Best Google Analytics Plugins
What are the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress? Naturally, there are several ways of going around installing a plugin for GA, but the truth is that it can be far more easy and convenient to check out all the data right from your site’s dashboard.
In today’s article, we’re looking at a selection of highly functional and user-friendly Google Analytics plugins. Some of them are free while others are paid, but we’ll specify this information for each.
Which Google Analytics plugin for WordPress is best?
MonsterInsights
Since over two million people have installed MonsterInsights on their sites, this should give you a clue as to how good it is. The best thing about it is that you do not have to fiddle with any code.
MonsterInsights will display all of the information you need right in your dashboard, such as your site’s traffic, demographic information of your visitors, the pages that your audience checks out the most, as well as any event tracking.
We’d also like to add that you can use the plugin for tracking anything from form views, submissions, and conversion rates.
Best of all, the basic features of this plugin can be tested for free. The paid version does cost $99.50 per year, but it gives you access to much more data and functionalities compared to the free one.
GA Google Analytics
This plugin is completely GDPR-compliant, which as you know, can be quite important, especially if you are doing business in the European Union. GA has some pretty neat features, but they are mostly included in the paid version.
For example, you can select which users’ activity you actually want to track — you can exclude them based on a number of custom factors. You can also choose to not track certain posts or post types.
We decided to include GA on this list even though it doesn’t really show you the data that you can check out in your Google Analytics dashboard. In any case, it’s a pretty useful plugin to have and the cheapest plan starts at just $15 per site.
ExactMetrics
This one might also be considered the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, and it’s currently utilized by over one million users across the world. The plugin is easy to use and speaks to the needs of less tech-savvy site owners, since like MonsterInsights, you do not need any complicated coding knowledge.
One thing that we do have to mention about ExactMetrics is that while it is completely free, it cannot be integrated with WooCommerce or Google Adsense, for example.
But if you’re on a budget and you strictly want to check out your website traffic data, this plugin might be the right one for you. You can check out pretty much all of the information you might be interested in, from outbound links and your bounce rate to your page views and organic searches.
WP Google Analytics Events
This plugin is aimed more toward event tracking rather than anything else, so it might not speak to the needs of all site owners. You can track a variety of things using WP Google Analytics Events, such as how many people scroll down a specific post or page, click on a button, write in your contact forms, or even view an image or video.
There is a free version available, but it is going to provide you only with data regarding your link clicks. Anything else in terms of tracking is available in the paid version, which starts at $79.
WP Statistics
WP Statistics is free of charge, which is undoubtedly a detail that you should be considering if you’re starting a website for the first time. Besides, it’s got pretty much all the data you might be interested in checking out, such as real-time website metrics.
Best of all, WP Statistics gives you geographical and content reports, both of which are quite in-depth. Another reason to install this plugin is that it doesn’t share the data with anyone else but you — and the old data can be deleted if you can’t handle the storage costs.
Other interesting features range from the ability to filter out your data whichever way you want, whether by keyword, location, or anything else to emailing you stats of your site.
Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics
If you own a WooCommerce store, it goes without saying that you will need a plugin for that. This one has its fair share of limitations and might also not work with certain themes, but we’d say that it’s pretty good at tracking product clicks, cart events, and everything else you might want to know.
Probably the best thing about this plugin is that it doesn’t cost a thing, so it’s great for those of you who might want to spend their budget on improving their products or marketing rather than plugins, at least for now.
Analytify
This Google Analytics plugin can provide you with all the data you need, such as your bounce rate, the average time spent on your site, new versus returning visitors, page views, page depth per session and more.
The nice thing about Analytify is that there’s also the option of you visualizing all the data in graphs, which can tell you a bit about how your site’s traffic is progressing.
We’d also like to note that Analytify has a free add-on plugin that can show your stats right in your WordPress dashboard. The free version doesn’t include any graphs, though. As for the pricing, the plans start at $59 a year.
Matomo
If you are focused on privacy, whether the data you collect from your users or even your own, Matomo might be a plugin to consider. The biggest difference between Matomo and the other plugins in our selection is that it lets you opt out in terms of sharing your data.
This Analytics plugin gives you pretty much all the info you might want, such as your visitors, geo-location, traffic sources, keywords, as well as bounce rate. It does have to be used by adding your tracking code to your site, though, but once that is done, you can visualize your reports right in your WordPress dashboard.
There is a basic free version available, so you can check it out first but the paid one gives you a lot of other functionalities, such as heatmaps, A/B testing, form analytics, and much more. Plus, it assists you in making your site totally GDPR-compliant.
Google Analytics by 10Web
If you have been searching for a pretty basic plugin that gets the job done and that means no hassle on your end, this one should be right up your alley. It’s simple and does specifically what it has been designed to do, so that’s one less thing to worry about.
Some of the things you can do with it range from checking out your analytics reports right in your dashboard (which is what a Google Analytics plugin should do, after all) to sending out automated email reports or exporting them in CSV.
The plugin also integrates with Google Ads and Adsense, which gives you the ability to track how your paid campaigns are progressing. There’s also the option of you tracking the activity on your eCommerce site, and you can also set a number of specific triggers for event tracking.
Perhaps the most significant reason to give this one a try is that it has a free version. The paid one starts at just thirty dollars, which is slightly more affordable compared to other choices listed in this post.
GainWP
Despite the rather complicated history of this plugin (acquired by developers at MonsterInsights, who split some of its features and basically turned it into two different plugins, a paid and a free one), we’d say that it is at least worth looking into.
Some of the data that you can check out right from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard if you decide to go with GainWP ranges from real-time stats and custom event tracking to affiliate link tracking, custom dimensions, as well as enhanced link attribution.
While the interface might be less user-friendly and also less visually appealing compared to that of MonsterInsights, this one is free, so it makes a pretty good choice for people on a tight budget.
Site Kit by Google
This is Google’s official Analytics plugin and it doesn’t cost a penny, so it definitely should be considered by newbie bloggers and website owners. It’s got a bunch of features from traffic sources and countries to the devices that your audience uses to browse your site.
Seeing that it is free, you might also want to know that Site Kit is the only plugin that integrates with Tag Manager, Search Console, Adsense, and pretty much any other Google product you might want to utilize for your website.
Lara’s Google Analytics
If what you want is to basically visualize your Google Analytics data right in your dashboard, including with the same graph and metrics, Lara’s GA is the right way of going about things.
It lets you visualize anything from your sessions and visitors to your bounce rate, page views, and the devices that your audience uses the most.
You can see the data for every past 30 days, but the period is extended with the premium plan, which costs $14.99, which makes it quite an affordable Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
Actionable Google Analytics for WooCommerce
As its name suggests, this one is uniquely made for WooCommerce, meaning that it’s a bit more advanced than the standard alternatives, which basically allow you to see data about your website traffic.
There are a lot of features included in this plugin, but to mention just a few, we’d like to note that it has anything from GTM support and IP anonymization to client ID tracking and product refund tracking.
There’s also a number of cons, though, and the most important one seems to be that it is quite expensive. It costs $135. Also, it is not the easiest plugin in the world, and while the team at Actionable Google Analytics will guide you and offer you excellent support, it’s still anything but affordable.
Finally, another drawback is that you can’t see all of these reports right in your WordPress dashboard — although obviously, the plugin needs to be installed on your site.
Choosing the right Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress website
While our first option is obviously MonsterInsights, it can set you back approximately $100 a year — still, it’s cheaper compared to others, especially those that ask you for a fee every month.
If you don’t need too detailed statistics, a free option like Site Kit by Google might be right up your alley.
So we’d say that the first factor to consider when sifting through the many GA plugins available out there would be the cost. A question would be: can you see all your data in your WordPress dashboard or do you actually have to go elsewhere?
Can the plugin integrate with WooCommerce if that’s what you need? What else can you do with the plugin? Does it send you emails of the data, does it allow you to delete the data so that it doesn’t take up too much storage space?
And finally, you should also check whether the plugin you have picked actually works for your WordPress theme. Unfortunately, we couldn’t help noticing that even some of those that we’ve showcased here don’t work with child themes or custom themes.
If you want to keep it simple, you can always just upload the tracking code on your site and use good old Google Analytics instead — especially if you do not want to install too many plugins or you don’t need any fancy event tracking or eCommerce data. And these days, doing this is super easy as you can find all the info online or even come across several videos detailing how to do it.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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