How to add analytics to WordPress

Do you need to analyze the data on your WordPress website? If you want to know more about how your users interact with the website’s content, pages, services, and products in WordPress and make the best decisions, you need to pick the best analytics tool for WordPress and integrate it into your WordPress website.

This article will discuss the benefits of analytics tools from step one and explain why you need them in your WordPress website. Then we will introduce you to the various analytics tools out there and share beneficial information about them to help you choose the best analytics tools for WordPress based on your needs.

Adding Analytics tools to WordPress is an essential task for analyzing website performance to get best results in your business. Analytics tools for WordPress examine how your audiences and customers relate to your website from different dimensions and show this information in great detail. Adding analytics to WordPress is one of the first steps when a website is ready to launch.

There are many tools available today for analyzing a website in WordPress. In this article, We evaluate the most important features that an analytics tool for WordPress should have, and then we will explore the different analytics tools on the market, plus the features and benefits of each of them. Finally, we will introduce you to the best analytics tools for WordPress by presenting various aspects of it and showing you how to use it in WordPress.

• Why should we have analytics in WordPress?
  • Site engagement and performance
    • Grasp which posts and pages have the most visitors
    • Understand your website performance fluctuations
    • Get ideas for better content generation
    • Discover your audiences and make strategic decisions
    • Know what your visitors do in your website using a customer journey view tool
    • Find out how visitors end up on your website
    • Determine peak visiting hours
    • Learn why visitors lose interest
    • Know where your visitors are from
  • Business performance
    • Sales analytics
    • Product analytics
    • Customer analytics
• What features should a good analytics tool have?
• What are the best analytics tools For WordPress?
  • Growmatik
  • Google Analytics
• What’s next?

Why should we have analytics in WordPress?

The importance of marketing analytics becomes clear when we want to extract key website information and make decisions based on the information we receive from them and plan for the future. Also, it’s helpful when we want to evaluate the results of the things we did in the past.
To make significant and fundamental improvements in digital marketing strategy, using analytics is the best solution for evaluation because the facilities it provides to the user cover a vast range of marketing aspects. In the following, we will discuss the key reasons and benefits of using analytics tools for WordPress.

Site engagement and performance

Grasp which posts and pages have the most visitors

Checking which pages and posts on a WordPress website are the most visited is one of the most common reasons people use an analytics tool. With this data, you can figure out which contents on your website are popular and which need to be improved. It helps you to focus more on your top-performing pages and optimize them to achieve more conversions.

Understand your website performance fluctuations

Understanding the changes in your website’s performance is also one of the most important factors in determining a digital strategy that can be achieved using analytics tools. User performance on the site involves key details such as the amount of time spent on a page, the number of clicks on each page, actions taken by the user on different pages is valuable information that provides you with a snapshot of the performance of that page.

At some point in time, the number of users visiting the site may be very high, and you may want to continue this trend. Therefore, knowing more about these visitors and their referring source is the most useful data you can have. Analytics provides all of this data for you. There may also be a significant reduction in the number of visitors to specific pages or websites at other times; of course, you need to be aware of the reason behind this to address the site’s weaknesses and do something about it.

Get ideas for better content generation

Content creation is essential for every single website, But not all topics will perform well on your website. The analytics tool will help you identify which topics generated more traffic and conversions and, according to that, you can identify the best ideas for better content creation. Similarly, tools like Google Search Console are very beneficial for finding which terms are being searched most often to give you ideas for the next articles and pages.

Discover your audiences and make strategic decisions

Learning about your audience is one of the best ways to  develop a suitable strategy for the website, since it will help you serve them better. If you do this part well, you will reduce advertising costs and serve users the exact thing they need on your site in the shortest time and optimize conversion rates.

Know what your visitors do in your website using a customer journey view tool

Features like the number of page views, visitors’ location and other basic reports are available in almost all analytics tools in WordPress. But most of them don’t offer customer journey view tools. This tool will help you see your customers’ journey at a glance and get several valuable insights about issues on your website. How easy is it for shoppers to interact with your company? Which channels, sources, products, landing pages, etc. are performing well on your website and which are not? You can get all this information with the Growmatik customer journey mapping tool.

Find out how visitors end up on your website

This information is easily accessible via something known as referral reports. Referral reports provide a wealth of information about how your online strategies are driving traffic to your site. It shows you the number of visitors coming from social media, search engines, the advertisements you placed on other sites, and more.

Determine peak visiting hours

With some of the analytics tools on the market you will be able to easily identify the peak viewing hours of different pages of the website, such as products, service and blog posts. Now, with this information in hand, you can publish your posts during peak hours or put your special products and offers on the site to be more visible to your audience. This encourages the users to buy, view, ask and generally take any action.

Learn why visitors lose interest

By using analytics data and comprehensive tracking of site users, you can get a better understanding of why visitors lose interest. This data will make you well aware of the website’s weaknesses and will help you adopt a new strategy to satisfy your users and customers.

There can be many reasons for user dissatisfaction with your pages or posts. The followings are some of the most important reasons for the decrease in user interest in the website:

• The term the user searched is not related to your page.
• Providing insufficient information about the product or service to the customer
• Existence of technical problems on the website
• Improper internal linking
• Lack of quick access to the customer’s desired products

Know where your visitors are from

Another important advantage of an analytics tool is gaining access to the user’s location. Of course, this information  will give you much more value when combined with other data. By knowing the geographical information of your users, you will understand what language they speak and what their interests are. Also, you’ll be able to discover what services these people are interested in. If the WordPress analytics tool you choose has the marketing automation tool alongside analytics functionality, you can segment your audiences and change content based on location on WordPress and show them exactly what they are actually interested in.

Business performance

For sure, the ongoing growth of any business is what every manager wants. Analytics tools are the best choice for improving business performance and measuring top KPIs. Using analytics, it is possible to compare current site traffic with results obtained in the past. By using an analytics tool, you will have many ways to do this to grow your business significantly.

Sales analytics

Every sales activity is trackable. Just you need to find out which KPIs best show the performance of your Woocommerce store. Sales analysis helps you to measure the profitability of your marketing campaigns and improve them for the future. Some KPIs you can track in sales analytics are Google search performance, conversion rate, average acquisition cost, shopping cart abandonment rate, average order value, customer lifetime value and more.

Product analytics

Product analysis is the evaluation of the product’s price, features, availability, appearance and any other aspect of the product that might affect its sale. You may have focused on a product on your website that is not something that customers are into and won’t sell. In this case, you can apply some changes to the product features or description or address any issue you identified for the product. You may also need to replace the product with something else to attract more customers.

Customer analytics

Customer analytics includes techniques such as information management, segmentation, data visualization, etc. The business owner uses these to understand the customer better to provide more personalized suggestions for the customers. Customer analytics, if done properly, has many benefits for the business, like increasing customer participation and loyalty by providing tailored and special offers, a significant reduction in the high cost of advertising campaigns.

What features should a good analytics tool have?

There are dozens of different analytic tools for WordPress with various features, making it difficult to pick the suitable tool. Here are the most important features an analytics tool should have:

1. Easy installation: Easy installation is a requirement of any tool to gain more users. In some tools and software, the installation needs some coding knowledge and takes some time, making them bad choices for novices.

2. User friendly interface: An effective user interface should be intuitive and simple, allowing users at any stage of expertise to perform analytics operations without needing to write code.

3. Flexible: The data and information that any analytics tools for WordPress provides to the user should have the necessary flexibility in various reports for the site administrator. Everyone should be able to use it according to their needs.

4. Offering all the data you need: The more information available about the site and its users, the better you can understand your users’ interests and needs. This helps you meet the expectations of customers and users of the site and create content and products that exceed their expectations.

5. Supporting ecommerce reports: E-commerce reports in a WordPress analytics tool provide general information about what is happening in the store, including sales in a certain period of time, number of orders, profit, best-selling products, the success of each campaign, etc. With these analytics, you can easily choose a specific strategy for your e-commerce store to achieve more sales and conversions.

6. Preparing regular updates: All software on the market is manufactured and therefore may have bugs or need to be modified from time to time. These modifications might include changing the appearance, fixing bugs, or adding new features. So before choosing your analytics tool, make sure that it has been updated recently and that they provide regular updates.

7. Including customer journey analytics: Of course you can use separate customer journey analytics tools in WordPress, but it’s always better to use all-in-one marketing tools since everything is synced together.

8. Useful and actionable reports: Lots of analytics tools usually offer very basic data. But there are other tools that have some complicated and comparative metrics to help digital marketers make better decisions by providing relevant metrics instead of general information.

What are the best analytics tools For WordPress?

Growmatik

Growmatik is an all-in-one marketing automation tool that offers an analytics tool for WordPressalong with plenty of other marketing automation features.

Customer Journey Analytics

Growmatik’s WordPress customer journey analytics tool helps website owners discover the most effective funnels on their site. Using this tool, you can see what your customers are doing on your website and see top-performing locations, referral sources, landing pages, subscription channels and products on your website at a glance. Also, you can look through specific locations, sources, landing pages, subscription channels or specific products to see what your traffic is doing within those funnels.

Assess each automation’s reports

Growmatik is not just about analytics but offers many automation features. With Growmatik, you can measure your marketing automation performance with custom analytics reports and make informed decisions about what to do next.

Reports page

In the reports page of Growmatik, you can see comparative reports and statistics about number of sessions, users, page views and bounce rate in any time period you need. For Woocommerce websites, it offers the statistics and charts for number of orders, revenue, conversion rate, average order value, order frequency and repeated customer purchases. Also it gives you detailed information about customer behaviour and compares it to the same previous period of time.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics solution on the market. It’s totally free to sign up and a single account will let you track multiple sites.

The kind of information you can track on Google Analytics includes number of visitors, referral source and time spent on your site. This tool also allows you to track links and user engagement and perform A/B testing.

Plugins For Google Analytics In WordPress

There are several ways to integrate Google Analytics into WordPress. For example, you can use Google Tag Manager or manually integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress by adding codes inside the head tag of your pages. But these processes can be a little difficult and time-consuming for new users. Therefore, you can use the following plugins to integrate Google Analytics into WordPress to benefit from more features and save your time. With the help of some of these plugins, you can also view Google Analytics information in the WordPress admin panel.

ExactMetrics

This Google Analytics WordPress plugin provides an analytics dashboard in WordPress that lets you track your site.

This plugin offers you many features including the following:

• Key statistics of Google Analytics are displayed in the WordPress dashboard, posts and pages.
• Provides accurate information about user navigation and presence on the site at different time intervals.
• Provides in-depth reports and various analyses everywhere, including posts and pages.
• It is possible to access different people who have different roles according to their position.
• Display statistics of site visits in real-time or at different time intervals, plus countless other advanced features of this plugin for digital marketers and managers.

The pricing for this plugin starts from $199/year.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights plugin lets you easily install Analytics on your WordPress website and see what’s going on on your site. This plugin is the most popular Google Analytics plugin active in more than 3 million WordPress websites. The best part of this plugin is that you can view all the Google Analytics data in the WordPress dashboard. MonsterInsights quickly provides all the data you need to analyze a site easily, and this data can help you make quick decisions and make changes.

Some of the benefits of using the MonsterInsights plugin are:

• Quick and easy installation of Google Analytics on the website
• Real Time statistics
• Track popular posts and pages
• Track files downloaded by users and find the one with the most downloads
• E-Commerce tracking
• Track banner ads and find the most clicked banners
• Track links and referrals and find clickable links accessed by users

MonsterInsights pricing starts from $199/year

Analytify

The Analytify plugin, which is available in both free and pro versions, makes all Google Analytics site information visible in the WordPress dashboard. Using this plugin, all site information collected by Google Analytics can be viewed in the site management section quickly. The downside to this plugin is that it requires an add-on to connect to WooCommerce. Also, Analytify has seven other add-ons besides WooCommerce:

• Email notification
• Forms tracking
• Author tracking
• Campaigns
• Goals dashboard
• Dashboard widget
• Easy digital downloads

Analytify pricing starts at $99/year but it doesn’t include WooCommerce integration. The WooCommerce addon is available in a conversion plan starting from $199/year.

Heap

Heap is one of the most powerful tools for analyzing a WordPress website. The data that Heap provides to the site owner is the result of the various customer actions on your website. This smart tool allows you to analyze your website traffic accurately. Heap also offers advanced features like quick reporting, conversion rate optimization and customer tracking based on site users’ behavioral patterns for multiple websites and ecommerce.

Heap automatically stores any interaction on the website, mobile app and cloud, including clicks, submissions, transactions, emails and more.

Price: Free for 10k session per month

WP Statistics

WP Statistics is another practical yet simple tool for website analysis. This advanced analysis plugin, installed on WordPress, allows you to view the site’s status in a very simple way with diagrams in the WordPress admin section.

Using this tool, it allows you to filter information and categorize it based on criteria such as: user IP, search term, user geographical location, browser and many other factors. While WP Statistics provides the necessary features for a WordPress website that needs user analysis, the only downside of it is that it stores all the information on your website.

Price: The plugin itself is free but the addons can be purchased for $69.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg offers a unique perspective among analytics options since it adds a unique tracking code to your site. This lets you witness what visitors are hovering over or clicking on in the form of a real time heat map.

The plugin includes A/B testing for variables such as color, content placement and copy to help you boost conversions and improve user experience. If you want an alternative to Google Analytics with more focus on conversion optimization, Crazy Egg is a good option for you.

Price: Premium plan starts from $9 per month

Matomo

Once known as Piwik, Matomo offers an open-source analytics option complete with detailed reports on common metrics including visitor activity, keywords and visitor activity. The plugin will also install a custom Matomo tracking code that lets you see the analytics data withon your WordPress data.

Matomo’s advanced features include the option to manage multiple sites or track visitor behavior in real time. It also offers an app to let you access reports from your mobile device, though you will need a current account to access the data.

Price: Starts from $9 per month

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack has capabilities to cover design, security and marketing as well as analytics. It offers a simple interface displaying data to tell you how your site is doing, but leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to data on individual posts or pages.

It offers great troubleshooting guides, as is typically the case with WordPress products. Plus, it will indicate if the analytics tools are working with a handy emoji at the bottom of your page.

WP Power Stats

With its wide-screen interface, WP Power Stat is an excellent way to get a birds-eye view of your site’s data. The plugin is fast, reliable and secure, plus all its data is stored on your WordPress site to keep any third party from meddling with your data. This is an excellent, lightweight free option.

What’s next?

Adding analytics to WordPress is essential while starting a new website. But in order to get the most out of the statistics, charts and numbers, you need to distill this data and use them to improve your website performance. In this article, we talked about the benefits of using analytics tools for WordPress, top tools to add analytics to a WordPress website and how to choose the best one based on your needs. Keep in mind that the best way to improve any business is to have some KPIs and focus on getting better results on them and using analytics tools like Google Analytics or Growmatik to help you collect the data you need to achieve your KPIs.

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