and as always I'm here with Mike Mella. Hey Sean, how's it going? Pretty good and today we have a returning guest friend of the show Angie Herrera and she's going to be talking to us about Google Analytics and alternatives to that. Angie, how are you doing? Hey guys, good, how are you?
**\[00:27\]** **Mike:** Welcome back. Thanks. This is my first time, last time you're on the show, it was just Sean, so this is my first time speaking with you, and it's really cool.
**\[00:34\]** **Sean:** Yeah, way back in season two, I think you were the episode before Mike came on as co-host. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. That's right. So today, we're gonna talk about analytics, and the big elephant in the room is gonna be Google Analytics. Everybody knows about it, everybody uses it, And Angie had an interesting tweet a few months ago, which I approached her afterwards about coming on the show. She posted a link to, I believe it was a link to an article that she wrote on her blog about why she was switching to fathom. Angie, would you like to go on,
**\[01:17\]** **Angie:** tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so yeah, it was an article that I wrote on my blog in May of last year. And previous to that, it, it, it had occurred to me that maybe I should, you know, just look at Google Analytics a little more deeply and, you know, I had heard about how it's not great for privacy and all that stuff. So I decided to take a deeper look because actually I had, I had finished reading a book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis.
And Paul Jarvis is one of the owners, co-founders of the Fathom, and so I decided to take a look at it, and I really liked it, and so I went for a trial, it gives you like a seven-day free trial, and I really liked it. The analytics are super simple, and privacy is a big, big thing, so yeah, I decided to make the switch.
**\[02:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so with analytics, there's a few different issues that you could argue are a problem with Google Analytics. One being, it's just so complicated, a lot of people have no idea what they're looking at, and they can't really make meaningful decisions based on that. And another is the privacy issue where it has a tracking system in there that, I mean, it doesn't track individual people sort of thing, but there's a certain amount of things that it does track about people, and it's now, I think that is included as part of the, what is it, GDPR thing in Europe, right?
**\[02:48\]** **Angie:** Yeah.
**\[02:49\]** **Mike:** If you have analytics, Google Analytics running, you have to include that as one of your things that you're notifying, your visitors that, oh, by the way, we're tracking you in a sense sort of thing, right?
**\[03:00\]** **Angie:** Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, you hit on the two big points that for me, made me switch. Privacy was, I mean, I'd say they're equal, but privacy was a big one that, um, because I try to use Google stuff as little as possible. As a web developer, I find I can't get 100% away from it, just because other people use it and everything. But
and then the other part of it was just how crazy detailed you can get in Google Analytics, which is awesome if you know how to read through all that. And I personally, I just don't have the time. And my clients generally go with Google Analytics, not that they necessarily know how to go through it and all that, but it's free. That's like their biggest thing.
But, you know, it's like, there's this thing that says, if you're not paying for a product, you are the product. And that's like Google's... Absolutely. I call it Google's an official motto, even though they've never said it. So, yeah, so that was a big one for me because I just, I would spend, you know, minutes hours looking at my analytics in Google and I'd be like, I have no idea what I'm looking at and I don't know how to use this. All I, all, what ended up happening was I was just looking at, you know, what pages were the most popular, how long people were staying on the site. So all the thing, all the basic things that I didn't need Google Analytics for.
So I switched to Fathom and it, it's been, it's been exactly what I need.
So I went for a trial, it gives you like a seven-day free trial, and I really liked it. The analytics are super simple, and privacy is a big, big thing, so yeah, I decided to make the switch.
**\[04:30\]** **Sean:** Actually, for myself, I switched for a lot of the same reasons, but for me, the bigger one was I find Google Analytics incomprehensible and confusing, just it's a behemoth, and it's difficult to understand the data. It's not, I don't think it's presented in a particularly user-friendly way.
I like the idea that the system I'm using, not fathom, it's called StatCounter, I believe it has a little bit more privacy involved than Google, but it's not as privacy oriented as Fathom. So, you know, I like that, but it's just, I had analytics on my site for years and years, and I would check it maybe once a year, and I'd just spend 10 minutes in there and go, I don't understand this.
Now with stack counter, it's simple graphs, it's labeled easy, it's easy to navigate and I can find what I want and I can understand what I need to do. Plus, the mobile app is really nice.
**\[05:32\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Well, let's take a little step back here. For our audience, which tend to be sort of people without a devoted web team, what exactly are analytics? Like, what kind of things do you tend to think that people should be tracking in Google Analytics? You mentioned a few things there. How many visitors came to the site this month or whatever, but do you have like a kind of list of things where no matter what tool you're using, you wanna make sure I need to be able to find this, this, and this, that kind of thing.
**\[06:05\]** **Angie:** Yeah, I mean, I think it's just the basics, how many visitors you're getting any given day, week, or month, or year. Usually I feel like people look at you, they're a 30 or a 90 day period, sometimes a 60 day period, just to get an idea of how their site is performing, depending on what they're publishing, that sort of thing.
And then also the stickiness or the bounce rate. So that being where if a person gets to your site and then immediately leaves, that's a bounce. So the bounce rate, I guess the number, in Google Analytics, it's a percentage. So if you have like an 83% bounce rate, that means people are not staying on your site for very long.
And that's another metric, how long people are staying, what pages they're looking at, things like that. Those are, I think the only things that most, I would say most companies really need to be aware of. Once you get into e-commerce and bear companies that have at least one dedicated person who can look at all this stuff, then maybe it makes more sense to do a deeper dive into the e-commerce specific things, the landing page stuff where you can have goals and see the path where people have gotten to the different landing pages, that sort of thing. But I'd say, for my client base, for instance, I have one client right now that I'm working with, but all they do is analytics. They provide analytics data for their customers, so they know the ins and outs of analytics, which is insane. So for them, it makes sense,
but then I have smaller clients who they just want to know. If they even ask, sometimes I get people don't ask, but I stick it on there anyway, because eventually the question will come, you know, how many people am I getting to my website? And that's really the baseline that all the people
**\[08:00\]** **Sean:** need to know. I also like knowing what is my most popular page. Yeah. So it's good to know, because then hey, this is actually doing something for me. I'm getting some Google Jews. Maybe I should write more articles like that or maybe make a shift in my what I'm providing to my clients so
**\[08:21\]** **Angie:** that it addresses that. Yeah that's definitely the that's definitely the thing that I look at the most as well is what are like the top five or ten pages and see if there's something I can
**\[08:33\]** **Sean:** kind of spin off of that if it's a blog post or something like that. Okay so Angie Google Analytics is the most popular one. Like you said it yourself, everybody just puts Google Analytics on their site, and they may or may not understand it. Why would I want to use another option such as Fathom or Stack Counter when that's going to cost me money? And I know you addressed it a little bit, but let's look at why these other options are much better, or better for the right kind of person.
**\[09:09\]** **Angie:** Yeah, so yeah, it does go back to the stuff that we've already talked about which is, you know, just the simplicity, because like you said earlier, Google Analytics can be very, in my opinion, as well, not very user-friendly. Like even, I mean, I'm a UI designer as well as a developer, and so I go in there and I get a little bit kind of overwhelmed because there's so much stuff, and it's not organized as intuitively as I think it could be but you know I've never really taken a look at it or that deeply but it is it is kind of a rabbit hole
**\[09:46\]** **Sean:** so to speak. Sure I imagine it's pretty difficult to organize something
**\[09:50\]** **Angie:** that's got that much depth. Yeah yeah exactly so I mean I say that with a grain of salt knowing that I've never even tried to tackle that as a designer so I'm not I'm not trying to knock them by any chance because I know that's a lot of work
But yeah, so there's that. So I mean, if a company just really needs to know how many visitors they're getting per day, week, whatever, Google Analytics is overkill. It really just is a lot overkill. It's giving you more data than you probably need than you'll ever use.
Now the other part of that is also the privacy thing that we talked about, where like Michael saying, Google does have this tracker. So it's tracking all of this data from your users that are visiting your website. Again, it's not personally identifiable, where they don't know your name or anything like that, but they may be able to get your IP address.
And then based on that, they're gonna kind of put that together with other sites that you've been to and including shopping sites. So they start to set up like this profile. And then you get all those ads.
And you see the same ads over and over again.
And the very thing that people complain about and then here we are, a lot of people putting Google Analytics on their sites or the Facebook Pixel or something like that. So that's the other part. And so like I said earlier, if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.
And in this case, you as a website owner may not be the product in the sense where Google is tracking you for putting Google Analytics on your site, but you're doing it to your customers. doing it to your potential clients and customers. And you might be okay with that. I'm not personally because I don't like it.
So I don't want to do that to people visiting my site. And so the trade-off is that I do have to pay a certain amount of money per month or year or whatever plan you have. And for me, that's okay. I'd rather do that than have Google tracking me or Google, rather, Google tracking people visiting my site.
**\[11:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I know that if you think about, so we mentioned that they're not tracking individual people per se, but if Google knows your IP address, your screen resolution, the browser you're using, the computer you're using, all these different things are definitely trackable in analytics and if you aggregate them all together, you can get a very specific picture of every
**\[12:19\]** **Sean:** user that's in there, right? Plus you got things like, all right, you're on this site, and we know you've been to this site, this site, this site, and this site. Now we can kind of guess demographics about you. Oh, you're probably a 30-year-old mom with two young children. Right. Or you're a middle-aged white man who likes sports. Right. It could be anything.
**\[12:44\]** **Mike:** And they do have male and female and age range and stuff in there. You can drill down, I mean, it's probably not that accurate, but the fact that they can make that kind of assumption shows that they must think they know a lot about the people that are hitting that site. Now, this might be a question for the people at Fathom, I guess, but do you know how they do all this tracking without having the personalized tracking thing that Google does? Like, how are they measuring this stuff? stuff. You know, that is a great question. That is a good question and I used to know the answer.
**\[13:17\]** **Angie:** I think I did too. I haven't read like yeah they they have a page specifically dedicated to that on how they do that and I and I can't remember off the top of my head but it's I mean it's it's just like Google Analytics and the you know like installing it it's just the same thing it's just a little piece of JavaScript code that you stick in your websites but they're but there's something in in there that, yeah, they don't have that tracker. I think part of it is that they're, maybe they're not setting cookies, I'm not sure.
**\[13:45\]** **Mike:** Yeah, oh yeah, that sounds right. I remember I read about it once too when I first heard about that and I think you're right about that. And we'll put all these in the show notes anyway, links to these products in the site so you can go and research it after listening.
**\[14:01\]** **Sean:** Hi, would you like to be a guest on the show? We'd like to talk with website owners about what you like and what you don't like about the CMS you're using, is updating your website easy to do, are the features you wish you had available?
**\[14:15\]** **Mike:** We'd love to hear from users of any CMS, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or any other system. Recordings are done virtually, so all you need is a computer and a microphone. Get in touch with us at website 101podcast.com slash contact. So now, one of the things that I do with Google Analytics, sometimes when I use it for clients is I generate these reports based on whatever it's tracking, so it can spit out a pie chart of how many people visited on this day or whatever. And it's a little more easy to consume for the average person. Does Fathom have tools like that that let you sort of generate something that's user-friendly for clients?
**\[14:54\]** **Angie:** I don't know. So I know that I get a weekly email from my Fathom setup that shows me just some basic things. I know you can export stuff. And yeah, that's as far as it goes. Cause I don't have any clients, as far as I know, I don't have any clients that use Fathom. So I've never had to really go down that route.
**\[15:15\]** **Sean:** Okay. I also get a weekly email from StatCounter, which is the service I'm using. Mike, you said you're using StatCounter. Does it give you the option to export like that? Cause I don't know.
**\[15:27\]** **Mike:** You know, this is, I should have been more prepared for the question I asked myself. I honestly don't know. because I've been using stack counter and like poking around in there and that, but I still have analytics running on a lot of these sites as well, like the both of them. And I haven't really drilled down into stack counter and see what kind of reports it does. But I'm almost certain that it can let you, yeah, generate like a little PDF of something, of the important stuff, yeah.
**\[15:54\]** **Sean:** I think so. Yeah, maybe we should check that out. Check into that. Yeah, definitely. So Angie, do you know if Fathom lets you set up goals and funnels or is it a more simplified tool? That's one of the big things that people like with a Google Analytics.
**\[16:12\]** **Angie:** Yeah, you definitely can set a goal and have a conversion rate, look at your conversion rate and everything. So yeah, you can definitely do that in Fathom, which I think is another important piece of of having a website, especially one that, you know, where you're trying to sell something, and you want people to get to those product pages and checkout pages, that sort of thing.
**\[16:33\]** **Mike:** Yeah, one of the, I actually have on my website, a service that, and this speaks to how confusing analytics is, if you go to my services page or something, it says that you can hire me to just set up Google Analytics. And one of the features in there is I will have it generate, or I will set up Google Goals, So it's like, you know, if you want to know how many people went to this page and then followed through and went to this other page, you know, I can help you set that up. And so it's a service I offer. Even if I haven't built a client's website, it's just like, yeah, are you totally confused by Google Analytics? Well, maybe I can help you with that.
So one more thing I wanted to ask about, you know, features in there. \[BLOCK 0 CONTINUED\] And this is also just something your opinion as a developer and you too, Sean, I'm curious what you guys think about this. So there are tools that let you track, so like, let's say I'm a visitor and I go to a website that has this thing installed, it will actually record my mouse going around and it records everything I do. It records what links I click on when I scroll down the page, if I fill out a form, it doesn't include the things that I put in the form, but it's basically like a recording of my visit. And there's a tool called, what's that one red hot jar? Hotjar.
It's called hotjar.
**\[18:02\]** **Sean:** Hot jar, yeah, yeah, I've got hot jar installed on my site. Crazy egg is another one.
**\[18:07\]** **Mike:** Crazy egg hot jar, there's one called full story, I think. Yes. I've tried a few of them and they're really interesting to watch in that, but they're really, really creepy, you know what I mean? To know that they're doing that. And I know that Stadcounter has a new feature where if you want to pay extra, it'll be built into this tracking thing because normally it's not part of your analytics tracking service. Anyway, I'm just curious to know both of you, what are your thoughts on that kind of user tracking thing? Are you into it? You think it's a bad idea?
**\[18:42\]** **Sean:** I am a little bit mixed on it. I like the idea. I like watching how people move around my site because I had a hot jar and what was the other one?
**\[18:54\]** **Mike:** I had full story, crazy egg.
**\[18:56\]** **Sean:** Yeah, yeah, okay. I had full story and hotjar installed on my site for a while and they're no longer there, but I had them installed just to check it out and I liked looking at it, but I wasn't exactly sure how I could use that data. And it might be more useful for if you've got a bug And you want to see, hey, why are users not being able to do what they're trying to do?
And I also set it up with a stack counter that had a short trial period when it was in beta. And I ran it there. And it was basically the same thing. But for me, it wasn't worth paying extra to have it on my site. But I mean, if it is good for you and you need it, I think having it all in one service would be a great way to go.
**\[19:47\]** **Mike:** Yeah, Angie, what are your thoughts on that?
**\[19:50\]** **Angie:** Yeah, I'm a little mixed too. Like you said earlier, I do think it's a little bit creepy because it does follow your mass around. I mean, when crazy egg was relatively new, which I want to say was like maybe 15 years ago, I used it on my site as well and I used it for a couple of client sites. And yeah, it was interesting, but like Sean said, I didn't really know how to get anything useful of that data, partly because I'm not a data person necessarily. I build and design websites. But in addition to that, I think the advantage of those is springboarding off of what Sean said, it's good for user testing. So maybe right before you go live on a site, you put it on your staging site, your beta site, whatever, and you're using that to check out the usability accessibility, that sort of thing.
I think for user testing, I think it'd be really good, but beyond that, keeping it on there for your live site, I think it, again, it just depends on your company, your business, and how much you really need to know that information off of your website.
**\[21:00\]** **Mike:** That's a great idea. I'm actually doing usability testing for a client very soon, and I never even thought of that. I was going to sign up for one of these sites that charge at $300 a month for whatever, but that's a great idea. I should use that maybe.
**\[21:14\]** **Sean:** Yeah, because you could just send some people to a little site, go take a look at it, and you know what time they're there, and then you could go check the videos of what they're doing.
**\[21:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I know another thing that I did think was, I mean, I feel like those recordings are kind of just a packaged way to know about all the things that we said are difficult to find out, you know, like rather than drilling down for every visitor, this and that, it sort of gives you the whole thing in one session.
And one thing I remember noticing in one of those services, I can't remember which one, is it tracks rage clicks. So like if someone's using your site, and suddenly they're like, they think something's a button or whatever, and they just click, click, click, click, click. It will highlight that area in red on the timeline to let you know, look, this person is going nuts here trying to click this thing that's a heading or whatever, and it's supposed to let You know, oh man, that looks, that does look like a button or, you know, you'd act on it that way.
**\[22:09\]** **Sean:** And it is a button, but it's not actually, I work in the way it's missing or something. Sure. The, the, the forums not submitting or that's an interesting idea that I wouldn't have thought about that. And I, I hadn't seen any rage cooking before, but I liked the idea.
**\[22:24\]** **Angie:** I've seen, I've seen something, well, it's not that exactly, but like crazy, at least back what I used it. You could, you know, because it gives you like the heat map or whatever and then you can see like the hot spots of where people are clicking. Yeah. And sometimes there'd be a page that would come up.
And it'd be like this really bright hot spot. It'd be red like you're saying. I mean, it didn't say that it was anybody was rage clicking, but they might be clicking on something that they think is a link or a button or something. So I think, yeah, so I think that kind of goes along with the with the user testing side of things for that.
**\[22:59\]** **Sean:** Right, just a backup for a second. And you just set a heat map. And for visitor or listeners who are not familiar with what a heat map is, it's basically, after you have so many people looking at a particular page and you've got this mouse tracking thing going on, it will show where the mouse is the most active for most users as kind of like this red overlay that gets darker as it gets to more concentrated.
**\[23:24\]** **Mike:** And you know, something I've noticed actually, now that you mentioned that heat map, in these recordings that I was talking about, that you can get some of these services to do, I notice sometimes that you can watch people's mouse go across the lines in a paragraph, like a lot of people use their mouse to read text. You know what I mean? It's like they're keeping an eye on which line they're on, and I can tell they're reading because their mouse is just going back and forth across this paragraph. It's really interesting to see.
**\[23:51\]** **Sean:** That might be an indication that your text because too many characters per line. And that's, it could be, could be.
**\[23:57\]** **Angie:** It might not be, though, because it might be also just the way people read. Yeah. Like my brother, my brother actually has ADHD. And so when he's on a website, he's reading something. He actually has to highlight every line as he's reading to be able to focus and read it. So it might just be that as well.
**\[24:15\]** **Sean:** Oh, that's interesting.
**\[24:16\]** **Mike:** I hadn't even thought about that. So one of the other things that analytics, Google Analytics does is this real time tracking, which is sometimes a big hit for, I find like CEOs and stuff, if you tell them about it, hey, you can go to the real time thing and just see who's on your site right now. And I know, I don't know why. I suppose if you had a program that like just launched maybe and you wanna get data right away so they can tell the board or whatever, this is successful and you wanna know how many people are hitting that section of the site at the moment, I suppose it could be helpful for that, but it's generally not, I find it's not terribly helpful, but a lot of people like, they get a kick out of watching it.
Do you know if Fathom or Statt counter have any of these things?
**\[25:01\]** **Sean:** I think Statt counter has it, but I can't go into that.
**\[25:05\]** **Angie:** Yeah, Fathom does. It definitely does, because I've randomly logged into it to my Fathom account and it'll, it just, I don't find it very useful either, but there's like a little bar at the top that says, one visitor, and it gives you, I think, the URL, if I remember correctly. Yeah. But yeah, I don't find it very useful either.
**\[25:24\]** **Sean:** OK. So Angie, how much are you paying for Fathom? That's a good question. Monthly annual, or what kind of limitations are there on it?
**\[25:38\]** **Angie:** So I actually have to go to their site and look at it. I think I'm actually paying annually for it, but there are three different price points that you can pay per month, and it's based on the page views per month. So for 14 bucks a month, and that's US dollars, it's, you get 100,000 page views per month, which I'm never gonna hit my website's not that popular. So I think that's probably the one that I'm on.
And yeah, you can, yeah, I actually, I do know I'm paying annually because you do get a bit of a break when you pay annually, and I did, like I mentioned earlier, did start with their seven day free trial, which for my purpose is, and I think for most sites is probably perfect. I don't think you necessarily need a whole month trial, but it's probably nice, but seven days was plenty.
**\[26:26\]** **Sean:** Right. So with stock counter, I signed up for that, and I'm looking at the pricing page right now, and there's a free version where you get 500 pages a month, which is not going to to be worth anything. And the other one is 100,000 page views and it costs $9 a month. A $9 a month, if you're paying by the year, it's $89.
**\[26:52\]** **Mike:** Right. And this is a good thing to point out for our listeners is that, you know, a lot of people might think, well, Google's free and why would I pay that? But I mean, a lot of people have sites that like you mentioned, Angie, that you're not getting hundreds of thousands people a month. So just because it's a paid service doesn't mean it's not affordable. It might be very affordable if, you know, given the visitor, you know, load you tend to get per month. It might be, you know, I don't know, $10 a month or whatever. I mean, $89 for a year
**\[27:26\]** **Sean:** is more than sufficient. And this service, I don't know if Adam does this, but I can use the same
**\[27:34\]** **Angie:** account on multiple sites. Yeah, madam does the same. Yeah, I have my company site
**\[27:40\]** **Sean:** capping creations on it. And then I have the podcast site on it. And so I'm tracking both of them. And they each get their own individual tracking code. And all of the page views add up to the total that I'm allowed. Yeah. So it's not like I'm paying $90 a year for each site. If that was the case, I would maybe do it for my company site. And the podcast
**\[28:02\]** **Angie:** would be it on the free one. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because yeah, I have the same setup. I actually have three sites that I'm tracking. I'm tracking my main business, my company site. I'm tracking my personal site, which is just a one page. It doesn't get any traffic at all. And then I'm tracking a third site for the hosting site of my business. So, yeah, I pay $140 a year for tracking three sites. And again, same thing, three different tracking codes and all within that 100,000 page views per month, so I think it's a good deal.
**\[28:37\]** **Mike:** Right. I'm doing the same thing with a stat counter where I have two. I have the one account tracking two different client sites and you can weigh it, I think, so that if one site is more popular than the other, you can tell it, well, allow the popular site to have more visits before or you bump me up to the next tier of pricing or whatever, that kind of thing, right?
**\[29:01\]** **Sean:** Isn't that right, Sean? Yeah, that's how Stack Counter works. I don't know about Fathom though.
**\[29:05\]** **Mike:** Yeah, for our listeners, that could be useful if they have, you know, sometimes people build like microsites for a certain campaign. So if you have a site that's running for one month and you know it's gonna get so many, you know, a few thousand visitors, you can set up another sort of tracking code using your same account and have it all together, it's really useful.
**\[29:25\]** **Sean:** most definitely. Actually, I just before we wrap up, I had another question pop into my head here. Mobile app for your tracking system. I know Google Analytics has one, and I found the mobile app better than the desktop for Google Analytics, but still overwhelming because of the depth and the amount of information available to you. Stack counter has a nice app. It's really, really nice and clean, snappy, easy to understand. I put it on about equal to what you get with the desktop view. And what about a fathom? Does it have a mobile app or you just log in on your phone and it works the same?
**\[30:08\]** **Angie:** Yeah, you just log in on your phone. It's a responsive site. There's no separate app.
**\[30:12\]** **Mike:** I don't know if I've ever felt the need to check tracking on my phone. Sean, what do you do for that for? Why do you find the need to go?
**\[30:20\]** **Sean:** I need to just install it because it was there when I'm on Netflix when I'm watching TV in the evening occasion I'll pull it up and like oh what you know what what hits did I get today like that that's it I just I don't have to go in and remember my password or whatever because
**\[30:39\]** **Mike:** it's just it's an app on my phone yeah that's fair enough I used to do that when I had Google Analytics
**\[30:43\]** **Angie:** too and and I'm trying actually to break that habit where I just download apps just to have them So I'm actually glad Fathom doesn't have one because I would totally be doing that.
**\[30:55\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I think the app would be more useful for somebody who's got a very active site or maybe there are professional that are managing analytics for clients and you want to be able to like monitor your different clients' sites while you're out and about. Maybe you're between visits to clients. You got to go, I promised client A, I'd like check on this, all right, oh yeah, okay, double check that, knock on the door. Yes. Right. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Okay. Well, this has
**\[31:23\]** **Mike:** been really interesting. Angie, thank you again for coming on the show. I think people will find a lot of good advice here and know now that Google is not always the solution to everything. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I certainly isn't. And as Angie said, if you're not paying for it, you are
**\[31:41\]** **Sean:** the product. So do you want to be the product with Google? I mean, I sold my soul to them. except for my analytics.
**\[31:48\]** **Mike:** That's right. So Angie, where can our listeners learn more about you online?
**\[31:54\]** **Angie:** Well, so they can go to my company website which is block81.com or just, I guess, find me on Twitter. I think I'm most active on Twitter which is just Angie Herrera.
**\[32:04\]** **Sean:** Excellent. Thank you so much, Angie.
**\[32:06\]** **Angie:** Yeah, thanks for having me again.
**\[32:10\]** **Sean:** The website 101 Podcast is hosted by me, Sean Smith. on Smith. You can find me on LinkedIn. My username is caffeine creations or on Twitter where my username is caffeine creation. C-A-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-8-I-O-M or at my website caffeine creations.ca.
**\[32:34\]** **Mike:** And by me, Mike Mella, you can reach me online at BLikeWater.ca and also on Twitter and LinkedIn, where my username is Mike Mellon. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 04
- 1 [ 'Click Here' Hurts Your SEO and UX: Why It's Time to Change](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-1/click-here/)
- 2 [ How to Talk to Your Web Developer: Communication Tips for Clients](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-2/how-to-talk-to-your-web-developer/)
- 3 [ Red Flags](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-3/red-flags/)
- 4 [ Content Strategy](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-4/content-strategy/)
- 5 [ Accessibility](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-5/accessibility/)
- 6 [ Improving Your Website Without a Redesign: Content Audit, Usability Testing & More](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-6/how-to-improve-your-website-without-doing-a-full-redesign/)
- 7 [ Content Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-7/content-marketing/)
- 8 [ Alternatives to Google Analytics](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-8/alternatives-to-google-analytics/)
- Bonus[ Listener Survey - What Topics do you Want to Hear More of?](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-/listener-survey-what-topics-do-you-want-to-hear-more-of/)
- 9 [ Website Optimization and Speed](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-9/website-optimization-and-speed/)
- 10 [ Exploring WordPress Website Development with Laura Bailey](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-10/wordpress/)
- 11 [ From Novice to Bootcamp Instructor](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-11/from-novice-to-bootcamp-instructor/)
- 12 [ Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-12/pimp-your-typography/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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