Google Analytics For WordPress: Best Plugin Recommendations And The Hype Of Paid Pro Versions

Tracking your traffic stats is obviously super important. Google Analytics happens to be the most popular tool for doing so.

To be clear, I no longer use Google Analytics. In fact, I think you should strongly consider alternatives. But there’s still no getting around that a lot of people really want to use Google Analytics for WordPress.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks end up getting into big, bloated plugins to do something as simple as installing Google Analytics. A company called Awesome Motive has done a great job of all but cornering the marketing of such plugins.

Case in point, I used to use a plugin called Google Analytics Dashboard For WP (GADWP) to do the job. But, then I woke up one morning to this…

A new version 6.0! Snazzy!

But, it was a good thing I checked the details of the update before hitting that update button. Because now the plugin is part of ExactMetrics. And who owns that? Yep, Awesome Motive. The other big plugin in the space is MonsterInsights and Awesome Motive owns that, too. More on that below.

So, how should you go about implementing Google Analytics today? Do you have to use one of these over-commercialized plugins to do it? Are there other options?

Let’s dive in…

First, The Basics Of Google Analytics

In case you’re unaware, Google Analytics is a free service by Google for measuring and tracking the stats of your website. It is pretty much the industry standard, I would say.

Analytics is quite robust. You can use it just to track the basic stuff like visitor counts, page views, popular pages, etc. But, you can also get quite deep and nerdy with it. It really just depends on how far you want to go and what you want to track.

At the basic level, all you need to do is insert a tracking tag onto your site one time and you’re done. You don’t need a plugin at all to do this. Just copy/paste the tag Google gives you into your site and you’re generally good to go.

Now, Google Analytics is kind of notorious for having an interface from hell. 🙂 It is one of the things I hate about it. Analytics has become a big, bloated, corporate piece of crap if you ask me. So, I’ll just point you over to their documentation on how to set it up with your website. It is made even less friendly by the fact that they keep changing things.

But, the simplest and leanest ways to implement Google Analytics would be:

• Copy/paste their code into the header of your site using any plugin that can insert code into your header. Most themes have an option for this built-in.
• Use a snippets plugin like FluentSnippets to insert the code into the header of the site.
• I often use PerfMatters for site performance optimization and it has an option to localize the Google Analytics script for you. Just plug in your site ID and PerfMatters takes care of the rest, but in a way which is performance friendly.

If you’re going to use Google Analytics, I recommend you use a simpler integration technique like above. It is the cleanest way to do it.

So, that leaves the question…

So, What’s Up With The Paid Analytics Plugins?

If it is actually pretty straightforward to integrate Google Analytics into your website, why do paid premium plugins exist?

MonsterInsights is, by far, the most well known such tool. It offers a very popular free version which is pushed hard. You see it always coming in in “Recommended” lists. You see some web hosts pushing it because of special backroom deals. You even see other plugins by Awesome Motive cross-promoting it and I’ve had clients end up with MonsterInsights installed on their sites and they don’t even know how it got there.

But, while MonsterInsights is available for free and it will provide tracking and the integration, almost all of it’s reports are locked down unless you upgrade to the Pro version. That Pro version will run you (as of this writing), about $100 for the first year then they’ll surprise renew you at $249 thereafter. Typical less-than-clear pricing from this company, so pay attention.

Since ExactMetrics is basically the same thing, it acts the same way.

Why Pay For An Analytics Plugin? Is It Worth It?

A few years ago, I tried the paid version of MonsterInsights. I paid for it for one year for $199. I did not renew it as I did not believe it provided enough value to me to justify itself.

When they bought my favorite free Analytics plugin and turned it into ExactMetrics and employed all of the same tactics, I got extra annoyed about the whole thing. I suspect they did this in order to alleviate a major (free) competitor. 

But, what are you getting for that money? Why would anybody pay for this? Is it as simple as merely the convenience of having pretty graphs inside of Wordpress?

Well, no. There is indeed more to it. You just need to decide if you really need it.

To be clear, being able to view your Analytics reports right inside of WordPress is pretty handy. You can get all the data right inside your Analytics account directly for free, but it is more work since they are difficult to use. MonsterInsights does make it far more approachable.

See, Analytics is incredibly powerful software. However, in order to use it to fully track things, you need a deeper integration than simply pasting your tracking tag into your header. For instance:

• Analytics can track ecommerce transactions, conversion rates, and more. But, some special tracking has to be installed in certain places on your site in order to feed the necessary data into Analytics.
• Analytics can track outbound link clicks. For instance, you can track click-throughs on your affiliate links or download links to PDF files. But, again, you need special tracking setup for that.
• Analytics has very granular reporting capability known as “dimensions”. And, in terms of Wordpress, this would allow things such as the ability to independently track certain categories, tags, authors, custom post types, etc. But, again, specialized tracking has to be set up to feed that data into Analytics.

Both MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics make it much easier to set up all that nitty-gritty tracking. That kind of thing would often require a web developer to set up correctly and it can get nerdy. The global tracking tag cannot do it by itself. The global tag will track your overall site just fine, but some of that more specific data needs specialized tracking on certain parts of your site.

Now, the question is… do you actually need all that stuff?

Let’s be real…

MOST Wordpress users only really track the basics. Stuff like page views, visitor counts. Maybe the top URLs on the site. MOST Wordpress users don’t get very deep into the numbers.

Not only that, deep-diving into the numbers can be useful. However, it can also be a very deep rabbit hole. One that doesn’t always lead to something actionable. I know more advanced marketers might wince at me for saying that, but I think it is true. Knowing your numbers is very important, however it is all too easy to spend a lot of time tracking numbers just because you feel like you should. It isn’t always incredibly actionable.

So, I personally think that paid plugins and “PRO” upgrades like this are best… for the PROS. The people who know what all that tracking is for and how they will use it.

For MOST blog owners and solopreneurs? I think you can get the numbers you need just fine for free or in simpler ways using other tools.

And in that case, I think MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics are poor choices for most peple. The free versions are simply too limited and the upsells are too aggressive. Most bloggers simply will not get enough value out of the paid versions to justify the cost. 

While the free versions make setting up the Analytics more fully much simpler, it comes with the annoyance of being subjected to aggressive upsell marketing right inside your own Wordpress site.

So, I went looking around for alternatives…

So, Let’s Look At The Other Options For Analytics Wordpress Plugins

The main thing I was looking for was some basic presentation of the basic stats inside of the Wordpress admin panel. Let’s see if we can find a simple, lightweight way to do this.

And I’m going to try to find one that is free. It isn’t that I’m a cheap-ass. Hell, I run a business here and I’m perfectly willing (and do) pay for things. But, paying $199 for something this simple doesn’t sit right with me. 

First option comes directly from Google itself. It is the Site Kit by Google plugin.

This plug-in is free and does the basic job for you. You can bring basic Analytics data and Search Console data right into Wordpress. Newer versions even track your Pagespeed Insights scores so that you can track your core web vitals.

So, Sitekit works. It makes it as easy as any other to hook your site up to Google Analytics. Being direct from Google, you know it will adapt if Google ever changes anything. Plus, bringing in Search Console data is actually a nice feature. But, I wanted to see if I could find more.

Next, I checked an option called Analytify.

This plugin has a free and pro version. The free version does the job pretty well. It has a free add-on to show basic stats on the WP dashboard. It shows stats on the post/page edit screens so you can easily view traffic to single pieces of content. And the main Analytify dashboard gives far more data.

There are no graphs in the free version. There are upsells to the Pro version, but they are not nearly as annoying as MonsterInsights or ExactMetrics. The one big upsell on the report screen can be easily dismissed to make it go away.

Analytify looks like it might be a winner. But, let’s also see what else is out there…

Google Analytics plugin is a freebie put out by ShareThis. It gives some nice reports inside the WP Admin, including a graphical dashboard widget. Being that it is totally free, there are no upsells.

One thing to be aware of with this plugin, however, is that it might be a case where “free” comes with baggage. Many of the reviews on this plugin say it is including some tracking scripts from ShareThis. This can also slow down site load time and there are some concerns about potential data mining. Either way, there’s really no legit reason to be including ShareThis javascript files, so I’d skip this plugin.

As I look through the plugin repository, there are a whole lot of plugins that will integrate with Google Analytics. I mean, take your pick of the litter, really. Most of them, however, are simply for including the tracking tags. Most of them have the ability to do a few extra things, such as exempting admins (like yourself) from tracking so you’re  not skewing your own stats.

But, aside from that, not many of these plugins will bring Analytics stats into the WP admin area. Since that was something I was looking for, I stopped looking.

My Final Recommendations for Google Analytics For WordPress

Stay away from MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics unless you want to pony up a fairly hefty price tag. This isn’t to say they’re not nice plugins. They certainly are and they both have gorgeous interfaces. However, for the overwhelming majority of bloggers, I think moving to a paid version of these plugins is overkill. And unless you upgrade, the upsells will annoy you to no end.

If you want a deeper and easier integration, I’d probably go with Google Site Kit.

If you want the cleanest install, I’d probably just embed the code directly and be done with it without any extra plugins. As I said above, PerfMatters can at least do it in the most performance-friendly way and that’s probably what I would do.

But, to be clear, if somebody asks me today what I recommend, it would be to avoid Google Analytics altogether.

My preferred solution today is Fathom Analytics. I moved to it for all of these reasons. And, with their plugin, you can bring the basic core stats into your WP dashboard just the same way.

There’s just not a strong reason anymore to deal with the bloat and privacy problems of Google Analytics. And that annoyance is made even worse by the bloated commercialized plugins being pushed on WordPress users who don’t know of their alternatives.