How to Add Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site

Everybody wants to improve the performance of their websites. I am assuming you want that too. However, before you do that, you need to know the current statistics of your website.

While there are various tools available for this purpose, I suggest you use Google Analytics. As the name suggests, the tool will provide you with valuable data to help you analyze the website performance.

In today’s tutorial, I will show you how to integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress site.

Why Use Google Analytics

There are several reasons for you to use Google Analytics. Before we get started with the actual integration process, let’s take a moment to detect the obvious reasons to use Google Analytics.

Know More about Your Visitors

Everything you do on your website is targeted at your visitors. Therefore, having detailed knowledge about the visitors is an absolute must for you. This is where Google Analytics will help you the most. The handy tool will let you know the geographical location of your visitors along with their age, gender, interest, language, browser, screen resolution, operating system, and so on. Having access to all this information will help you make better decisions about your website.

Find Details about Visitor Activities

Google Analytics will offer detailed information about the visitor activities on your website. You can extract crucial information like which pages visitors like the most, how long they stay on the pages, and what their browsing pattern is. This will help you make small changes to enhance the user experience. What’s more, it is also possible to detect how many clicks a link or button receive, which makes it a lot easier to run A/B tests without using third-party tools.

When Do You Get the Most Visitors?

When using Google Analytics, you can easily detect the hours of the day when you are receiving the most amount of visitors. As a result, you can target that time to publish new posts on your website. If that time is out of your regular hours, you can schedule the content to be published during that time period.

Discover The Top Referrers

Another important feature of Google Analytics is the feature to find out the top referrers that send the most amount of visitors to your website. Depending on your website, this can be different things like social media, search engines, affiliate links, links from other websites, etc.

For instance, let’s assume that social media sends you a lot of visitors. In that case, Analytics will provide you with the number and percentage of visitors coming from each social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on. The same principle also applies to search engines and other sources.

Now that you know why it’s important to use Google Analytics, let’s find out how to integrate this handy tool with your WordPress site. The first step is to sign up for Google Analytics.

Signing Up with Google Analytics

You need to sign up with Google Analytics to use this service. Click here to go to the Google Analytics sign up page. If you already have a Gmail account, you can use that account here. However, if you don’t yet have one, you can create a free account by going to More options > Create account.

Once you have logged in, you will be taken to a page like the following –

Click the “Sign up” button on the right side. It will take you to this page –

It is possible to track both websites and mobile apps with your Analytics account. However, we will keep this discussion limited to the websites only.

You will find several options to provide the account name, website name, website URL, category, and the reporting time zone. Provide all the information and click the “Get Tracking ID” button at the bottom of the page.

In the next step, you have to agree to the terms of services. Take a quick look at the terms and if everything looks alright, click “I Accept.”

If you have completed these steps, you have successfully created a Google Analytics account. Now, let’s see how to integrate your Google Analytics account with your WordPress site.

Integrating Google Analytics with WordPress

There are several ways to integrate Google Analytics with WordPress. For this tutorial, I will use the Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights plugin.

Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress site. This will create a new menu item titled “Insights” in your dashboard menu. Go to Insights > Settings to configure the plugin options.

Click the “Authenticate with your Google account” button to start the process. This will open a new pop-up containing three steps. Click NEXT to move to the next step that looks like the following –

At this point, you have to choose the “Click To Get Google Code” button. This will open a new pop-up where you have to allow Monsterinsights to access your analytics account.

In the next step, you will be provided with a code. Copy the code and close the pop-up. Now, get back to your website and paste the copied code into the pop-up created by Monsterinsights. Click NEXT, and you will be asked to choose an analytics profile.

Click the drop-down menu to choose the website you added just a while back. Finally, click the NEXT button once again. This will finish the integration process. You can close the pop-up now.

Depending on the size of your website, it may take some time to sync all the data. Once the process is completed, you can check out all the data from the Insights > Dashboard page.

Final Words

Google Analytics provides you with crucial information about the overall condition of your website and the visitors. This information will help you take the necessary steps to improve the performance of your website and keep the visitors satisfied.

So, have you integrated your site with Google Analytics yet? How is it helping you to improve your website performance? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Miguel

I started this tech blog back in 2011 as a place to write down processes I took to fix my client systems and network. Now I write some tips and tricks to help others with the tech issues that one might encounter.

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