Introduction
While a powerful tool on its own, WordPress can be further elevated by the plugins you choose to bolster your website’s ecosystem. Think of adding plugins to your WordPress website as you would installing apps on your smartphone. It’s for the benefit of the user experience, with the added advantage of optimising the current framework. As of writing, there are 56,068 plugins housed in the official directory to extend the WordPress experience. This is not to mention the thousands of third-party plugins available from highly popular places like CodeCanyon and expert developers who specialise in tailor-made solutions. This brings us to the MonsterInsights, the top plugin for Google Analytics for WordPress.
At Kaira, we’re big fans of analytics tools that allow users to see the direct results of their efforts to grow and reach new customers. One of our favourites is MonsterInsights, a powerful and highly popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Let’s learn more about it:
What is MonsterInsights?
Previously known as Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast, Syed Balkhi acquired the plugin in 2016 and set about making analytics simple for everyone, starting with a new, memorable name.
Today, with over 2 million professionals using the software, MonsterInsights is undoubtedly the most popular plugin for Google Analytics for WordPress. The deeply functional software scrapes all of your digital avenues to provide the analytics you need to take decisive action and grow both your business and its website.
Why does Kaira recommend MonsterInsights?
Simply put, you won’t find another plugin that offers such effortless onboarding with the depth of functionality that MonsterInsights does. Before it, a person would have to hire a coding specialist to set up and integrate Google Analytics for WordPress, or event and eCommerce tracking. Thanks to MonsterInsights, you’re able to download and install the plugin and its features without any prior coding knowledge. From a high-level perspective, you can look forward to:
- Audience reporting: Tells you where you website visitors are coming from, which device they’re using, and what they’re searching for. It also informs you of their age, gender, and more.
- Behaviour reporting: Ongoing tweaking and optimisation is one of the most effective ways to see traffic gains and increased website conversions. With its behaviour reporting dashboard, MonsterInsights helps you see what’s working on your website, and what’s not. Invaluable insights include how people discovered your site, which keywords they used to search for it, and who referred them.
- Content reporting: There’s nothing worse than churning out content that doesn’t resonate with its intended audience. With MonsterInsights’ content reporting dashboard, you can identify the content that’s hitting the mark and the fluff that’s missing it. In terms of SEO and search rankings, it’s made even more powerful when used in conjunction with their search console report and custom dimensions.
- Ecommerce Reporting: This will show you vital store stats like revenue, conversion rate, average order value, top referral sources, and more.
- Forms Reporting: Reporting of forms will show you conversion stats for the different contact forms and lead forms on your site, so you can work on improving conversions to grow your online business.
- Search Console Reporting: Showing exactly how well your website will rank in Google, you can then further optimize your Search Engine Optimization to grow your organic website traffic.
- Custom Dimensions Reporting: These reports help you dig deeper by showing you your most popular authors, the best publication times, your most popular categories or tags, how well your Yoast focus keywords and SEO scores are performing, and more.
Besides just Google Analytics for WordPress, the sections below will go into greater detail about the standard (Plus) and Pro package features.
Advanced Google Analytics for WordPress – MonsterInsights Premium:
Plus package: the standard, out-of-the-box features
Accurate analytics provide actionable insights that allow you to make data-driven decisions to increase your digital footprint. Here are a few of the Plus packages’s user-friendly features that enforce an insight-based methodology for business growth.
- Universal tracking: Get a better understanding of your user with universal website tracking that encompasses every device and campaign (no coding experience needed).
- Google Analytics dashboard: Empower your business decisions with actionable insights from a website analytics report that fits neatly into your existing WordPress dashboard.
- Live stats: With statistics delivered in real-time, you can see who’s browsing your website and what they’re doing on it. This gives you finger-on-the-pulse insights into who your audience is, opening up opportunities for future engagement.
- Affiliate links and ads tracking: This nifty feature allows you to automatically track user clicks on your affiliate links, banner ads, and outbound links to see which particular collateral is resonating with your audience segments.
- Google optimize: Enhance performance with Google Optimize. With it, you can deploy A/B testing to see what’s working, adjust the speed and sample rate of your website, and use additional advanced features for a high-performance website.
- Page-level analytics: Get a more detailed understanding of which content is working and why. Page-level analytics offers detailed statistics for each post and page, giving you a deeper understanding of what users are reacting to.
In addition to the above, MonsterInsights offers one-click tracking integration with the most popular plugins and services on WordPress. This means you won’t have to ditch any of your favourites to accommodate the plugin.
Pro package features
The Pro package caters for eCommerce websites and businesses who have outgrown their current suite of sales and marketing tools. With Pro, you’re able support five websites for $199.50 per year. In addition to offering everything that the Plus package does, you get a deeper, more comprehensive suite of analytics tools for growth. To name a few:
- eCommerce reporting and tracking: Gauge your store’s performance from one place with total revenue, conversion rate, average order value, top products, and top conversion sources. Superpower your online retail hub with one-click Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, and MemberPress.
- WooCommerce: Use the biggest eCommerce plugin to your advantage with single-click WooCommerce integration. You also get a handy WooCommerce report dashboard with installation. If you’d like more information on what makes WooCommerce so powerful, click here.
- Easy Digital Downloads: Complete your enhanced eCommerce suite with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin in one simple click. If you’d like to learn more about this intuitive, lightweight eCommerce tool, we go into greater detail in this article.
- Custom dimensions: Tailor your analytics to your needs by setting your own custom tracking parameters. This gives you the data you need without the clutter, from a simple yet insightful dashboard.
- SEO score tracking: Analyse statistics from your Yoast SEO score to see how it affects your traffic and use these insights to create content that’s more impactful, and that search engines love.
Packages and pricing
MonsterInsights has three packages: Plus, Pro, and Agency. The suite and price you choose is fully determined by your requirements, with the Agency package being for large businesses with many moving parts and departments. Pricing is as follows:
Head over here for the packages and their list of services to decide which one is best suited to your requirements.
Conclusion
With a WordPress website, you’re able to build-out a digital ecosystem that’s perfectly suited to your business’s requirements. MonsterInsights offers in-depth analytics and intuitive functionality that makes it easier than ever to harness your analytics for growth that’s powered by customer engagement, conversion and retention.
If you’d like to discuss adding Google Analytics for WordPress or simply any website or plugin needs, feel free to reach out to a Kaira specialist today. With over a decade of developing plugins and themes for WordPress, we’ll be able to advise you on the ideal integrations for your digital hub.
For an example of our work, check out our latest theme, Overlay.
