How to add Fathom Analytics (to your Ruby on Rails app) and be more privacy conscious
Why Fathom Analytics?
Fathom Analytics is a privacy focused, non-surveillance capitalism, analytics solution that enables your business to have actionable insights without sponsoring the obliteration of humanity (curious to learn more then check out Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book).
- Simple, privacy focused analytics
- Simple uptime monitoring included
- No cookie notices on your website
- Unlimited websites and monitoring included
- Surge-proof (they are ready to handle viral-level surges in your website traffic)
- They pledge 2% of gross revenues to the planet
That should be all you need to know to make the switch from that other one.
How to add Fathom Analytics to your website
- Sign up for an account -> use our referral link to save $10
- After signing up, login and go to the “Sites” section of your dashboard (https://app.usefathom.com/#/settings/sites).
- Then, go to the “Add a new site” section.
4. Type your website in, e.g. example.com, and click on “Get site code →”.
5. Now you have a few options:
- You can choose a custom domain, a bit more advanced but you can read more about it here, to further ensure your analytics aren’t blocked by ad blocking scripts.
- There’s an optional CMS / Framework (and they have a solid tutorial section for each one)
- There’s a “Site ID” section for your reference (we won’t need it in this example)
6. We’re going to just need the HTML Embed Code at the bottom.
7. Click on the “Copy embed code” link in the lower right corner of the HTML Embed Code section.
8. Paste that code directly into the head section of your website. On Ruby on Rails app, we made a _head.html.erb partial and pasted it there:
9. That’s it! You’re privacy focused analytics solution is now setup and good to go.
10. You will want to click on “Verify site code →” to double check that everything is working properly.
Optional
11. I highly recommend you enable uptime monitoring, since Fathom provides it for no extra charge and it’s as simple as a click:
Click on the “Off” link on the far right and you will be prompted to input some contact information for uptime monitoring (this is where they will send you the monitoring notifications when your website goes offline or comes back online from being offline):
12. Enter your information and then click on “Enable monitoring →”.
13. Woohoo! Your uptime monitoring is now setup and you will receive notifications whenever your website goes offline.
You will also see that it now says “Active” under the monitoring column in the “Sites” section of your settings dashboard:
Conclusion
It’s incredibly easy to setup, run, and utilize Fathom Analytics for your business.
When we started our software company, we were considering foregoing analytics altogether. Thankfully, we discovered Fathom Analytics and we’ve never regretted the choice.
We’re proud of being able to say “goodbye” to those annoying we’re spying on you and enabling you to be used you as the raw material in a new age of exploitation cookie notices.
