What Is a Google Analytics Plugin
What’s the one thing every good Analytics plugin should give you? Before we answer that, let’s accommodate everyone by briefly looking at what Google Analytics is.
Google Analytics is web-analytics software or a set of tools that track and report website traffic. These tools help you better understand your customers, their actions and interactions on your website.
At the end of the day, what you want from analytics is to understand your users better and use that understanding to give them a better and improved experience.
Therefore, every good analytics plugin should do more than just collect and present data. It should present the data you need and help you achieve your end goal. Whether that be more leads, conversions, sales, etc.
Why you might need a WordPress Google Analytics plugin ?
Using Google Analytics is a must if you want to make data-driven decisions about your website and business. It helps you understand where your visitors come from, their preferences, and how they use your website. You can also measure your marketing campaigns’ effectiveness and find out what keywords your content ranks best for.
However, Google Analytics can be challenging to understand for many beginners. It gives you access to vast amounts of information, so navigating its interface is not very straightforward. Unless you know what you’re looking for, it can be overwhelming to the average user.
Also, you need to integrate your Google Analytics account with your website, which is not an easy process. It typically involves an HTML tag to your site’s header – a tricky task if you’re not familiar with code, and not the easiest setup to maintain even if you are.
That’s where WordPress Google Analytics plugins come in handy. Most of them are easy to install, so there’s no need for you to edit your site’s code manually.
Many of them also give you an overview of the most critical metrics for your site directly in your WordPress dashboard. You can even set up automatic email reports, making it a lot easier to stay up-to-date with your campaigns.
Finally, some tools also help you set up other advanced types of Google Analytics tracking, such as tracking downloads/link clicks or enhanced tracking for eCommerce stores.
MonsterInsights
What Is MonsterInsights?
MonsterInsights is a popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It is a convenient way to turn data collected by Google Analytics into meaningful reports that can be used for real world action.
What’s Good About MonsterInsights?
MonsterInsights comes with a built-in Google Analytics Dashboard for your WordPress site, it’s easy to install and it shows you real time data. That’s difficult to beat!
Here are some features that come with:
- Audience Report
- Behavior Report
- Content Report
- Ecommerce Report
- Forms Report
- Search Console Report
Anything Not so Good About MonsterInsights?
MonsterInsights is really advanced, however, one of the most echoed opinions about the plugin is that the free version doesn’t do enough and that the pro version is overpriced. We’ll leave that up to you to decide.
MonsterInsights Pricing :
The free version of MonsterInsights is available in the WordPress directory. You can also purchase a premium version of the plugin to unlock features such as events tracking, ecommerce tracking and more.
You can get MonsterInsights at the followingprice points:- $199.00 for 1 site with 1-year support and updates.
- $399.00 for 5 sites with 1-year support and updates.
- $799.00 for 25 sites with 1-year support and updates.
Analytify
What Is Analytify?
From a Google Analytics Premium Partner, Analytify is a plugin that does more than insert tracking code in your website, it presents statistics under posts, pages and even custom post types
What’s Good About Analytify?
Wielding an impressive 1-Click Authentication process to add Google analytics tracking code to your website, Analytify is definitely a good option if you’re looking for a ‘codeless’ (painless) approach.
What’s more, as a technology partner of Google you can be confident that they must have some idea about what they’re doing.
What you get in the way of features:
- See traffic data for individual blog posts and pages
- Bounce rate of top pages: What’s happening when users come to your site
- List of top Countries
- List of top Cities
- Social Media Statistics
- List of top Referrers Browsers
- List of top Referrers
- Mobile device Statistics
Anything Not so Good About Analytify?
If you like to look at things only visually this may break your heart, but graphs are only for pro users, same goes for real-time statistics. So if these are fairly important to you, it may be necessary to consider upgrading or looking elsewhere.
Analytify Pricing
You can either get the free version of Analytify from WordPress.org or get the pro version by choosing one of four basic pricing plans on their website. They also have bundled offers to purchase different addon combinations together.
- $39 for 1 site with 1-year support and updates.
- $69 for 3 sites with 1-year support and updates.
- $99 for 10 sites with 1-year support and updates.
- $199 for 100 sites with 1-year support and updates.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration
What Is WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration?
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration provides the desired link between WooCommerce and Google Analytics. This means that if you’re a store owner looking to track things like sales in your analytics (and why wouldn’t you), you can!
What’s Good About WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration?
Since the WooCommerce 2.1 release, the Google Analytics integration for WooCommerce is no longer part of the WooCommerce plugin. This has resulted in a much improved plugin with more accurate stats.
The features you’ll get:- Adding tracking code to your site
- Set Google Analytics code to support Display Advertising
- Use Universal Analytics instead of Classic Google Analytics
- Anonymize IP Addresses (Comply with certain privacy laws)
- Add event tracking code for Add to Cartactions
Anything Not so Good About WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration?
Would you like to know nearly everything about what’s going on in your store, this integration doesn’t make that possible. While the plugin is greatly improved, it doesn’t track some events to get you more advanced data.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration Pricing
The WooCommerce integration is open source and available for free in the plugin directory, therefore you can get some of that much needed ecommerce data into your analytics.
Google Analytics by ShareThis
What is google analytics ?
Google Analytics by ShareThis is a tool that provides you with the ability to add the tracking code of Google Analytics to your website without having to go through the extra steps of modifying core website files to do so. All you need to do in order to gain access to the features provided by this plugin is to login to Google Analytics from your WordPress dashboard and select the website that you would like to link to it.
Once this plugin has been fully installed, you can see the reports that are provided to you by Google Analytics directly within your admin dashboard on WordPress. By using this plugin, you have the ability to remove an extra step and save time whenever you want to check how well (or otherwise) your website is doing.
One notable feature of this specific plugin is the inclusion of “Trending Content“, which is a useful feature that allows you to more easily identify the current trends that are occurring within your site traffic. This feature will show you content on your website which may be performing substantially better than the rest of your content, which should help you ascertain how to take this content and expand upon it to promote successful strategies to other pages of your website. This plugin is entirely free and entirely responsive, which means that it works properly on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
jetpack
What is jetpack ?
Jetpack is a popular multipurpose plugin from Automattic, the same company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. It helps you to do of things, which we’ve talked about in detail in this post.
With the paid plans, Jetpack can also help you to set up Google Analytics and Enhanced Ecommerce tracking. The latter is the same feature I talked about with Analytify in the previous section.
If you just want a tool to add the Google Analytics tracking script to WordPress, you can find plenty of good free options, so don’t pay for Jetpack just for its Google Analytics features.
But if you’re already using Jetpack, or if you’re interested in other paid Jetpack features (such as automatic backups via VaultPress), then you may as well take advantage of the Google Analytics feature.
Additionally, if you have an eCommerce store, the Enhanced Ecommerce tracking feature is nice because Jetpack makes it really easy to toggle specific metrics on and off.
Jetpack’s Google Analytics feature is only available on the Premium or Professional tiers, which cost $99 and $299 a year, respectively. Both plans also get you access to a ton of other features, though, which helps to justify the cost.
Lara's Google Analytics
What Is Lara’s Google Analytics?
Lara’s Google Analytics is a plugin that saves you a trip to the Google Analytics website by introducing a full width Google Analytics dashboard widget into your admin area.
What’s Good About Lara’s Google Analytics?
For those that like to keep things centralized, this plugin is for you. Not only does Lara’s Google Analytics insert the latest Google Analytics tracking code to all your pages, it also adds a full width Google Analytics dashboard widget for WordPress admin interface.
Enjoy the following features:
- Enjoy Beautiful Graphs At Full Width
- See Pages visited in your site
- See Browsers used to view your website
- View Languages spoken by your website visitors
- Know the Operating Systems used by your website visitors
- Know the Device Types used by your website visitors
Anything Not so Good About Lara’s Google Analytics?
The plugin’s documentation isn’t exactly moving, so you’ll mostly have to figure out your way around the plugin on your own.
Lara’s Google Analytics Pricing
Available for free and at the following prices:- $14.99 for 1 site with 1-year support and updates.
- $49.99 for unlimited installations owned by you or your company only (one time)
- $99.99 for unlimited installations owned by you or your clients (one time)
GA Google Analytics
If you don’t want to see reports on your website but simply define what is tracked, you may want to consider GA Google Analytics.
Developed by WordPress veteran Jeff Starr, the plugin allows you to integrate Google Analytics into your website by simply stating your GA tracking ID.
GA Google Analytics also lets you add support for display advertising, enhanced link attribution, IP anonymization, and forcing SSL. There’s an option for adding custom code too.
The pro version of the plugin is available from only $15 for a one-website license. It greatly expands what Google Analytics tracks on your website.
Additional tracking options include tracking opt-out boxes, disabling tracking of all logged-in users, and disabling tracking of search results and post archives.
GA Google Analytics features
- Blazing fast performance
- Does one thing and does it well
- Drop-dead simple and easy to use
- Regularly updated and “future proof”
- Stays current with the latest tracking code
- Includes tracking code in header or footer
- Includes tracking code on all WordPress web pages
- Includes option to add your own custom markup
- Sleek plugin Settings page with toggling panels
- Option to disable tracking of admin-level users
- Option to enable page tracking in the Admin Area
- Works with or without Gutenberg Block Editor
- Easy to customize the tracking code
ExactMetrics(GADWP)
Formerly known as Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP), this plugin was acquired by Awesome Motive in 2018 and rebranded to ExactMetrics.
Yes, Awesome Motive is the same company behind the MonsterInsights plugin above.
ExactMetrics is the second-most popular Google Analytics plugin at WordPress.org, with its active install count at more than a million sites.
Despite now being under the same umbrella, there are still plenty of differences between MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics, which is why ExactMetrics gets its own spot on this list.
First, in keeping with its GADWP roots, ExactMetrics is 100% free. Additionally, Syed and Awesome Motive have publicly said they intend to keep it as a 100% free product.
So, while MonsterInsights locks some features behind the paid version, you’ll never need to pay for ExactMetrics.
From a feature perspective, ExactMetrics offers many of the same features you get in MonsterInsights (even some that require the paid version of MonsterInsights, which is great if you’re on a budget). For example :
- Enhanced Link Attribution
- Real-time stats
- Affiliate link/file tracking
- Custom event tracking
- See traffic by author
With that being said, I find the MonsterInsights interface to be better designed and easier to use. So, if you don’t need access to those advanced features for free, you may be better off with the free version of MonsterInsights instead.
What’s the Best Google Analytics Plugin for You?
As is always the case with any list such as this, there’s not a single plugin that’s the ‘best’ option in all scenarios — it depends on the features you want and what you’re willing to pay.
If you just want a simple way to add the Google Analytics tracking code to WordPress and don’t care about in-dashboard stats, go with the lightweight GA Google Analytics plugin. With the paid version, you can also get access to additional features to control where/when to add the tracking code.
On the other hand, if you do want to see your stats inside your WordPress dashboard (along with some other features), you have several good options.
If you don’t need too detailed stats, I really like the official Site Kit by Google plugin as it unifies the data from multiple Google services in your WordPress dashboard.
If you want more detailed reports, such as the ability to drill-down by post types or authors, then check out:
- MonsterInsights if you want the best dashboard and are willing to pay.
- ExactMetrics if you want a free option with a slightly less convenient dashboard.
MonsterInsights also has a free version — you only need to pay if you want the more advanced features.
Finally, I think Analytify is great if you’re running an eCommerce store and the WP Google Analytics Event plugin is convenient if you specifically want to set up your own custom event tracking.