How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress

Google Analytics helps you understand and analyze your website traffic, giving you valuable information about what is and isn’t working on your website. I’ll give you an overview of the information you can gain and show you step-by-step how to add Google Analytics to WordPress easily.

How does Google Analytics work?

Google provides you with a tracking code that you install on your website to track the activities of your website visitors. Google collects data about these activities and presents them in the form of statistics in your Google Analytics account.

Here’s what you can learn from the statistics:

• Who’s visiting your website — information about where your visitors are from geographically, and the devices they use to access your website.
• What your visitors do – see which pages they look at, how long they stay on your website, your bounce rate (the number of visitors who leave after just one page), and much more.
• When they’re visiting — find out exactly when people come to your website site by the hour, day, week, or month.
• How they find your website — see whether your visitors find your website through search engines, social media, links on other websites, or if they enter your website address directly.
• How they interact with your content — understand how people interact with your website, for example, the links they click on. If you define certain goals (like converting visitors to email subscribers) you can track that also.

Use The Information To Optimize Your Website

Instead of going with a gut feeling, you can take the information you learn from your analytics to eliminate the guesswork and optimize your website based on facts and data to do things like:

• Optimize traffic sources – invest more in those that are working exceptionally well, or increase your efforts on those that aren’t.
• Improve your content strategy to provide your visitors with more of what they’re interested in.
• Make technical improvements to your website to better serve your visitors.
• Track marketing campaigns to see how well they’re performing.
• Make improvements to pages that aren’t performing as well as you’d like.

How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress easily

Step. 1 – Sign up for Google Analytics

Go to https://accounts.google.com and sign in. If you don’t already have a Google account, click the blue Create account link to sign up for one.

Next, click the gray Sign up button Enter your details, then click the blue Get Tracking ID button

Step. 2 – Install the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)plugin.

Go to Plugins, Add New and search for Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP), click Install Now, then click Activate. 

Step. 3 – Authenticate with Google

Go to Google Analytics in the left side menu, then click the Authorize Plugin button, then click Get Access Code.

Click on your account, then click Allow, copy the code provided then go back and paste it into the box and click Save Access Code.

 

That’s it! You’ve successfully added Google Analytics to your WordPress website.

Note: Unless you want Google to record your activities, it’s a good idea to eliminate tracking yourself and any other site users. Click on Tracking Code under Google Analytics in the left side menu, then click the Exclude Tracking tab at the top. Select the user roles you don’t want tracked, then click Save. You’ll be able to view Google Analytics data right from your WordPress dashboard, but for a more in depth look, it’s best to view the data directly in your Google Analytics account.