8 Best WordPress Plugins for Analytics

One you’ve created a website, one of the first things you need to do is start tracking traffic. When you traffic your visitor’s traffic, you can gather data to plan a strategy to either create new content, or improve on your current site’s copy. In the end, with gathering this data, your goal is to get people to read your content, share your posts, fill out your lead forms, and above all, buy your stuff.

With WordPress, you can either figure out how to add tracking software to the site, or use a plugin. In this article, you’ll learn 8 of the best WordPress plugins for analytics.

What’s an Analytics Plugin?

An analytics plugin is designed to measure the traffic data of a website. In most cases, when you install an analytics plugin in WordPress, you can gather websites traffic site's insights without leaving your dashboard. Some of the more popular analytics plugins use Google Analytics, WordPress.com stats, or Clicky for gathering website traffic statistics.

Of the 3 analytics services, Google Analytics is one of the more popular ones, with 30-50 million users. The only thing that most analytic plugins can’t do, is run any Google Goals campaigns. That is something you will have to do directly from Google Analytics.

Why Google Analytics?

Google Analytics isn’t just popular, but it’s the most trusted, because it’s a product by Google, especially if you want to monetize your website. It also gives you the information needed to plan a successful strategy for your business, as well as discover what your visitors are actually doing on your website.

With Google Analytics you can gather information like:

• Where someone landed on your website.

• Where someone exited your website.

• What browser they used.

• How long they were on your website.

• Where they go within your site.

• If they left a form half-way through trying to fill it out.

• What device they used.

• What browser they used.

• If another website referred them.

• What keywords people used when they found your site.

• Which pages were the most clicked on within your site.

• Where your website visitor came from.

• The age range of your visitor.

• The gender of your visitor.

• Are your campaign goals successful?

…and much more! The greatest thing about Google Analytics, is that it is free to use too!

8 Best WordPress Plugins for Analytics

Please note that some of these plugins have free and paid versions.

• MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress

• 10WebAnalytics

• GA Google Analytics

• WP Google Analytics Events

• Jetpack

• HubSpot

• CrazyEgg

• Clicky Analytics

MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress

MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress, which used to be Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast, is a robust plugin that brings the power of Google Analytics to your WordPress admin area. The free version will show limited stats, but it has a great onboarding wizard so you can sync Google Analytic with the plugin.

If you would like more details and beautiful graphs displayed in your WordPress admin, you can purchase MonsterInsights Pro for as little as $99.50 per year, for one website.

10WebAnalytics

10WebAnalytics delivers Google Analytics stats to WordPress. It’s super simple and straightforward. 10Web offers a premium version that can be bought for about $85 per year.

GA Google Analytics

GA Google Analytics simply adds the tracking code to your website, and it’s completely free. For the person that prefers to use Google Analytics directly or can’t insert the tracking code in their theme’s header, this does the trick. Other features of this plugin include:

• Stays current with the latest Google analytics tracking code.

• Options to include tracking code in header or footer.

• Options to Include tracking code on all WordPress posts or pages

• Ability to to add your own custom markup.

• Option to disable tracking of admin-level users.

• Option to enable page tracking in the WordPress admin area.

• Works with the Classic Editor or with Gutenberg Block Edit

This plugin does offer a pro version of GA Google Analytics that has more features and the price packages start at $20.

WP Google Analytics Events

WP Google Analytics Events is another WordPress plugin for analytics that allows you to avoid messing with adding any website data tracking codes. You can track events like your site’s call to action button performance, contact form submissions, links, page navigation, and even your set Google Goals.

The pro version of WP Google Analytics has all of this for as low as $79 per year, plus tracking for YouTube, Vimeo, clicks, and scrolling.

Jetpack

Jetpack has a lot of features and has been known as a “Swiss Army plugin”, because of that. It’s features include:

• Security

• Speed optimization

• Defense against comment spam.

• Social sharing buttons.

• Social media auto-publishing

• Image optimization

• WooCommerce store addons for payments and calculating taxes

• WordPress.com Analytics

If Google Analytics isn’t enough, then you can use the WordPress.com analytics, that is within the Jetpack plugin. This feature is free to use, but requires you to sign up for a WordPress.com account. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to pay to have your site at WordPress.com. You can use a self-hosting WordPress.org site. Learn here to know the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

HubSpot

HubSpot analytics plugin that is free to use, but it does have integration with their CRM tool, which does cost. You also have to sign up for a HubSpot account. HubSpot provides the stats, but there have been some reviewers that still say that they had to use their Google Analytics stats for some data that they need. This plugin has a lot more features, and may be more suited for professionals that want most of their marketing needs like email marketing, all under one umbrella.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is a paid tool that does offer a WordPress plugin for analytics, but what CrazyEgg is famous for, is their heatmaps. Heatmaps offer you a visual representation of exactly what people are doing on your site. By adding their plugin to your site, the more that people click on an area or linger in a spot, the hotter the color is on the heatmap of a web page. This is a brilliant way to know what to improve on, or get rid of on your site.

Additionally, CrazyEgg offers analytics, A/B testing, and more. To use, it’s based on your current traffic, so CrazyEgg packages are as low as $20 per month with 30,000 pageviews.

Clicky Analytics

Clicky Analytics is all its own analytics platform and free if your website doesn’t get more than 3,000 daily visitors. Clicky offers its own real time data, and different dashboards for collecting your website visitor’s traffic behavior. If you need something more robust, Clicky offers some upgraded packages that include monitoring uptime, email reports, video tracking, and even has heatmap features.

In Summary

With just 8 WordPress plugins for analytics, you’ve got a to choose from. It’s okay to install one from Google Analytics, and any of the other stat plugins. Try each and see what you like best. Hopefully one or more of these WordPress plugins for analytics can assist you in improving your website’s traffic stats.

Frequently Asked Questions