Overview
In this article I will show you an easy way to setup Google Analytics for your website. Before we start, a quick explanation – what is it and what for do we need it? So, it is one of Google applications, like Gmail, Google Translate or Google Maps, available for free, that offers reports about website’s usage. It is very useful because we are able to track and analyze the traffic on our website. How many visitors, from where, which pages or posts visited most often, how much time on average spent on each page, bounce rate etc. – all such information can be gathered. It is like an information goldmine about web traffic and it’s absolutely free. If you care about growing the audience of your blog for example, it is essential to know who visited your site an when, what content they were reading, how did they interact with contents and how did they discover it in the first place. Using such insights you can improve your website to make it more attractive for the visitors.
The steps to set up Google Analytics for WordPress website are quite easy. Count about 30 minutes for the whole process. Let’s get started.
Create Google Analytics account
For this, go to GA site: https://www.analytics.google.com (if the link does not work, simply type “google analytics” in Google search, I noticed that they switch the link sometimes)
Here, depending on whether you already have a Google account or not, you will need to login with your credentials or create a new account. If you are using Gmail, then you can use the same account for GA.
Once you are logged in, find the Start measuring button on homepage to open the Account Setup screen. Here you need to fill in the name for your account, then after clicking Next button you proceed into Property Setup where you select some options, like reporting time zone, currency, business category etc. and accepts the Terms of service agreement.
Next you need to fill in your website address into Data stream window, to let GA know for which website it is supposed to collect traffic data. Click the Create stream button once all requested information is filled in.
You will see the Web Stream Details screen, showing that the data collection is not yet active (i.e you are not receiving any traffic data). This is normal, as to complete the process you need to include a Google Tag in your website’s code. Wait a minute! It was supposed to be super simple and now we are talking about touching the code? : ) No worries, there are tools to handle it. For the moment, just copy the to find the tag (i.e Tracking ID or Measurement ID– it’s simply a combination of few letters & numbers) that must somehow find a way into our code.
The options to do it include (1) manual copy-paste of a tracking code into the header section of your website code, (2) using website builders, like Wix and (3) using dedicated plugins that perform the code modification for us. They are shown when you click on View Tag Instructions on the Web Stream Details screen. However, my recommendation is to use the plugin – I’ve set up the analytics for my website this way. It was easy and it works well.
Add GA WordPress plugin
When searching for the proper plugin to use, I have found multiple recommendations for 2 plugins: (1) GA Google Analytics and (2) MonsterInsights and finally ended up using the first one. As it has worked perfectly for me, I am showing the way how to use this one.
Let’s begin with finding it on WordPress Dashboard. To do it click on Plugins menu, then Add New and in the search box type “GA google analytics”.
Install the plugin, it will take just a moment, then Activate it. Now you can go to Plugin Settings screen to paste our individual Tracking ID that you received in Google Analytics. Next check the “GA” and “Include tracking code and Save the changes. If you have any difficulties, you can ask the plugin Author for support.
Verify that it works well
Once all above steps completed, we must wait a bit for the Google Analytics to start receiving your data. It can take up to 48 hours. After that time (or earlier) we can verify the integration. To do that, open Data streams screen. It should be saying that the traffic data has been received. Alternately, you can open Real Time report and open your website. If tracking is properly connected to your website, you will see that there is a visitor currently viewing it.