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If you haven’t already installed Google Analytics on your WordPress website, you could be missing out on a whole world of useful insights on how your customers and users are behaving on your website.
Google Analytics is entirely free to use and only takes 2 minutes to install. In doing so, you’ll be able to collect a whole range of interesting and often highly useful data on how people are using your website. This might include:
- What pages are most frequently visited
- How many seconds or minutes people typically spend on your website before they leave
- How often people arrive at your website and click on something, vs how often they visit and immediately leave
- What countries, states or cities your visitors are connecting from
- The gender and age groups of your visitors
- How your visitors found your website
- What sort of screen or devices your visitors are using to browse your website
- How many repeat visitors you’re getting
- How many visitors are on your website in real-time
- How many pages a visitor typically accesses before they add something to the cart
- Which pages cause your visitors to leave your website the most
- And so, so very much more!
To get started and install Google Analytics on your WordPress website, simply follow the steps below, and you’ll be up and running in no time!
Step 1
First, you’re going to need to sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already use other Google services, you may have an existing Google account which you can use for this too.
Step 2
Log in to your website’s dashboard and click on Plugins > Add New. Then, search for “Google Analytics Dashboard for WP”. You should find the aforementioned plugin, then simply click “Install Now”. Once the installation has completed, click “Activate”.
Step 3
First, refresh your dashboard by clicking the refresh button on your browser, or simply click on any other page on your dashboard to refresh your dashboard menu. You should now have a new menu item called “Google Analytics” near the bottom-left of your WordPress dashboard. Once you’ve found it, click on it to head over to the plugin’s settings page.
Step 4
Once you’re on the general settings tab of the Google Analytics plugin, click on “Authorize Plugin”, then click the red “Get Access Code” link. You should now be redirected to login to your Google account. Make sure you login to the same account you created your Google Analytics account with, in step 1. After you’ve logged in, click the “Allow” button to let the plugin access and send data through to your Google Analytics account.
Step 5
Next, copy the code you are given, and head back to your WordPress dashboard. Then, paste the code into the “Access Code” field and press “Save Access Code”.
Step 6
Once the page reloads, under the “General Settings” section, make sure your website is populated in the “Select View” dropdown field, then press “Lock Selection” on the right-hand side. Finally, press the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.
Voila! You have now finished your Google Analytics installation for your WordPress website. The plugin we’ve recommended in the steps above offers a number of other settings and features which you can experiment with at your leisure. If you’d like to learn more about what each setting does, you can check out the quick start guide here.
Likewise, Google Analytics offers a vast array of data which will be automatically captured for you. There are many advanced features you can learn about to further enhance your data analysis. You can learn more about Google Analytics and how to read your data by taking one of Google’s free online analytics courses for beginners.
We hope you’ve found this article useful! Google Analytics, when used properly, can open your world up to a myriad of important insights which you can use to further enhance your website and sales tactics, and is certainly worth spending a bit of time familiarising yourself with.
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