news  Paul Jarvis · May 5, 2023

For the last few years, we’ve been thinking about and building a solution that’s easy to use, costs you nothing more than your existing Fathom Analytics, and, most importantly, gets your data out of GA for good in a super-privacy-focused way.

We think you’ll love our GA importer because:

1. It takes a few minutes to map out and import one or more sites from GA to Fathom. Watch our 6-minute tutorial video here.
2. It saves your data since UA is going away and the data is being deleted. And GA4 is hard to use and time consuming to figure out.
3. It doesn’t cost you anything extra. We don’t charge you if you want to import 10 pageviews from your historical data or 10 million. We just want you and your clients to stop using GA.
4. You don’t need to be an existing customer to use it, so sign up for a 7-day free trial and start importing, even before paying us.
5. It’s just as anonymous as our native data: meaning we don’t import any demographic information or private data about your visitors.

We get it; people have wanted to import their Google Analytics data into Fathom for a long, long time:

Google Analytics import being our top-requested feature, would be a colossal understatement.

Like everything we do, we wanted to build a solution that worked well and was easy to use. So the least amount of steps on your end (our customers) and the most functionality for your data. That’s why the GA importer has been our #1 priority for quite some time now. We’re proud of what we’ve built, and we’re happy that all our customers and everyone who signs up for a free trial of Fathom Analytics can now use our GA importer.

Large sites, old sites

If you’re wondering if this works for large sites and historically old sites, it does!

We tested this using one of my own old sites where I was just keeping the GA account for the sake of not losing the data—as it was the site I used to build an audience of tens of thousands of weekly readers. That site went viral several times (including being tweeted about by Ashton Kutcher and Arianna Huffington) in it’s lifespan and had data back to 2013. We tested our GA importer on it, and it took a little while, but didn’t break a sweat and brought in the GA data perfectly!

Now I don’t have to hold onto a GA account just to “save” that data for a rainy day.

How our Google Analytics importer works

Here’s how our GA importer works:

1. Go to Imports from Settings in your account.
2. Connect your Google account (the one that’s got your GA data) to Fathom.
3. Map your GA account (UA or GA4), property, and view to a Fathom dashboard (Site ID). If you’re importing several sites simultaneously, keep repeating this process until everything is mapped. We made it easy to import lots of sites at once (see the screenshot below)
4. Click “Import the data.”

That’s it!

You’ll then be emailed once the import is finished. And at that time, you can see your GA data right on your Fathom Analytics dashboard forever (since we never delete historical data).

You can watch a video on how the importer works right here (less than 7 minutes long).

If you haven’t switched from GA to Fathom yet…

Fathom Analytics is a simple, privacy-first website analytics tool that’s a great alternative to Google Analytics. We’ve got a single-page dashboard that’s easy to understand, doesn’t require training, and is backed by fantastic customer support.

Here are a few other reasons to switch from Google Analytics to Fathom:

• We have a Universal Analytics and GA4 importer :)
• We don’t delete your data or force you to upgrade to a new product.
• We have unlimited data retention, meaning we keep your historical data forever.
• Our software isn’t illegal in the EU.
• We’re independently owned, proudly bootstrapped, and customer-driven.
• Using Fathom doesn’t hurt your SEO or ranking.

You can manage up to 50 separate/discrete sites on a single Fathom Analytics account and add more for a small fee. So if you’re an agency or freelancer who manages sites for your clients, you can now tell them it’s easy to import their GA data into their new favourite website analytics tool.

People are jumping ship from Google Analytics at an incredible rate. If you want to join them and try a better bit of software, please consider a 7-day free trial of Fathom Analytics.

Please check out our support documentation to learn more about our GA importer, the limitations, and how the data may differ between GA and Fathom.

Tired of how time consuming and complex Google Analytics can be? Try Fathom Analytics:

Start a free trial