I have always enjoyed looking at who is coming to the sites I have built via website analytics. When I first started making websites 20 years ago, it was a fun way to see how many people came to the little side project sites I had made and learn what pages they were going to most often. But really, it was just nice knowing someone was going to the site and there was proof in the data.

When I began making sites for clients as a freelancer, I got lucky: Good work led to word of mouth and I built a solid business around referrals. I had a nice portfolio site but I didn’t really analyze or optimize it – as long as it looked professional that seemed to be all I needed. It also didn’t hurt that in 2007 – before most people had any idea of SEO and I somehow ranked #1 for “[my large city] web design” in Google and getting a lot of new clients. Analytics and site optimizations were not something I had to really worry about.

Then I suddenly dropped off page 1 of Google and my business took a major hit. I had to start putting in real effort to get new clients. The first step: analyze my traffic to help determine how I could get more leads.

This is when I began my fascination with website analytics. It wasn’t just about counting visitors for fun like in my early days. It became a business necessity to understand them – where users come from, what they like, and what makes them contact me or leave. These insights helped me regain traction for my site, but also for the clients I worked with. With the knowledge gained from regularly analyzing website traffic patterns of sites, I’ve been able to better tailor websites to specific audiences, enhance user experiences, and increase online engagement and conversions. 

I have since pivoted to focusing my work to build WordPress plugins, but I use all the same lessons learned to help grow my businesses online. Whether you’re a budding WordPress professional, a small-business owner managing their own WordPress website, or just curious about making money online, understanding website analytics is a key step in your journey to finding success. Let’s dive into how you can use analytics to build more success from your WordPress site.

What to Look At In Your Website Analytics

Website analytics is somewhat like a crystal ball. It provides crucial data about your website’s performance by tracking user behavior. This valuable info lets you tap into your site’s strengths, identify weak points, and understand the interests of your visitors better.

There are a couple core metrics that you should be looking at:

Page Views

The page views tell you how many times pages have been visited on your site, not rocket science on this one but it is the most core metric to review. On a macro level, you can see if the total page views on your site are increasing, indicating a growing site, or if they are decreasing, indicating the site needs some attention. This is often the very first chart you will see in any website analytics platform.

You want to use this info to look for specific trends or patterns. For example, if a specific blog post is getting a lot of visits compared to others, it might be a good idea to place your key offerings or call to action there – think “Sign up now!” or “Contact me” buttons.

Remember, metrics for some pages will need more attention than others. For example, BOFU page views will be more important than TOFU, and therefore, your checkout page design requires additional time and attention.

User Engagement

User engagement is information such as how much time visitors spend on your site, how frequently they come back to visit, and the number of pages they view per visit. This can help you understand which content users like so you can create more content similar to it. A more engaged user is more likely to convert, whether that be contacting you or purchasing a product. If user engagement is low, on the other hand, you might need to improve the quality of your content by adding more information, images, videos or other assets to make it more engaging.

Date Comparisons

Understanding how your site is changing over time is also incredibly important. Every analytics platform offers a way to compare website traffic between different dates. Some great comparisons I like to do are:

• This month vs last month
• Month vs same month last year
• Before and after a major change to a site

Note: Whenever doing comparisons over a shorter time period, such as a month or shorter, I recommend always using the same week days as the start/end points. For example, if I am doing week vs week, I make sure to Monday to Sunday for both time periods I am comparing to ensure they align. When doing month vs month, I recommend actually choosing 4 weeks, again starting on the same day of the week, since each month has a different number of days.

Spotting Seasonal & Time-based Trends

How you view your data, meaning the time increments that you use, can help you spot seasonal and other time-based trends. For example:

• Seasonal trends: Look at your page views over the course of an entire year and you may notice peaks and valleys at certain times. 
• Day of the week trends: You may notice that specific days of the week get more traffic than users. For example, usually B2B sites see a peak on Mondays and slowly decrease until Friday with a large drop off on the weekends.
• Hourly – Look at stats for a single day and see if you notice a specific time of day that has more visits 

When you look through the data and identify popular seasons, days, time, you know when you have the most engaged audience. This could be the best time to send your email marketing efforts!

Conversion Tracking

A conversion is a really important metric to track but will be specific to each website. Put simply, it’s when someone visiting your website does something you want them to do. Think of it like scoring a goal in a soccer game: Passes, dribbling, and shots are important to keep track of but what you really want to know is when someone scores a goal – that’s a conversion. Here are some examples:

• Purchase: You can track conversions when you sell products with WooCommerce, a membership with Restrict Content Pro, tickets with The Events Calendar, or anything where a user buys from your website. Well-crafted SEO product descriptions play a crucial role in driving these conversions.
• Signing Up: Maybe you have a newsletter or an email list. When a visitor signs up for it, that’s a conversion.
• Form Submission: Track conversions when a contact form built with the Kadence form block or any other kind of form on your site is submitted.
• Download: If you offer things like eBooks, apps, or PDF guides, and someone downloads them, that could also be a conversion.
• Clicking a Link: Sometimes, you might want visitors to go to a certain page or check out a partner website. If they click the link you provided, that can be considered a conversion.
• ecommerce Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who make purchases is especially crucial to measure business success.

Tracking conversions helps you understand if your website is ultimately successful. If lots of people are doing what you hope they’ll do on your site, it means your site is working well. If not, you might need to use the other analytics data you are tracking to help make some changes to make your site better at getting visitors to take action. 

Choosing an Analytics Platform for WordPress

The reality is Google Analytics has been the de facto analytics choice for most websites for nearly 2 decades. However, there are many new alternatives around you may have heard of. So which analytics platform is right for you?

Is Google Analytics the Best Option?

To answer this quickly: For most websites, I do not think so.

If using Google Analytics, you may have run across “UA” which stands for Urchin Analytics. Google acquired Urchin back in 2005 and turned it into their own solution. As UA, I felt Google Analytics was really easy to setup and use for me and my clients – it was also free so there wasn’t really a need to look elsewhere. Then, in response to GDPR and other privacy concerns in 2023, Google retired UA and introduced Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to try to help. While you can setup GA4 to be privacy friendly, it takes a lot more effort than what I feel it’s worth.

I believe GA4 has been a total disaster as myself and many professional marketers do not like it and want to ditch the platform entirely. In the update, none of the UA data was accessible in new GA4 accounts meaning you could no longer do date comparisons to your own historical data (you can still see your UA data in a separate dashboard, but it’s not a user friendly experience). I also found myself struggling to find simple, basic report data that was so easy in the previous UA version. It seemed like GA4 took things several steps back in terms of simplicity – if you can’t read and understand your data, what is the point of collecting it? Analytics shouldn’t require a multiple day course to understand.

However, the one area where GA4 does excel at is integration with Google Ads. So professional marketers running their Google paid ads can have a bit of advantage by using GA4. There are certainly ways to use Google Ads successfully with many of the available alternatives I will get to here shortly.

Why is privacy important for website analytics?

I briefly touched on the idea of privacy earlier. Google Analytics, specifically the Universal Analytics (UA) version, has faced legal challenges in some countries mainly due to concerns about privacy and data protection and the forced upgrade to GA4 was an attempt by Google to help with those issues. Here’s why it was a concern:

• Data Transfer to the US: Google Analytics collects data about website visitors and often sends this data to servers in the United States. Some countries, especially in the European Union (EU), have strict rules about transferring personal data outside the EU. They worry that once the data is in the US, it might not be protected as well as it is in the EU.
• GDPR Compliance: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU sets high standards for data privacy. It requires that any tool used by websites, like Google Analytics, must protect the privacy of EU citizens. The concern with Google Analytics was whether it fully complied with these rules, especially regarding user consent and the anonymization of data.
• Lack of Consent: Under GDPR, websites need to get clear consent from visitors before collecting their data. Some countries found that websites using Google Analytics were not always getting this consent properly before tracking visitors.
• Cookie Usage: Google Analytics uses cookies to track user behavior. Some countries have strict laws about cookie usage, requiring explicit consent from users before any cookies are placed on their devices. 
• Surveillance Concerns: There were also broader concerns about US government surveillance practices. Some EU countries were worried that data sent to the US could be accessed by US authorities, which might not provide the same level of privacy protection as in the EU.

Because of these concerns, some EU countries declared the use of Google Analytics (UA version) illegal without proper safeguards, like additional data protection measures or obtaining explicit consent from website visitors. This led to a push for more privacy-focused analytics solutions and modifications in how Google Analytics is used, especially in terms of obtaining user consent and ensuring data anonymization.

Privacy-Focused Analytics Alternatives

The push for more privacy-focused alternatives from website owners has led to a large growth in the number of analytics alternatives that are now available. These alternatives use “cookieless tracking” which allow them to abide by stricter privacy laws and can also eliminate the need for having a cookie banner on your site (although having a privacy and cookie policy is still important).

For WordPress website owners, there are a plethora of options to choose from as either hosted solutions or plugins:

Hosted privacy-focused analytics alternatives

Hosted means the tracking code and data is stored on a 3rd party server. These solutions have highly vetted the servers for privacy security and also do not track any personally identifiable information. While these options are not free, they offer a significantly better user experience and are a great fit for most websites: Here are some to consider:

• Fathom Analytics
• Plausible Analytics
• Pirsch Analytics
• UserMaven

You can see a more detailed comparison of WordPress analytics platforms including prices, features, and more detailed reviews.

WordPress analytics plugins

There is nothing stopping you from just having your own analytics data stored with the rest of your WordPress website. The WordPress ecosystem is so amazing that you can find solutions to just about anything, including full analytics platforms. An added bonus, because you are storing the data, many of these plugins have free versions that work great for tracking the important core metrics of your website:

• Burst Statistics
• Independent Analytics
• Koko Analytics
• AnalyticsWP

Adding Analytics to Your WordPress Website

Adding the core analytics tracking to your site isn’t the hardest thing to do as a site owner – it’s really just a line or two of JavaScript that needs to be added to every page of your site. However, if you are using Google Analytics you will want to be sure to use one that integrates with a cookie consent tool to ensure you are keeping in line with privacy laws and can make the process of analytics setup a little more challenging. As a result, I do not recommend just cutting and pasting analytics JavaScript tracking code with a code snippet plugin.

In WordPress, the easiest way to include the analytics tracking code is with a plugin – this helps ensure that you have the latest version of your platform’s tracking snippet and it’s in the proper place within site structure to better ensure you are not missing out on any data. If you are using one of the aforementioned WordPress plugins, there is no additional setup – install and activate the plugin and you’re set.

To get the most comprehensive and easiest analytics implementation plugin I recommend using Conversion Bridge. Not only does it integrate the core tracking code for 10+ analytics platforms (including Google Analytics), you can actually enable multiple platforms at the same time to evaluate which option is best for you. More importantly, it adds 1-click, no-code conversion tracking for 50+ plugins – including StellarWP brands – helping you to track all the important metrics you need to grow your online business.

If you just want the basic Google Analytics tracking added to your website, I recommend the official Google Site Kit plugin.

If you choose one of the privacy-focused analytics platforms, each one has its own plugin to help you add the core tracking code. Just search in the WordPress plugin repository for your chosen analytics platform to find their official plugin.

Understanding Your Analytics Is a Must For a Successful Website

Regardless of which analytics platform you choose for your WordPress website, having something is better than nothing. Be sure to make it a regular part of your monthly maintenance to check in and look for any changes in trends that could indicate problems with your website. Over time, you might come to enjoy looking through the data (but probably not if using GA4) and be as enthralled with looking at data as I am and, more importantly, use the insights gained to improve your online business.

A guest post by…