How to Install Google Analytics in WordPress for Beginners
Understanding how visitors interact with your content is key to achieving your goals as a website owner. Whether your aim is to grow a loyal readership, increase sales, or establish yourself as an authority in your niche, having access to website traffic data is very important.
This is where Google Analytics comes in. It is a free and powerful tool from Google that provides insights into your audience’s behavior. This allows you to make data-driven decisions to improve your website and content strategy.
Across our 16+ years of experience, we believe that Google Analytics has remained the best way to know your audience. We’ve also helped many users install and get started with Google Analytics on their WordPress sites.
In this article, we will share why Google Analytics is important and how you can easily install Google Analytics in WordPress (step by step).
First, we will explain why Google Analytics is important and how it can help you grow your website.
After that, we will show you how to sign up for a Google Analytics account and different methods to install it on your WordPress site.
Finally, we will explain how to view your traffic reports in Google Analytics.
Here is a quick overview of what you’ll learn in this article:
Ready? Let’s get started!
Why Is Google Analytics Important for Bloggers?
Once you start a blog, your #1 goal is to get more traffic and subscribers. Google Analytics helps you make data-driven decisions by showing you the stats that matter. You can see:
Who visits your website?
This part of analytics shows the geographical location of your audience, which browser the user used to visit your site, and other important information such as screen resolution, JavaScript support, Flash support, language, and more.
This data is extremely useful, and it can help in numerous ways. When creating a custom website design , you can use the user data to make sure that your site will be compatible with your audience.
If most of your users don’t have Flash support, then you should avoid adding the Flash element to your site. If most of your users are on 1280 screen resolutions, then make sure that your design is compatible with that resolution or smaller.
What do people do when they are on your website?
You can track where the users are going on your website, how long they stay on your website, and the bounce rate (the percentage of users who exit your site on the first visit).
Using this information can decrease the bounce rate and increase your pageviews.
You can also find your most popular articles, articles that are not doing so well, and the kind of content your users are looking for.
When do people visit your website?
By looking at the hottest hours in the day for your site, you can pick the best time to publish your post . If that time zone is not compatible with yours, then you can schedule your post for that hour.
How do people find your website?
This section of the analytics shows you where the users come from . For example, do they use search engines, enter direct links, or click on referral links from another site?
It also shows you what percentage of your visitors came from each of these sources. Google Analytics gives you a breakdown of each of these categories. If it is the search engine category, then it shows you which search engine got you the most traffic, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so on.
The breakdown of referral sources shows you which sites you need to work with the most. If your top referral source is Facebook, you need exclusive Facebook content to make your audience feel special.
If your top referral source is an external website, then you might want to consider having a partnership with that website ( guest post exchange or something else).
How do people interact with your content?
Google Analytics shows how your users interact with your site’s content. It shows you what percent of the user clicked on which link on your site and much more.
You can run A/B split tests by creating content experiments in Google Analytics to understand what works best to meet your goals.
By seeing user interactivity, you can work your content around your users. By seeing the answers to the questions above, you can focus on the strategies that work for your site and avoid methods that don’t work.
Simply put, eliminate the guesswork and focus on stats that matter, so you can make data-driven decisions.