Google Analytics is the most popular tool to measure the performance of your website and see all important data about your visitors.
Every website owner and blogger must sign up for it and learn how to navigate through the dashboard as the information there can help them take decisions.
There’s so much you can do with Google Analytics. Here are some of its uses:
- You can see how many visitors landed on your pages;
- You see bounce rate – the percentage of those visitors that left right after coming to your site, which says a lot about whether you’re targeting the right audience and what first impression you make;
- Get to know your audience thanks to the reports provided by the tool. You’ll learn a lot about the demographics and psychographics of your visitors directly from Google Analytics (after you have some traffic to analyze, of course);
- Figuring out where users are coming from is another great feature. Imagine how helpful it would be to know what channels brought you visitors (so you can focus more on these traffic sources and can know what works) and also to know what pages people go to most often so you can optimize these;
- You can see the geographical location of your readers too;
- Google Analytics (GA) allows you to set goals. This way, you can track specific interactions such as how many times people clicked on a certain button, signed up to a form, or downloaded a freebie. When the action happens, that’s called a conversion. You need to be aware of your progress in order to know how things are going and whether you should change direction;
- See the keywords that attract visitors to your site. Ranking for keywords is a big part of optimizing your content and making your site more popular. Often, however, even when you include one specific word (keyword – it’s found through research) in a post and rank it for it, people will also find it thanks to synonyms or phrases that include it. You can see things like that and much more in GA too;
- See what social media platforms your users like the most so you can share more content there;
- Know what device and browser people are using to read your blog;
And more.
In a nutshell, Google Analytics can be of big help for marketing purposes, growing your blog, knowing your readers, and producing better content.
If you haven’t started your blog yet, make sure you enroll in my free blogging course:
Let’s set it up.
How to Install Google Analytics in WordPress
1. Click the Sign Up button.
Head to https://analytics.google.com and click the Sign Up button.
2. Fill in the details.
Your account name can be your name. After which you have to write your blog’s name and URL.
Next to website URL, don’t forget to choose ‘https’ from the dropdown menu.
Choose the category that suits your blog’s topic best.
The time zone after that is just for reporting purposes.
When that’s done, click the blue button at the end ‘Get Tracking ID’
Accept the terms of service.
Welcome to your GA dashboard.
3. Install the Google Analytics code on your blog.
The next step is to connect Google Analytics to your site so it can get access to the data and analyze your traffic.
An easy way to do that is through a plugin called Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights.
Go to your WP site and find it in the plugin directory. Then install and activate it.
You should immediately see a notification on top saying ‘Please configure your Google Analytics settings!’ You can click the link in it.
You can also access the plugin’s settings by finding it in the left sidebar in your dashboard (it’s named ‘Insights’) and clicking ‘Settings’.
4. Authenticate with your Google Account
Click the blue button you see and you’ll be redirected to Google Analytics. You may need to log in again.
On this page, press ‘Complete Connection’
Once that’s done, under Insights in the sidebar on the left, you’ll see ‘Reports’. That’s where you will click in a day or two so you can see real data from your site.
Read also: How I Use MonsterInsights to Analyze My Site
