Integrating Google Analytics into your WordPress site will give you access to an incredible amount of data about your website’s traffic and user behavior.
Whether you’re improving your digital marketing, enhancing site usability or boosting SEO efforts, Google Analytics provides the valuable insights necessary to make data driven decisions.
This guide will walk you through the simple steps to connect Google Analytics to your WordPress site, helping you to harness the full potential of your website.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a service run by Google that tracks website traffic. It is part of the brand’s wider Google Marketing Platform, which is home to a range of free tools designed to help business owners keep on top of and analyse their data.
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools included in their Marketing Platform and is widely used by small business websites and large enterprises websites alike.
Google Analytics tracks various important traffic statistics, such as average session length, pages visited per session and information about where that traffic is coming from.
Despite the power of Google Analytics, many business owners just aren’t using it to its full potential.

Why Install Google Analytics On Your WordPress Site?
There are a number of reasons why you should install Google Analytics on your WordPress site.
In general, analysing the performance of your business is essential if you want to ensure consistent growth, Google Analytics is just another tool to help you achieve this.
Easy To Use
The first reason to integrate Google Analytics tracking code into your WordPress pages is that the process is very simple.
It doesn’t matter what your level of technical skill is, adding analytics to your website is something that you’ll be able to do with ease.
Later on in this article, we’ll show you a couple of different ways to install Google Analytics.
If you’re planning on installing alternative analytics software, then the process will probably be very similar.
Links With Google Ads
In a few simple steps, Analytics can be linked up with one of Google’s other popular marketing tools, Google Ads.
Integrating Ads into Analytics lets you easily see how your adverts are performing and what their effects are on your website traffic.
Additionally, this connection allows you to import your goals and eCommerce transactions into your Google Ads account.
As a result, you can build a full picture of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and easily locate areas that need to be improved upon in the future.
You’ll be able to view data collected via Google Ads in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
Need more information on tracking online sales? Talk with our eCommerce website design team for more advice.
Collects Data Automatically
One big benefit of Google Analytics is that it collects data automatically. Although this is true of most analytics tools, it’s still something that should be celebrated.
Being able to find out in depth information about the performance of your website without having to actively collect Google Analytics data yourself is a truly great thing.
This hands off approach to website data and analytics can save business owners tons of time and allow them to actively focus on other elements of their company that they would like to grow.
This is one of the main reasons why any savvy business owner should add Google Analytics to WordPress sites.

It’s Free
When there’s a free tool available with this amount of power, why wouldn’t you want to use it?
Like most of Google’s services, Analytics doesn’t cost anything to install or use.
This is different from many other web analysis services, which often charge a subscription fee or require users to pay upfront.
Improves Bounce Rate
Google Analytics is able to measure your website’s “bounce rate” – the percentage of users that leave your WordPress site after visiting just one page.
This is a great way to get an insight into what’s going wrong and help you start to make changes.
It’s never nice to know that something you’re doing isn’t working as well as you want it to, but understanding your mistakes is essential if you want to grow a business.
Great business owners are always looking for ways to improve and adding analytics to your WordPress site is a solid first step in this process.
Understand Your Audience
One of the most useful results of using Google Analytics is that you get to know your audience.
Knowing who your audience is and what they’re looking for is essential if you want to improve your products and services.
Google Analytics recovers various pieces of information about your website users, including their age, location and interests.
This allows business owners to see which demographics they are finding success with and which ones they need to target.
All of this valuable Google Analytics data can be found in “The Audience” section of Google Analytics.
Investigating this section is an excellent place to start if you’re looking to develop new marketing strategies.
Find Your Best Content
Content is key to any successful website. However, knowing what kind of content you should be producing can sometimes be quite confusing.
With Google Analytics, you can easily see which content is having success on your WordPress site.
If you’re producing FAQ pages that are getting plenty of clicks but your blog posts aren’t performing well, then there really isn’t much point in continuing to sink time into your blog.
It’s always important to understand where your strengths as a website and business lie.
Not sure where to start? Check out our WordPress Developer Brisbane services for more information.
How To Set Up Google Analytics In WordPress
If you’re looking for how to add Google Analytics to WordPress sites, then you’ve come to the right place.
Below, we’ll show you two different methods to set up Google Analytics.
Both of these methods are fairly simple, but one may be more suited to you than the other.
Whichever method you choose, the first step in the process is to register for a Google Analytics account.
Method 1: Use A WordPress Plugin
This method is probably the simplest of the two.
We’ll use a useful plugin for WordPress to automatically insert our Google Analytics tracking code into our web pages, which will report back to the Google Analytics dashboard.
The Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that we recommend is the Site Kit by Google plugin.
This is the most popular Google Analytics WordPress plugin and for good reason – it is free, easy to use and is built by Google themselves.
Step 1: Install a Google Analytics WordPress plugin
The first step is to install the Site Kit by Google plugin. Installing and activating a site kit plugin is a very simple process and there are plenty of online guides that explain how to do this.
Step 2: Set up Site Kit by Google
Once your plugin is activated, you’ll be able to see the Site Kit by Google control panel in the admin page of your WordPress site.
Once you click on this panel, the Site Kit by Google set up page will appear.
Follow this setup wizard to connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress site.
Step 3: Choose what you want to track
Once you’ve selected which of your Google Analytics profiles you’d like to track, then you’re up and running.
At this stage, you’ll be asked to set up the recommended settings for Google Analytics tracking code.
You can then click through the following steps to complete the installation.
Step 4: Using Site Kit by Google
Site Kit by Google allows you to view Google Analytics information right from your WordPress dashboard.
You can see sessions, average session length, page views and bounce rate with ease.
Using a Google Analytics WordPress plugin is by far the best method for beginners or those who don’t require any super advanced functionality.
However, if you have a basic grasp of coding, then you can add Google Analytics to WordPress without having to use a third party plugin.

Method 2: Add Custom Code Snippet
This method is not one that we’d recommend to most people looking to add Google Analytics to WordPress.
Having said that, avoiding a plugin does mean that you could have the possibility for more more advanced features and customisation and you won’t be limited to certain features.
To add Google Analytics to WordPress without using a plugin, you’re going to have to delve into the code of your WordPress website.
This can be scary for beginners and it’s quite easy to make a mistake and mess up the code.
If you’re at all worried about this, then we’d advise you to use a plugin.
This method is also more temperamental than the plugin technique since your code is likely to disappear if you ever change the theme of your site.
If you’re still interested in giving this method a go, then here are the steps to follow:
Step 1: Copy your Google Analytics tracking code
To add the Google Analytics code to WordPress using this method, you’ll need the tracking code from your existing Google account or Analytics account.
Simply copy this to your clipboard and then move to the next step.
Step 2: Add the Google Analytics tracking code to the theme header
For Google Analytics to properly track your website, the tracking code needs to be added directly to the header of the WordPress and theme files.
You can do this by editing the header.php file and pasting the Google Analytics tracking code directly after the <body> tag.
Once you’ve done this, simply save the header.php file and ensure you re-upload it to your site.
Step 3: Using Google Analytics via the header
If you’ve used this method to add Google Analytics to WordPress, then you’ll be able to view your data via your Google Analytics dashboard.
Of course, one of the disadvantages of this technique is that you can’t view the information directly from your website admin page.

How To Make The Most Out Of Google Analytics
Unfortunately, lots of business owners take the initiative to add Google Analytics to WordPress, but they fail to use the service effectively.
When you do manage to harness the potential of Google Analytics, it can become an extremely powerful tool that will vastly improve your future marketing campaigns.
Here are a few simple tips that can help you get the most out of your Google Analytics account:
Set Up Goals
Setting goals is an important part of any digital marketing process. Without targets to aim for, it is very easy for a campaign to drift, stall and have no real purpose.
Having a specific and realistic goal set out from the beginning gives you the best chance of getting to where you want to be in the quickest time possible.
In the context of Google Analytics, your goal could be to reduce your bounce rate by 5% or perhaps increase the average session length by a minute.
You should also set an appropriate time frame for your targets and regularly review your progress via your own Google Analytics reports or WordPress dashboard.
Organise Your Google Analytics Account
With so much information available via Google Analytics, it’s easy to get distracted and lose track of your goals.
It’s important to filter out the information you don’t need and organise the data you do want to analyse.
The better you organise your Google Analytics account, the easier it will be for you to quickly find the information you are looking for.
The process isn’t complete as soon as you add Google Analytics to WordPress – it takes a while to get everything set up in the best way for you.
Use The Segment Feature
The segment feature is one of the most useful and powerful features included with Analytics.
It allows users to filter the data about who is browsing their site so that they can understand which demographics they are seeing success with.
You can add up to 4 segments to the traffic data streams that Google collects, which don’t affect the underlying data.
You can filter by location, age, people who made a purchase and more.
It’s not difficult to see plenty of potential users for this feature and it’s definitely something that you should use if you’ve added Google Analytics to WordPress.
Wrapping Up
Although the Google Analytics plugin is the most widely used, there are a variety of other WordPress analytics services available.
If the Google version seems a little too complicated and overwhelming, then it’s definitely worth looking for ways to add analytics to WordPress using a different tool.
The main drawback of many alternatives is that they are usually paid services.
This is probably the biggest advantage of the Google platform because you can get some quite incredible tracking functionality free of charge.
Having said that, the best Google alternatives will bring added functionality and often come in a very user friendly package.
Examples that we recommend are Yandex, Metrica, Heap and Jetpack Stats.
Each of these will offer you some cool features and a slightly different experience than you get when you add Google Analytics tracking to your sites.
If you have any questions about the Google Analytics integration please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Brisbane SEO team or our web design Brisbane team if you’d like help connecting it to your WordPress site.

Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is Google Analytics and why should I use it on my WordPress site?
Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that tracks website traffic and provides insights into user behavior, traffic sources and website performance.
It helps improve SEO, digital marketing efforts and overall user experience.
2. Is Google Analytics free to use?
Yes, Google Analytics is completely free.
It offers powerful tools and insights without any subscription fees, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes.
3. What are the main benefits of integrating Google Analytics with WordPress?
Key benefits include:
- Automatic data collection
- Improved understanding of audience demographics
- Insights into top-performing content
- Ability to monitor and reduce bounce rates
- Integration with Google Ads for tracking campaign performance
4. Can I use Google Analytics without a plugin on WordPress?
Yes, you can manually add the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress site by editing the header.php file.
However, this method requires some coding knowledge and may be less convenient compared to using a plugin.
5. What plugin is recommended for adding Google Analytics to WordPress?
The Site Kit by Google plugin is highly recommended.
It’s free, easy to use and integrates directly with Google Analytics, allowing you to view key metrics in your WordPress dashboard.
6. How do I install and set up the Site Kit by Google plugin?
- Install and activate the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory.
- Follow the setup wizard to connect your Google Analytics account.
- Select the recommended settings and start tracking data from your website.
7. What is the difference between using a plugin and manually adding Google Analytics?
Using a plugin like Site Kit is simpler and more user friendly, especially for beginners.
Manual integration provides more customization but requires coding knowledge and may lose the tracking code during theme updates.
8. How do I find my Google Analytics tracking code?
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you’ll receive a tracking code. You can find it under the Admin > Data Streams section in your Google Analytics account.
9. What is the segment feature in Google Analytics and how can I use it?
The segment feature lets you filter traffic data based on specific criteria, such as location, device type or user behavior.
It helps identify trends and optimise marketing strategies for different audience segments.
10. Are there any alternatives to Google Analytics for WordPress?
Yes, some popular alternatives include:
- Jetpack Stats: Simplified analytics for WordPress.
- Yandex Metrica: Free, with heatmaps and session recording.
- Heap: Tracks user interactions automatically.
These tools may offer unique features but are often paid services.
To your success,
Jackson