Shoutout to the client who made me ditch Google Analytics for a simpler tool

After a client in Austin showed me their actual sales data from last month versus what GA was reporting, I finally switched to Fathom Analytics 3 weeks ago and haven't looked back-has anyone else found that their GA numbers are way off from reality?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_wendy1mo ago

The big one nobody talks about is how GA handles bot traffic. Their filters miss a ton of bots from data centers and cloud providers that inflate pageviews and sessions. I switched to Plausible a few months ago and my real conversion rate jumped from like 1.2% to almost 4% because we were chasing phantom traffic. Makes you wonder how many people are making decisions based on fake numbers.

the_alice1mo ago

The 1.2% to 4% conversion rate jump is insane. That's like a whole business lying to itself for months. I had a similar moment when I manually counted form submissions from my email inbox and found GA was reporting double the actual leads. It's not just bots either. GA's sampling on high traffic sites is awful, especially if you aren't paying for the fancy version. You get these smoothed out averages that feel right but are totally fake when you dig into raw data. I wish more people would just check their numbers against real server logs or their payment processor once a quarter at least.

hall.joel1mo ago

Honestly, what you said about the 1.2% to 4% jump really hit me. I used to think GA was good enough, but after manually checking my own signup data against what it showed, I realized how many decisions I was making on straight-up bad numbers. Now I'm looking into simpler tools just like you did.