How to install google analytics on WordPress? A google analytics tutorial can help make the complicated use of google insights easier to understand.
Simple ways to quickly add google analytics to WordPress are given in this article. Whether you’re trying to know more about the audience of your site or simply trying to see how they interact with your posts and content, google analytics can provide you with a deep insight into these data.
Google Analytics is one of the most comprehensive web analytical tools out there and the best part of it all? It’s completely free. You can use this amazing service free of cost to track and monitor traffic on your website.
Before we get started with how you can add google analytics let’s get to know a bit more about the service and its multifarious usage.
Table of Contents
What is Google Analytics?
As we’ve mentioned google analytics is a free analytical tool to monitor the traffic to your website. This analytical tool can provide you with important information like daily hits on your site, post engagement, pings while accessing your web server. The information that you receive from google analytics can be divided into five distinct categories.
Live Information
The activities of your site will be showcased to you in real-time. That is, you can view what is happening to your site at any time, live.
Audience and Followers
You will also receive information regarding your audience, demographic, and whether they’re a regular visitor or not. In addition to that, you’ll also get information regarding the number of unique visitors per week or per month on your site.
Acquiring Traffic
This is for the technical heads. The analytics platform is designed for technicalities but this specific part shows you how you generate traffic for your site. You get an idea about how your ads are performing and whether you’re able to generate site traffic through affiliation and advertisements.
Site Engagement
You can also monitor the activities done on your site by the visitors. Like which page they’re visiting, what are they clicking and which post gets the most engagement.
Site Conversion Rate
This report basically shows how well you’re able to retain your traffic base. The report outlines the performance of customer retention policies like mail subscription and affiliate sales that attract traffic to your site.
Based on these key points, you can get an answer to some key questions that works as a driver for your website such as
Who are Your Viewers?
This is an important driver factor in deciding some key aspects of your website mainly the demographic aspect. You need to understand where most of your audience comes from, what is their common language, what sort of plugins are available to them like Flash or JavaScript support. What sort of screen resolution do they use?
Based on all this information, you can design your website to better suit your viewers. This will help to increase the responsiveness as well as overall user experience.
What Activities Happen in Your Website?
Suppose a viewer visits your site. What does he do? If it’s a blog, what article does he read, which categories does he follow? What are his preferences? Based on all these you can create a preferential list of your content that will be very helpful in redesigning your landing page.
For example, you can understand from the analytics, what sort of posts are doing well, and what is not. Based on that, you can focus on the high performing ones or categories of contents.
When do People Visit Your Site?
From the demographics you get an idea of where your views originate from, the analytics also shows you the time when your website has the most traffic. Based on this, you can determine the perfect time to drop new content on your website.
This will help your content get a better reach and more engagement on your website.
What Leads People to Your Website?
Another key aspect that the analytics shows is where you’re getting your traffic from. It can be from an affiliated marketing site or social media.
For example, you may market the content of your website on Facebook, the analytics will help to show you what percentage of the site traffic is led to your webserver from Facebook.
This helps you to give importance to certain sources that are performing well to drive traffic as well as focus on the ones that are not performing that well.
What Sort of Content Interaction Happens the Most?
By content interaction, we mean what sort of content gets the highest engagement in your platform. As we have mentioned before, you can build a network of content centered around the topic or category that gets the most traction on your website.
How to Get Started with Google Analytics?
Getting started with google analytics is pretty straightforward and simple. We have mentioned earlier that google analytics is a free service and part of the google insights services. All you need to get started on the google analytics sign-in process is to have a Gmail account.
If you have your Gmail account setup, you will need to visit google analytics and start the sign-up process. for the process to start, you will need to log in with your Gmail credentials.
Once the signup process is complete, you will need to choose between web, apps, or web and apps from the presented menu. Be sure to choose the web as we are talking about adding google analytics to your WordPress website.
After that, you will be presented with a page where you will need to provide your website’s name, URL, location, and time zone.
Once that is done, you will be provided with a google analytics tracking id. This tracking code is important as we will be using it in one of the methods to add google analytics to your WordPress site.
There are several ways to include google analytics on your WordPress website. In this article, we will be outlining three easy and quick ways to do so which can be your google analytics tutorial.
1- How to install google analytics on WordPress through plugins
One of the most common ways to add anything to a WordPress website is through plugins. Adding google analytics is no exception to that. The most commonly used plugin for google analytics has to be MonsterInsights.
This is the most comprehensive plugin that manages to perfectly integrate google analytics to any WordPress website. It is also the most used plugin with a usage count topping over 1 million including most of the high profile business websites.
Monsterinsights has both a premium and free version of their plugin. The premium version has advanced features that are not generally required if you’re a simple blogger like us.
But if you’re planning on running an e-commerce venture, we suggest you sign up for one as you’ll be needing the additional benefits that come with the pro version.
The setup process is fairly simple.
1. First, you have to activate the Monsterinsights plugin.
2. After activation, you will see a tab called insights on your WordPress dashboard. Clicking on that will begin the setup process.
3. As you can see above, you will at first need to choose the type of your website. After that, you will need to click the save and continue button.
4. On the following page, you will see the “Connect Monsterinsights” option. You will have to click on it to start the setup.
5. After that, you will be required to login into your Google account and you will see the following page.
6. Here you need to provide access to your google analytics profile that you have created earlier for your website. This is basically the final step of setting up the plugin.
7. You will see the following page after you hit allow.
8. Here you will be required to put in your website to cue in the final piece. After that, you’re good to go.
It is mentionable that most of the websites run perfectly on default settings, however, you can choose to customize it however you want from the plugin menu.
It generally takes a few days for google analytics to take effect. You can expect to run a full-scale operation within three days. The best thing about using Monsterinsights is that you can access your analytics report right from your WordPress dashboard.
2- Google Analytics Through Header and Footer Plugin
This is also a good way to add google analytics to your WordPress website. Though it’s not as comprehensive as Monsterinsights, it’s a good option.
One of the gripes with the header and footer plugin is that you cannot view the reports right from your WordPress dashboard. This makes the process a bit complicated as you’ll have to separately load google analytics.
1. To start, you’ll need the tracking code that you got while initially setting up google analytics.
2. You will then need to activate the header and footer plugin in the WordPress dashboard. From the dashboard setting, you’ll need to open the settings and paste the code like below.
3. Once you hit the save button, you’re done.
This is a relatively easy way to add analytics to your WordPress website but as it goes, it’s also less on features compared to Monsterinsights.
3- Google Analytics in WordPress Themes
Okay, so this one is a bit more integrated than the header and footer plugin. But this one is not recommended at all, hence the third position in our list.
The problem of adding google analytics to WordPress themes is that the moment you change or update the theme, your code will be gone. Meaning you’ll have to re-do everything to add google analytics again to your website.
Just like the previous method, you will need to copy the tracking code from google analytics. After that, there are two common ways to add that into your WordPress theme
Through header.php file
This is the more simple of the two methods. All you have to do is open the header.php file. Navigate to where <body> is and simply paste the code.
After that, you’ll simply need to save the code and upload it back to the server. That’s it.
Through Functions File
This one requires a bit of coding but don’t worry, we got you covered. For this, you will have to open up the function.php file first from your theme. After that you will need to add the following line of code
<?php
add_action('wp_head', 'wpb_add_googleanalytics');
function wpb_add_googleanalytics() { ?>
// Paste your Google Analytics tracking code from Step 4 here
<?php } ?>
Hit save after that and that’s it. You’re all set to go.
Now you might be wondering what’s the point of adding this method if it’s not reliable and easily lost and how to use Google analytics in this process?
The reason is that you get to monitor all the activities in real-time. The dashboard for google analytics opens on the left window and from there, you can get a real-time report on the activities on your site.
This saves you a lot of hassle, unlike the header and footer plugin.
We have already talked about the five types of reports you can obtain from google analytics.
- Real-time
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversion
These 5 comprehensive outlines help you to get all the information that you might need.
See also:
When Does the Tracking Code Send an Event Hit to Google Analytics?
How to Install Google Tag Manager on a WordPress Website?
Conclusion
Google as a platform itself is incredibly powerful and so are its features and services. With almost 25% of all websites running on WordPress, you have to have a clear vision and goal in order to grow your site among the pool of thousands.
Google Analytics is an amazing tool that lets you do exactly that. You can couple google analytics with google search tools to make the most out of the services as it outlines where your site ranks in the search engine.
We tried to be as detailed as possible with our method outlines. We hope it is comprehensive enough to give you a clear idea as to how to install google analytics as well as how to make the most out of it to grow your website.