If you have created a WordPress website/blog, you would surely like to keep track of the visitors coming to your website and know about their activities on your website. You can use this information to optimize your content accordingly. Also if you are running a paid campaign like PPC, you will need this information to manage your campaign. Google Analytics is one best way of generating this data in real-time. You can set up Google Analytics in a WordPress Website quite easily. But before you install Google Analytics you must know what it is and how to use it. Then only you will be able to take full advantage of it. So lets begin with basics of Google Analytics :
What is Google Analytics :
Google analytics is a tool offered by Google to analyze the performance of websites. It provides you with the most detailed information about your website. As this information is real-time, it will help in correcting the mistakes you are making on your website. It analyzes your website on various parameters like the number of visitors – overall or pagewise, time spent by visitors on your website etc.
Parameters Analyzed on Google Analytics :
1. Real-time Visitors Analytics:
1.1. Overview – In this section, you can see the overall real-time visitor analytics like how many visitors are there currently on your website, where are they from, which URL they are on etc.
1.2. Location – In this section, you get to know the location of the current visitors on your website. Visitors are graphed on the map as well as in a table by Country, City etc.
1.3. Traffic Source – It shows that how these visitors reached your web page. They may have come directly typing your web page URL or by searching on google or clicking on a link on social media site or any other referral website. This information is very helpful in understanding your visitor’s behaviors
1.4. Content – Here you can see on what page the current visitor is on your website.
1.5. Event – It shows the status of the recorded events triggered by the visitor.
1.6. Conversions – Here you can check whether the conversions are taking place and your goals are achieved.
2. Audience Analytics :
2.1. Overview – It gives an overall idea of the audience analytics.
2.2. Active Users – Here you can see the number of all the visitors (new + returning) who visited your website at least one in the selected time period.
2.3. LifeTime Value – Though Lifetime value is a way complex term to be reported on this tool. But still, Google is trying to help you understand the lifetime value of your visitors measured by revenue and engagement metrics. It is in Beta Version yet.
2.4. Cohort Analysis – It is in Beta Version yet.
2.5. Audience
2.6. User Explorer
2.7. Demographics – Here you can analyze your audience based on their Demography like – Gender, Age etc. It will be helpful data in optimizing your content, service or product offering. You will get to know whether you are reaching to your target audience or not.
2.8. Interests – Here you can see your audience divided on the basis of their interests like Business, Sports, Games etc.
2.9. Geo – In this section, you can check your audience analysis based on their language and location.
2.10. Behavior – This section will give you an idea about your visitor’s behavior based on their tendency to returning to your website. You can check it on basis of – New vs Returning, Frequency vs Recency and Engagements.
2.11. Technology – Here you can see what browser your audience is using and also the network service they are using to visit your website. Browser information can be helpful for you to optimize your website based on browser performance. Network information though is not very useful for small business but can be helpful for large-scale businesses.
2.12. Mobile – In this section, you will get to know what devices your audience is using to visit your website – Desktop, Mobile, Tablet.
2.13. Cross-Device – It is in Beta Version Yet.
2.14. Custom – You can define a custom variable to analyze your audience on those variable. It is a quite a high-end tasks.
2.15. BenchMarking – You can Benchmark your audience channel, location, and devices here.
3. Acquisition Analytics :
3.1. Overview – It gives you an overview off all the Acquision metrics.
3.2. All Traffic – Here you can see all the traffic coming from varius sources like Organic, Paid, Social, Referrals etc. This section has sub-sections like Channels, Treemaps, Source/Medium, Referrals.
3.3. Google Ads – It gives you analytic about the visitors coming from Google ads. It also has sections like Campaigns, Treemaps, Keywords, Search Queries, Hours of the day, Final URLs to give a better-segmented view of analytics. To activate this section you have to connect your Analytics account with the Google Ads (known as Adwords earlier) account.
3.4. Search Console – Here you can see the metrics from your Search Console (known as Google Webmaster earlier). It provides information in subsections like – Landing pages, countries, devices, queries. For this, to work you got to connect your analytics account with the Search console account.
3.5. Social – This section provides you analytics about the visitors coming from the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. It has sub-sections like – Overview, Network Referrals, Landing Pages, Conversions, Plugins & User Flow.
3.6. Campaigns – Here you can find analytics about your campaigns. It is also divided into subsections – All campaign, paid keywords, organic keywords, cost analysis.
4. Behavior Analytics :
4.1. Overview – Here you can see the overview of the behavior analytics.
4.2. Behavior Flow – This a very interesting section. It gives a graphical view of the visitors behavior on your website. You can see the visitors journey on your website like how they move from one page to another. This gives you an idea about the navigation system of your website whether you are able to guide your visitor to the targetted page or not and can optimize the navigation accordingly.
4.3. Site Content – In this section, you can see the number of visitors on a particular page of your website with details like the time spent on the pages etc. It has sub-section – All pages, Content drill down, Landing pages & Exit pages.
4.4. Site Speed – Your website’s speed analytics will be found in this section. Speed is one big factor in SEO and Quality score of your website. It has sub-section – Overview, Page timings, Speed suggestions & User timings.
4.5. Site Search – If you are using Google Site Search on your website then you can get its analytics in this section like how many visitors used site search on your website. It has sub-section – Overview, Usage, Search terms, Search pages.
4.6. Event – It gives you an idea about the Events on your website which actually are user interactions with the content which can be tracked independently from the website. It has sub-sections – Overview, Top events, Pages & Event flow.
4.7. Publishers – It has Adsense and Ad Exchange reports. Sub-section – Overview, Publisher pages, Publisher referrers.
5. Conversion Analytics :
5.1. Goals – It has statistics about your conversion goals.
5.2. E-commerce – If your website is an E-commerce website then you can analyze your sales data too here.
5.3. Multi-Channel Funnels – It shows how a customer interacts with your multiple digital channels.
5.4. Attributions
Now when you are ready with the basic know-hows of the Google Analytics lets see how we can integrate it with our WordPress website. There are 2 ways you can accomplish this. Before adding / integrating or installing Google analytics with your WordPress Website you have to create a Google Analytics account :
Creating a Google analytics Account :
Creating a Google analytics account is super easy. Just login to analytics.google.com with your Gmail Id and Password. Follow the steps to create this account for your website. Once the account is created you can connect it with your website in one of the following ways.
Ways To Integrate Google Analytics with WordPress Website :
1. Direct Integration – If you are tech savvy and have good idea about the code structure of WordPress, this is the best way to go with as it will not bring any additional overhead to your site. While you would be creating your account, it will ask you to add a particular code into the head section of your website. Just copy that code and add it the header.php file of your WordPress website theme. Done !
2. Install a related Plugin – If you are not versed with WordPress coding then there are several plugins available to accomplish this task for you. Few plugin are listed below :
a. Google Analytics via ShareThis – Get This
b. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights – Get This
Hope you liked this article and it had been helpful to you. If you have any related / unrelated queries please ask in comments, I will be happy to help you.
