Nowadays, it is practically impossible to increase your website traffic without web analytical instruments. The good old times when the user served the web resource are gone, and it seems that they are gone for good. The modernity and competition on the web has its own rules that you need to follow if you are serious about the success of your project. These days the opportunity to get feedback and to analyze visitors is crucial for any commercial or non-commercial project; that’s why now we are going to talk about the basics of Google Analytics features and tools that will help you attract the positive attention to your web project.
First of all, we have to point out that Google Analytics is just one of many analytical tools that are used to measure your audience and their behavior. However, it is one of the most widely used once since it is pretty universal, simple and has a comprehensive free version that you can always start from if you have limited budgets.
Google Analytics allows you to collect a great variety of useful data about the people who visit your website, their behavior once they are surfing through it and even some information about the means that they use to access your website. So let’s have a fast look at the primary variables that can be easily measured by Google Analytics for your benefit.
Who Is Your Visitor?
It is hard to underestimate the importance of the personal user data you can collect with the help of Google Analytics tools. Well, at least if you have a rough understanding of how to interpret and how to use all this data and you are ready to make your resource more suitable and more compatible for the convenience of your visitors!
With Google Analytics tools, you can get important information such as location of your visitor, the screen resolution of the desktop or the gadget that he or she uses to enter your website, whether the visitor’s gadget supports Flash player or Java scripts, the language that the visitor uses, etc. All this data is very important for making decisions about website architecture, design, supported languages, used technologies and so on.
When Are the Peak Visiting Hours?
You can also find out the busiest hours on your website in order to plan a posting schedule. People love recently posted content because it always seems essential and more important. Even if the majority of your visitors live in the distant time zone and you are normally sleeping at the time they enter the site, you can always set the time of the post in advance.
How Do Visitors Find Your Website?
Undoubtedly, it is one of the most important data you can get from Google Analytics if you are doing your best to promote your website. The service may provide you with such essential information like the way of the user to your website. It may be a straight way from the browser search, a referral link from the partner website or a direct link from elsewhere. You can also get the detailed information of the search engine that was mostly used to find your resource.
Defining the primary social media or search engine is pivotal because it will help you to set priorities and make a long-term plan. For instance, if your visitors are mostly coming to your website from Facebook, then it will be a great idea to make more original content and promos in this social media in order to engage them more in interaction with your brand. Or if there were tons of visits from your partner’s website, it will be great to establish closer cooperation with this fellow resource, which may bring great advantage for both brands.
How Do People Act When They Are on Your Website?
Smart planning of the user experience is a big part of your success. It is obvious that if the website is entertaining, user-friendly, features a neutral but memorable design and looks aesthetically pleasing, it has many more chances to attract visitors and to help to turn them into loyal clients in a long-term perspective.
In order to improve the user experience, you can always rely on A/B split tests when you set your website for a random serving of two versions of a page or a website element to find out which of them is more clickable. Google Analytics will help you study the user’s behavior, so you will be able to improve your website considering real data. Otherwise, you will need to go through tedious stages of guessing, layout juggling and shuffling. In this case, Google Analytics will help you to save your time and money, so there is a very good reason to master it well.
Some Helpful Analytics Plugins for WordPress
Adding Google Analytics or any other counter plugin to WordPress is not too hard. Actually, you need to make several simple steps to get your hands on this terrific web instrument.
- You need to register and to create a Google Analytics account.
- Integrate Google Analytics with your WP-based website by adding a tracking ID. You can perform this relatively simple operation either with the help of a special plugin or by adding header.php tracking script to the code. You can also create a new function applying functions.php.
This sequence will work with Google Analytics as well as with some other web counters. In any case, you can always find detailed instructions on the website of the web service provider.
Now let’s look at some handy analytical plugins that may dramatically ease your way to the top of the search query results.
Finteza Analytics
A simple and practical real-time analytical tool that will provide you with all the essential audience stats, detection of bots and toxic clicks as well as generalized traffic analysis. Finteza is very easy to install and it is absolutely free, so you can give it a try anytime you want.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (dev. by ExactMetrics)
A practical dashboard that smoothly integrates with WP-based projects and Google Analytics. It supports a wide array of features like outbound link tracking, author tracking, referral tracking, popular post tracking, scroll depth tracking, etc. You can also easily customize your reports setting your own preferences. Receive detailed reports on customs dimensions, forms, search console, etc. The plugin also easily integrates with suck analytical units such as WooCommerce Google Analytics, MemberPress Google Analytics, Yoast Google Analytics, Pretty Links Google Analytics, etc.
Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce
In case if you are managing a WooCommerce-powered eCommerce project, this plugin may be very helpful for acquiring some very-specific data which, however, may be very useful for your decision-making. The plugin allows you to receive in-depth eCommerce reports specifically aimed at suck patterns of customers’ behavior like shopping process or checkout. You can also get detailed data on product and sales performance.
Analytics Cat – Google Analytics Made Easy
This is a small but powerful plugin that makes your integration between your WP-based website and Google Analytics (Universal Google Analytics) smooth and easy. It also helps to hide your Google Analytics code from the users. Analytics cat features a very simple and usable interface and won’t affect your website performance in any way.