How to Add Google Analytics to a WordPress Website with Ease?

Have you ever figured out who is visiting your website? Knowing your audience and their behaviour towards your site can do so much. When you know how your audience interacts with your site, things become more beneficial to grow. Adding analytics to your website is the best way to do this. Adding analytics lets you know every single insight about audiences on your site. This is where you need to choose the right analytics services. 

Out of so many popular services, we are using Google Analytics for WordPress to give the best possible results for your site. This is by far the most popular service, letting you know every possible insight about the users. This is free of charge and, most importantly, powered by Google itself. In this blog, you will find everything related to adding Google Analytics and methods to add. 

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a metric by Google that tells you about your website’s traffic. This is somehow a part of the Google Marketing platform with a wider range of analytical tools. Businesses need to consider this as it helps strengthen the overall insights of your website.

For any business, whether it is a small or wide area, Google Analytics plays a vital role in letting you know about the audience. It helps track areas most prone to traffic, average session length, pages visited per session, and more. 

Why use Google Analytics on your WordPress website?

Despite its persuasive power, Google Analytics has several benefits to help you understand it. You should know the right benefits of using Google Analytics for your WordPress website, ensuring consistent growth. So, here are some of the most useful benefits of having Google Analytics on your website: 

• Ease of Use: The prime reason you should get Google Analytics is the ease of use. This is the simplest way to know about your audience and their behaviour towards your website. There is no need to have technical skills to add Google Analytics.
• Easy to Learn: Just like it is easy to use, learning Google Analytics isn’t difficult. At first, you might get overwhelmed by the data, but it seems faster to grasp everything for your website. The only complexity comes when it counts the overall data for your website, letting you know the in-depth details. Once you know how to access the details, the tool becomes intuitive to use and know about your website. 
• Link with Google Ads: Also, Google Analytics can be easily linked with Google ads along with more popular marketing tools. This helps in letting you know how the ads are performing on your site and their effects on your site. This Woocommerce Google analytics integration even helps in importing the right goals and e-commerce transactions on your Google Ads account. Thus, it gives a complete picture of how the audience is interacting with your site, along with which areas need improvement.
• Automatic Data Collection: One of the biggest benefits of using Google Analytics is that it automatically collects data. Even when all the analytics tools do this, Google provides it while analyzing the website data. This is where your half-work is released when Google automatically gets the entire data collected for you, which you manually need to do. This saves the owners time and allows them to focus on more important elements that need to be embraced. And this is why businesses opt for Google Analytics to bring out the best insights for their businesses.
• Free of Cost: Apart from all its benefits, the most important thing to know is that this tool is completely free of charge. And why would anybody not opt to use Google Analytics, which is free of charge and collects data easily? Also, it does not cost anything to install or register. Unlike this, other analytics tools charge fees for their subscriptions. 
• Improves bounce rates: Another benefit that makes Google Analytics worth using is that it lets you know about the bounce rates on your site. Bounce rate is the percentage of users leaving your website without visiting any page on your site. And when you get to know about this, you can easily make changes to your website. This becomes super helpful as you get to know about the flaws of your website along with being able to correct them. This is a quality of good businesses that always look to improve their digital firms, and Google Analytics does this. 
• Understanding the Audience: All you need is to know your audience and their behaviour towards your website, right? Google Analytics does this too, and this is another striking benefit you must know. It becomes a vital fact to know about your audience and understand their needs to improve services and products. Also, Google Analytics helps in collecting pieces of information like customer location, age, and interests. This eventually helps business owners to get deeper facts about the users and how they can improve. 
• Finding the Best Content: Your website content is the only thing that attracts you, or sometimes bad content can degrade your website, leading to traffic loss. However, you must know what type of content the audience likes. This can be a bit confusing, but not when you have Google Analytics. It tells you which content is getting higher views or pay rates. You should know which content gets more traffic, and it should be applied all over the website.

How to Setup Google Analytics in WordPress? 

So, finally, we are here to let you know how to set up Google Analytics for your website. Here, we are using two methods to add Google Analytics to your website. Both methods are simple to use, but you will choose one to add. Above all, before getting any method initiated, you need to first create a Google Analytics account. And things will be smooth if you already have an existing Google account. 

You simply need to sign up for your Google account, and it will prompt you to join the Analytics service. It will next ask you to provide an account name, and the next step will ask you to choose between web or app analytics. You should select the “Web” option as you are working on a website. You need to then fill up the vital details of your website, and it will then provide a code for Google Analytics for later use. And now let’s begin with the two methods to add Google Analytics to your site. 

Method 1: Use a WordPress Plugin

Method 1 is the simplest among the two, as we are using a plugin to get the Google Analytics integration on your website.

Here we are using the plugin “Site Kit by Google Plugin,” and this will automatically insert the Google Analytics tracking code. This will report back to the dashboard area. The plugin seems highly useful, is easy to use, and is powered by Google itself.

So to begin with, you need to first install and activate the Site Kit by Google plugin on your website. Once the plugin is activated, it will appear in the dashboard area of your WordPress website. 

You can then tap on the option “Site Kit by Google,” which will take you to its page with the setup wizard. The setup wizard will help you connect your Google Analytics account to your website.

You need to then choose which profile you’ll need to track, and you are good to go. Complete the recommended settings and installation. 

Once you have completed the setup wizard, Google Analytics lets you access the information right from the dashboard area. 

You can get informed about the sessions, average session length, views per page, and bounce rates too. This is by far the simplest method to get Google Analytics for your site. 

Method 2: Adding Custom Code Snippet

If you are a coding professional and love to use codes, then this method is for you to add Google Analytics on WordPress. However, this is not a recommended method, as not everyone can adapt to this method. Before using this code you also need to setup Google tag manager in WordPress website

With that said, not using the plugin gets you to add advanced customization. And this method is certainly prohibited if you are a beginner and do not know coding.

Also, this method comes with a risk that any incorrect code can create a mess that will impact badly on the website. So, if you are still ready to accept, we are now proceeding with the steps.

Firstly, you need to copy the Google Analytics codes that were provided at the initial stage of account setup. Simply copy that code to the clipboard. 

If you want Google Analytics to properly track your website, then you must add the code to the header part of the site.

This can be done by editing the header.php file and pasting the Google Analytics code under the <body> tag. 

And once this is done, you need to save the file and ensure to re-upload your site. That will allow you to view your analytics report from the dashboard area.

Best Practices to Use Google Analytics for Your WordPress Website 

Most of the time, business owners get Google Analytics but unfortunately fail to know its actual worth. They fail to use it effectively and manage its potential, which results in the best results for their website. So, here are some of the vital tips you need to note down when you are using Google Analytics for your site. 

Setup the Right Goals 

You should decide on the right goals when you are dealing with the marketing world. When you do this, your targets are defined, and you can reach the goal easily. And with this, you can have a perfect future insight into your website. 

Organizing the Google Analytics account

Organizing your Google Analytics account becomes another most important practice that takes into light. What this means is sometimes you can be distracted and lose focus from your goals by so much information from Google Analytics.

So, it is advised to know which information needs to be accessed, and you should organize your account for this. When you organize your account, it becomes easier to focus on the right information. 

Use the segment feature.

Another one is using the segment feature, which is one of the most powerful features of using Google Analytics. This feature is there for users to filter out the data and see the live demographics.

This segment feature can be filtered by four sections, including age, location, people who made purchases, and more. 

Google Analytics Alternatives 

Apart from using Google Analytics, there are more service options available for your consideration. 

These options can be used when the Google service is a little bit complicated and is running out of its version. 

Most of the time, the alternatives are paid, and no doubt Google services are free of charge, and you get everything done perfectly. 

However, the alternatives bring advanced features and functionalities with user-friendly packages. Some of the alternatives are Yandex Metrica, Heap, and Jetpack Status.

Conclusion 

This was all about adding and using Google Analytics for your WordPress website. Analytics is something that every website must integrate with. This is the feature that brings light to how your audience is interacting with your site. 

Analytics is the best way to know about your users and their behaviour towards your site. It gives a complete report about views per session, page views, and bounce rates. Here, we have marked the light on Google Analytics and its services. Using Google Analytics is highly beneficial, as it comes with a lot of benefits. You might have come across the blog. This is free of charge and does so much just to give you the right insights. We have mentioned two distinctive methods for you to add Google Analytics to your WordPress website. So, you can now choose to add Google Analytics in the most suitable form.