Requirements
You connect Fathom per client via an API token — no OAuth, no extra tracking code. You need the API token from your Fathom account and the client’s site ID (a short code). Fathom is cloud-only; it does not offer self-hosting. A Fathom account is enough for API access.
Create the API token and connect
- 1Create an API token with read access at app.usefathom.com/api.
- 2Note the client’s site ID (a short code).
- 3In MetricDash, enter the API token and the site ID for the matching client.
- 4Assign the connection to the client account.
Cookieless and GDPR-friendly
Fathom measures without cookies and without personal data — no consent banner, a tiny script, and the data does not go to Google. Fathom is a Canadian company; if you want to keep the data in Europe, you can enable EU data isolation in Fathom, where processing runs in Europe. That changes nothing about the connection to MetricDash.
MetricDash only ever gets read access to the stats and shows them live in the dashboard and the client portal.
What lands in the website tab
Sessions, unique visitors, page views, bounce rate and average session duration appear automatically in the website tab, plus the top pages and the device split by desktop, mobile and tablet. Instead of a channel classification, MetricDash shows top referrers for Fathom — the hostnames of the referring sites, with no-referrer visitors as “Direct”. It is the same provider-agnostic website tab that GA4, Plausible and Umami also feed.
Your clients see the same numbers live through their own read-only portal login, without access to your Fathom account.
Common pitfalls
- Wrong site ID: the site ID is a short code from your Fathom account — not the client’s domain.
- No self-hosting: Fathom is a cloud-only service — you neither need nor enter a host URL.
- Expecting channels: Fathom delivers no GA4 channel classification, but referrer hostnames — which is why MetricDash shows top referrers here instead of traffic channels.
- Reports: Fathom numbers live in the dashboard and portal; they do not yet flow into the automatic report emails.