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When it comes to websites, the audience is everything: no audience = really not a lot of point in even having a website at all! So how best to find out how popular your website is (or isn’t)? How many people are viewing it? How many people return to it? Where do your visitors come from? These are all essential questions for growth and direction. If your website runs WordPress, one of the best (and easiest) ways of finding all this out is to use Google Analytics. But how?
Let’s take a look…
How to Use Google Analytics with WordPress:
Direct link to watch the video over on YouTube.
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to take a look at how to install Google Analytics on a WordPress website, step-by-step. But why should you watch this video? Aren’t there dozens of videos on how to install Google Analytics on a WordPress website? It’s true there are, but in this video I’m going to show you exactly the right plug-in to use so that you never need to worry about your analytics code again, even if Google changes all of their algorithms and changes the rules on where your code is supposed to go. This plug-in will take care of all of it. So let’s take a look at how to make this happen, step by step. The first step is to create your Google Analytics account. I’m here at the Google Analytics home page. Now this is really just a marketing piece. To really use analytics you want to sign in. And we’re going to sign in here at the top to Analytics. Now an interesting thing about Google properties is that you can use the same account across all of them, so if you already have a gmail account or a YouTube account or a Google Drive account or any of those ,you can use that same username and password here with analytics. So the next thing we’re going to do is click sign up. They want to know if we’re tracking a website or a mobile app we’re going to choose website and it’s already selected there and then we have to create an account name and this can be pretty much anything. And what’s interesting is that you can have more than one tracking ID per account. Aince this is our first one we’re not too concerned about that. So I’m going to create one called Coworkerpro and then it wants to know the name of our website. Now the site I’m putting this on is a staging site for Coworkerpro so I’m going to call it Coworkerpro Staging and then wants to know the website URL so it’s just the domain name like that. Then they want to know a bunch of information about our site and this is actually optional so you don’t have to put it in if you don’t want. I’m going to put in computers and electronics. The time zone can be useful. I’m in Eastern. And then Google wants to know if they may share your data with other services and this is entirely up to you. I’m going to choose no because this is really more of a testing account. And now I’m going to click get tracking ID. And before I can I need to accept this service agreement. There we are. Now this is our tracking ID. Now in the old days you would have to remember this tracking ID and maybe even all of this code but with WordPress we don’t need to do that and I can show you why. Because our next step is to install a plug-in. We’re here at our WordPress dashboard now go to Plugins → Add New. So we’re going to search for “Monster Insights” and here we get Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights. That’s the one we want. “But what’s so great about Monster Insights?” you ask. Well it connects to Google in a unique way. First of all it doesn’t ask you for your analytics code like most plugins do and it doesn’t just take that code and stick it in the header or the footer. The Monster Insights plugin actually connects to Google and integrates your analytics account into your website. That way it’s actually in communication with the Google Analytics website It learns things from Google and it tells Google things about your site and when Google makes changes the Monster Insights plugin knows, and it knows how to change its own code, and where to put it, and how to move it, and when. All of these things are an advantage over a less fully featured plugin that simply takes your analytics code and pastes it in. So let’s click install now and then activate. Now from here we want to configure the Google Analytics settings and we can do that either from this nav here on the left, this link here on the plugins page, or right at the top there’s a banner that says “Please configure your Google Analytics settings.” So let’s click that. And right here at the top it says Google Authentication. It wants to authenticate with my Google account so I’m going to click this button, I’m going to choose the Google user that I used to log in to Analytics, and then I’m going to choose “allow”. Now we need to pick a profile. Since my Google user only has one profile we can simply say all “website data”. If we wanted to use a different Google account we could, and if we wanted to just bail out and not do this you could click here, but we’re going to click “complete authentication”. And there we are! Remember our UA code here that was also right here? The plugin went to Google for us got all the right code and put it in just the right place. Not only that, if there are changes in the future with how Google manages this the plug-in will update itself and put the new code in the right place so you don’t have to think about it in the future anymore. If you want one last test about whether or not this is working, we can copy this number, go to the home page, I’m going to scroll down to the content area, and right click and “View Page Source”. And now we’re going to search for that number. And there it is. And this is all all that google tracking code that you did not have to put in because the plugin was great. So let’s review. First you need to create a Google account or use an existing one. Then we went to the analytics page and filled out their signup form but we didn’t do anything with the information that they gave us. We didn’t need to do anything with the UA tracking code or even all that JavaScript that we saw. Instead we installed Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights. Once it was installed we simply had to authenticate. And we looked over the settings to make sure it’s working right. This process used to be much more complicated but now, because of this excellent plugin and WordPress it’s now quite simple. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress check out WinningWP com.
Anything to add?
