This is especially important if you run a business on your website. You'll need to be able to understand your customers and what they're looking for so that you can optimize your website to your unique customer base. Google Analytics offers a full suite of tools that will analyze your website data and report it in a way that is easy to understand and use.<\/p>\n
Over fifty million websites utilize Google Analytics to track user traffic and get insights into the behavior of their customers. If you don't have much experience with website management, you may not have heard of Google Analytics. Even if you have heard of it, you might be wondering how it works and how to implement it on your WordPress site. The good news is you don't need to have much coding or SEO expertise in order to take advantage of Google Analytics. This is especially true if you run a WordPress site because WordPress makes it quite simple to install and use virtually instantaneously.<\/p>\n
This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about implementing Google Analytics for your WordPress site.<\/p>\n
In a nutshell, Google Analytics tracks what people do when they visit your website. It provides detailed traffic and behavior tracking that it can then report to you with easy-to-understand visuals so you can understand who is visiting your site and what they're doing on the site. Analytics will tell you where your visitors are located, what kind of device they use to visit the site, which pages they look at, how they access your site, and what links they're clicking on. Analytics tracks all of this using micro-moments, which are all the things that your WordPress visitors clicks on or engages with on your site. All of this data is then reported visually in charts and graphs that you can access through the Google Analytics web platform or mobile app.<\/p>\n
Google can also send you email alerts with pre-set criteria. Analytics also provides real-time data tracking so you can instantly determine how visitors are interacting with new or updated content or if a temporary sales promotion is effective. You'll also be able to determine if a recent social media post is driving traffic to your site. You can then track that data over time: Analytics will compare all data metrics to the previous thirty days so you can determine if your efforts are effective in driving traffic or getting your visitors to do what you want them to do on your site.<\/p>\n
You can also use custom Dashboards on the Google Analytics website to tailor the data you wish to see. For some sites, certain data will be more important than others. If you run a number of promotional or social media marketing campaigns, for example, you'll want to focus more on real-time monitoring so you can get a sense of how effective they are. If you are more focused on tailoring products to a unique audience base, you can focus on the demographic data of your visitors.<\/p>\n
In short, the more you understand your website's audience, the more you can tailor your site to them. By knowing critical pieces of data like where your visitors are coming from, how they're finding your site, and what they're doing when they get there, you can optimize your site content to suit\u00a0your audience and their needs. By incorporating Google Analytics into your WordPress site you can determine which pages your visitors are interacting with and which ones they're not, so you can improve the ones that aren't working.<\/p>\n
You'll also be able to understand whether your social media advertising campaigns are effectively bringing traffic to your site. Ultimately, tracking micro-moments gives you a detailed impression of what your customers engage with on your WordPress site and what they don't. You can use this to paint a picture of what on your website is attracting visitors or customers and what isn't. And Google Analytics is completely free to use, so you won't have to spend any money to get the data.<\/p>\n
You already know that you can tailor your website based on what you learn about your audience from Google Analytics. But you can also share your data through email or PDF reports. Through your Google Analytics Dashboard, you can determine what specific pieces of data you want to share and then generate an email or a PDF report that you can share with others.<\/p>\n
If you have a team of people helping to manage your WordPress site, you can assign permissions in your Analytics dashboard so that other people can log in to their own Google account and access the reports as well. Just use the permissions feature to set up who can see what data. This will save you from having to generate email or PDF reports constantly.<\/p>\n
Before you get started using Google Analytics, you need to know a few things about something called GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR became law in the European Union in 2018, so if your WordPress site reaches an international audience you'll need to make sure that you're GDPR-compliant. WordPress has\u00a0a useful guide<\/a>\u00a0to help make sure that you're not sending personal data to Google in violation of GDPR. The good news is Google Analytics has features that make it easy to prevent this from happening, including IP address anonymization.<\/p>\n WordPress also has plugins that can do things like cookie consent and a privacy policy. Even if your WordPress site has an existing privacy policy, you need to make sure that it's compliant with GDPR. Check the WordPress guide for information on how to construct a GDPR-friendly privacy policy when using Google Analytics.<\/p>\nSetting Up An Analytics Account<\/h4>\n