Owning a WordPress site can be a great opportunity for small business owners, as well as for the big ones. Tracking analytics helps you understand what your visitors like, how the traffic is directed and which devices commonly visit. There are lots of benefits for using WordPress tracker plugins, especially since the detailed reports and stats can really help your business flourish. You just need to know how to use all that data from your site to your advantage.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
One of the most commonly and widely used plugins for WordPress is definitely Google Analytics by MonsterInsight.
This plugin provides users with amazing analytic tools and incredibly easy-to-use interface. It can offer universal or asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code; it can track search results, outbound links and downloads, it can even provide users with IP hiding for stricter privacy. This plugin also comes in a premium version, which, for a cost, provides you with tons of great things like custom reports, amazing technical support, and AdSense tracking.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is extremely customizable and adaptive, and it gives its users complete tracking code control. So it’s no wonder this plugin has become essential to most of the successful business WordPress websites.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Quite similar to Google Analytics by MonsterInsight, this plugin represents an alternative with similar uses and functions with that difference that Google Analytics Dashboard for WP has much more functions and provides more different analytic services.
Some of the amazing features this plugin provides are cross domain tracking, Google AdSense linking, enhanced link attribution and page speed sampling rate control. There are much more, but if you want a really detailed specific tracking plugin – this one is quite good.
Jetpack
Jetpack by WordPress is one of the basic plugins every WordPress website should have. It represents a powerful analytic tool, but it also provides a number of other features like security services or image optimization.
This plugin helps to track trending posts, visitor’s peaks and visiting timelines. It offers website monitoring options and mobile optimization services. All aimed at directing more traffic to your website.
Amongst other things, Jetpack is great for protecting websites from brute force attacks; it also provides great customizing tools for your site, like galleries and notifications. Its social media integration is really good, so it helps you generate more visits by proper trending topic analysis.
Yoast SEO
This is one of the oldest and most used plugins in the WordPress business world. It is a powerful tool that can help you with specific analytics, but it also helps with search engine optimization and implementation, as well as with Sitemaps, graphs and meta tags reading.
Yoast SEO allows you to go through each element of the analysis in order to improve it, and it even provides you with suggestions of how to implement the needed improvement. This plugin is a great marketing tool and even better analytic helper, but the downside of it is that its support is only provided for the premium users.
WP Power Stats
WP Power Stats is a light-weight champion when it comes to WordPress plugins. Incredibly small, yet amazingly efficient, this plugin gives you detailed and statistical information about the traffic on your website.
Some of the main features this plugin offers to users are fully customizable options, private statistics only available to you, page tracking, views tracking, OS, location, device types and much more. The best way to observe WP Power Stats is to think of it as a stripped down Google Analytics tool, with core basics needed for general traffic analysis.
Analitify
Amazingly simple one-click installation and intuitive, easy to use interface, this plugin provides you with quite the number of features you can use to maximize your website’s traffic potential.
Analitify gives users the ability to track real-time statistics, get individual information about posts or pages and also it provides users with detailed analysis of other necessary data. Average time on site, average pages and page views, bounce rate, geographic location, the number of sessions, these are just some of the analytic services Analitify provides. Even though its free version has limitations, this plugin is great for small businesses and beginners in web analytics and it doesn’t affect your WordPress website’s loading speed.
WP – Piwik
This plugin is amazingly simple, but it does its job perfectly. Piwik represents an open source web analytic system, that provides users with various website analyses, but it doesn’t show Google Analytics data, as it runs on a different platform.
WP Piwik adds the Piwik javascript code in every page of a user’s website in order to save them from manually coding PHP. It can provide users with detailed analysis of page views, the number of visitors, time spent on the page, top pages and even top browsers and devices used. It gives precise bounce rates and is fully customizable and quite user-friendly.
Extra Watch
Extra Watch is generally made as an optimization plugin, aimed at analytics, but it has evolved into a great tool for full on traffic analysis. With optimization options that allow users direct site editing, this plugin also provides daily and weekly stats in preferred forms.
This plugin gives users access to monitoring visitor behavior, time spent and it gives reports when visitors leave the site. This plugin also provides you with “bad words” blocking, which helps block specific IP addresses.
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics provides users with a bit different analytic data. Instead of focusing on the overall website usage, this plugin tracks individual visitors, follows the links they’ve clicked and pages they’ve visited.
Even though it provides users with no overall website traffic data, it gives great insight about individual visitors, and it can be quite helpful when it comes to increasing conversion rates.
Crazy Egg
An amazing plugin that provides users with a detailed website traffic statistics, based on a motto seen on their website – what’s making your visitors leave?
Crazy Egg works on heat-mapping and scroll count, amongst other tools, to provide a detailed visual representation of the general usage of a website. Some of its amazing features are click counter, overall usage statistics, specific links and element clicks, and much more. If you want to have a full visual overview of your website’s traffic, this plugin is just what you need. The only downside to it is that it’s free for 60 days only.
WP Statistics
WP Statistics is a great plugin for detailed website traffic tracking. It doesn’t depend on third party services, which makes this tool quite useful and applicable in various ways.
This plugin helps you track visitors, gives you detailed page stats and covers current and previous sessions while working on all popular search engines and browsers.
It comes with some features like full geographical data, recording stats on exclusions; it exports data in various formats and gives shortcodes for different types of data from different elements
Simple Feed Stats
When it comes to feeds reports – Simple Feed Stats is absolutely great.
It has a lot of customization options that help adjust the data to user-specific wishes. It allows users to insert custom content showcased in feed, but it also comes with some other great features. Graphic, text and markup optimization for feeds, shortcodes for feed display, collecting of daily and overall statistics and in-depth analysis are just some of the great features this plugin provides.
WP Online Counter
Simple and small plugin, meant mostly for beginners and small business websites, WP Online Counter gives detailed analysis and counts of current online visitors, the highest number of visitors, most visitors online at the same time and the total number of visitors.
This plugin only works on servers with MySQL 4.1 or higher, but it provides you with the option of displaying configuration, and customization through the WordPress dashboard.
Analytics Cat
Definitely the simplest of all the plugins from this list, Analytics Cat provides simple but fast and quick solutions for traffic analysis.
This plugin provides the simplest way of integrating Google Analytics code to your website, and it helps you exclude logged in users from its tracking. This comes in as a very useful tool when you and your administrators, or employees spend a lot of time on your website. In order to show precise data, this plugin helps you get the true statistics you need from your WordPress website.
Conclusion
Naturally, you don’t need all of the analytics tracking plugins there are. You may not even need more than one or two, depending on the nature of your website. Generally speaking, Webdel WordPress developers Sydney, who’ve implemented many of these plugins in their projects, recommend Analytify as probably the best all-around solution for the end-user given its user friendliness and the ability to implement E-Commerce tracking, UTM campaign tracking as well as Email Notifications and a Dashboard Widget.
Even though, these plugins won’t magically help your website expand and evolve, they can give you a better view of your visitors’ wishes and preferences, which can be quite helpful. With this information, you can approach updating your website in the best possible manner to get the most out of it.
Author Bio
Hannah Thomas is a freelance web developer based in Australia. Always eager to learn new things and to share the knowledge she acquired along the way. Besides coding, she loves writing, movies and spending time outdoors.