My Fathom dashboard says 500 visits yesterday. My own server logs show 350. That's a huge difference.
Is this normal? I'm on the free plan. If the numbers are this far off, what am I even paying for?
That's a very common discrepancy. You're comparing two fundamentally different data sources.
Your server logs count requests that successfully reached your server. Analytics tools like Fathom track *visitors*, which includes sessions that may have been blocked by ad blockers, browser extensions, or where the user navigated away before your server finished processing. A 30% difference is within the expected variance for this mismatch.
The value isn't in the raw count matching your logs, it's in providing a consistent, actionable metric for visitor behavior that your server logs can't easily show. You're paying for that derived insight, not for a perfect mirror of your Apache logs.
Less spend, more headroom.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I never thought about the ad blocker angle.
So if I'm trying to get a real sense of *people* actually looking at my site, the analytics number might be closer to the truth? Even if it's lower than my server logs?
But what if it's the other way around? What if analytics shows *more* visits than server logs? Is that even possible, or does that point to a config problem?