When you build a website, your #1 goal is to increase visitors and traffic. In order to do so efficiently (and run effective marketing campaigns), you need to be able to view and analyze important data like:
- Who visits your website?
- What do people do when they are on your website?
- When do people visit your website?
- How do people find your website?
- How do people interact with your content?
By seeing and tracking the visitor activity, you can focus on the correct marketing strategies that work for your site and eliminate the strategies that don’t work. Analytics helps you eliminate the guesswork and focus on stats that matter, so you can make data driven-decisions
Installing Google analytics is easy and well worth it! Today we are sharing these easy steps with you!
- Make an account – If you do not have a Google Analytics account yet, make sure to visit their website and create one. Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and log into your WordPress website. (Note: you will be presented with your Google Analytics tracking code. You can copy this tracking code because you will need to enter it on your WordPress site. We suggest leaving the analytics browser tab open as you may need to revisit it.)
- Install the plugin on WordPress – On WordPress: You can download it from the WordPress directory or just go to Plugins > Add New on your sidebar and type “Google Analytics“. There are multiple plugins for WordPress, that can do the job – we suggest this one or this one.
- Activate the plugin: Once you have downloaded the plugin – go to Plugins> Installed and then click “activate” on the plugin.
- Insert You Google Analytics ID: As a final step, you just need to go to the settings of the plugin and insert your Google tracking ID. If you didn’t keep the page open and need to find your Analytics ID: Go to your analytics account, then from the menu, select ADMIN > PROPERTY SETTING. Copy the Tracking ID from there. (It starts with UA-). Now, go back to WordPress and go to your analytics plugins settings (If you do not see your plugin options on your sidebar: check under your sidebars WordPress “settings” menu in the left sidebar then look for Google Analytics. ) Once you are on the settings page, you should see a field called GA Tracking code. Simply paste your GA tracking code there and click save. Also, don’t forget to check the option of excluding your own visits from the tracking (you do not want your personal visits tracked as this will not be beneficial to your data)
Note: The plugin may ask you to authenticate the first time, so just follow the instructions on the screen and make sure you are signed into your Google Analytics account.
That’s it! Now you are all set and know how to add Google Analytics to WordPress. You can see your statistics right from the Dashboard and focus on getting more traffic!
We hope this helped you learn how to install Google Analytics on WordPress. Having trouble? Let us know, we are here to help!