Pricing: Free

The majority of Google Analytics users install and use the free version of the tool, which handles most or all of what’s required by typical small and medium-sized organizations.

Google Analytics 360

Google also offers a paid, enterprise version of its analytics tool. The paid version is called Google Analytics 360. Google Analytics 360 is for much larger businesses that need upgrades beyond the free Google Analytics tool, including these advantages:

• Higher traffic threshold: 1 billion+ hits per month (at the first GA 360 tier) versus up to 10 million hits per month with the free version
• Fresher data: Google Analytics 360 data is refreshed every 10 minutes to 4 hours versus the 24+ hours used for the standard, free version of Google Analytics

Large organizations that make extensive use of Google Analytics and find themselves limited by the free version are encouraged to consider upgrading to a 360 paid version that fits their needs.

Google Analytics (often referred to as GA in the context of web analytics) is a web analytics tool created by Google to provide reporting on web traffic for a website. Google Analtyics is installed on a website by inserting a

Google Analytics has been around since November, 2005. It was one of the first comprehensive web analytics tools, built to allow website owners to view realtime traffic data along with dynamic, multi-dimensional traffic statistics that make it possible to take actionable steps in response to traffic behavior and patterns. Google launched Google Analytics after acquiring a web analytics company

The video below, Google Analytics Ultimate Beginner’s Guide, will give you a very comprehensive overview of the features of Google Analytics. Although these features change on a continual basis, the standard core features of Google Analytics (the ones used by the majority of webmasters) have been consistent.

Google Analytics Features

The standard, free version of the Google Anaytics tool provides users with five main categories of tools, each of which represent a particular way of looking at those who are visiting your website.

Realtime

The Realtime section of Google Analytics shows you who is on your website currently. Clicking on the overview link within the realtime section will show you who is currently on your website using a world map. The overview also tells you what pages the users are on, which users are using a mobile device versus a desktop, and summary data for the referral sources, showing where the visitors came from.

Audience

The Audience section of Google Analytics shows you historical data, for the time period you select, describing who visited your website. In the overview section of the Audience report, you can see the total number of users for a period of time, how many pageviews those users performed, the bounce rate (who came and left without browsing your website) and other summary data.

In the Audience category of Google Analytics, there are many other customized views of your audience, including their location (Geo), whether they are new or returning, what types of devices they are using, and other user-focused segments.

Acquisition

The Acquisition section of Google Analytics allows marketers to understand what sources brought visitors to the website. Acquisition sources include:

• Organic search: people clicking on a non-paid search result to be directed to your website
• Direct: people who have bookmarked your page in their browsers or who have configured their browsers to not allow specific referral information to be sent
• Referral: visitors who come from other websites
• Social: visitors from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites

Behavior

The Behavior section of Google Analytics allows webmasters and marketers to see how visitors to their website are interacting with specific pages, including the flow between pages. This feature is important for helping with conversion and understanding where site visitors are losing interest, troubleshooting pages that are having issues, and for generally understanding how those who have come to the site are interacting with its specific pages.

Conversions

The Conversions section of Google Analytics gives website owners the ability to target specific objectives for visitors to their websites.

Using the Conversions features, Google Analytics users can set up goals and measure how well their pages accomplish those goals, such as doing things like subscribing to a newsletter, scrolling through an entire page, and other evidences that web pages are accomplishing their intended purposes as expected.

Installing Google Analytics

Installing Google Analytics is fairly simple for most websites. It involves placing the Google Analtyics tracking code on each page of the website for which a website owner wants to track visitors. Most website owners install the tracking code on every public page of the site (usually there is no reason to have web tracking in the admin or backend part of the site) so that they can track as much behavior as possible.

To install Google Analytics, you’ll first need to set up a Google Account. A gmail or other type of Google Account can be used for this purpose. You can also set up a Google Account in the process of getting starting with Google Analytics.

Once you’ve got a Google Account set up, you can go to Google Analytics, fill out the information they require (website name and other info), and then get the tracking code to input into your website header or footer.

Once you’ve inserted the Google Analtyics tracking code into each page of your website that you want to track, it’s a good idea to check that the tracking code is working, sending data to Google Analytics that you can see through your Google Analytics dashboard.

Google Analytics with WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management software available. There are dozens of WordPress plugins that can be used to install Google Analytics on a WordPress website. The most popular of the Google Analytics plugins is Monster Insights.

If you install Monster Insights after setting up your WordPress website, you can go through their setup wizard, including entering your Google Analytics tracking id, fairly easily.

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For anyone involved in publishing content online, understanding what WordPress is and how it works is highly beneficial.

WordPress is used by 64.2% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 43.0% of all websites.

W3Techs.com: Usage share and market share of WordPress

What is WordPress?

WordPress consists of PHP files (with extensions that end in .php), along with some other supporting files. Here is a list of the types of files included with the WordPress software package:

• PHP Files (.php extension): This is the core WordPress functionality.
• Stylesheets (.css extension): These are cascading style sheets, which are used to provide styling information for HTML pages.
• JavaScript (.js extension): JavaScript allows WordPress sites to have dynamic interaction inside a user’s browser.
• Fonts (.woff2 extension): These are font files in the Web Open Font Format. WordPress includes some default fonts with the core download.
• Images (.png extension): WordPress uses several images with its default themes as well as for using graphics on some of its default pages.
• Data structure definitions (.json extension): These files include code block definitions for efficient use of the core code.

WordPress is open-source software, meaning that it’s not owned by a for-profit company that’s using it to make money while keeping proprietary source code hidden. Instead, the WordPress code is owned by the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit that was set up to manage the development of the WordPress project.

Contributing to WordPress

Anyone who is interested in helping with the project can contribute to the development of WordPress. WordPress is kept in a repository called Subversion, which you can browse on the Make WordPress Core section of WordPress.

There are other ways to contribute to WordPress besides writing PHP code. WordPress actively solicits help from people who are interested in helping with anything from design to documentation to translation WordPress into other languages.

Downloading and Installing WordPress

Automated WordPress Installation by a Web Host

In years past, installing WordPress required a user to download the WordPress software files, upload them to a web server, set up a database to use with WordPress, and run the install manually, as described below. Because of how popular WordPress has become, going through this process manually is not necessary, as many web hosts have dedicated resources to make it easier for their customers to use WordPress.

To make WordPress more accessible to the average, non-technical person needing a website up and going quickly, many hosts have one-click WordPress installs. Many web hosts have also created specific WordPress hosting packages that can be purchased, where a WordPress system (often available with the choice of a few professional-looking themes ready to go) is built-in to the hosting platform.

The WordPress installation files can be downloaded directly from the WordPress download page. The WordPress installation file comes packaged in a .zip file that is around 20MB in size. You also have the option to download the WordPress installation files in a compressed .tar.gz file that takes up about 18MB.

Once you’ve downloaded the WordPress files, you’ll need to upload them to your web host using a file manager application. Then you’ll unpack the WordPress files on your host.

Setting up a Database (MySQL) for WordPress

You’ll need to create a database (most often MySQL is used) for your WordPress instance to use, and give your WordPress instance access rights to the database. This is often done using PHPMyAdmin, which is much easier to use than having to remember the MySQL commands for creating a database, setting up a new user with a password, and giving that user access rights to the database.

Running the WordPress Install

After you’ve unpacked the WordPress files and put them in the directory on your web host where you want them, and after you’ve got a database setup that WordPress can login to and use, you’re ready to run the installation, which is straight forward.

Setting the WordPress Root Directory

By default, the WordPress files are kept in a directory named wordpress. Most people move the WordPress files into their root directory so that their WordPress website is served from the root folder on their host (for example, https://mywebsite.com/ versus https://mywebsite.com/wordpress/)

Uses for WordPress

WordPress has many different uses. The initial purpose of WordPress was to create a blogging platform back in the early 2000’s when blogging was just becoming popular and people were looking for dynamic ways to publish web pages. WordPress was originally used to publish blog posts in a chronological order, with features for having people subscribe to your blog.

WordPress has carefully and intentionally evolved to be a popular content management system for creating almost any kind of website, including:

• personal blogs
• informational websites with blogging components
• small business websites with just a few pages
• online retail stores (using the WooCommerce plugin) for small and large businesses
• enterprise content management systems

WordPress Themes

Something that makes WordPress attractive is the flexibility that exists with the design of a blog, website, store, or whatever it is that you’re intending to use WordPress for. There are nearly 5,000 different themes to choose from in the WordPress theme catalog. Installing a theme can be done quickly and easily within the WordPress admin.

Also, WordPress enforces a standard for developing a theme and having it published and available for installation via the WordPress theme interface. This makes it so that each of the themes available has a core set of similar functionality and common configuration options. Switching between themes or altering a theme to better suit a user’s needs is predictable and not difficult to learn.

Because of how ubiquitous WordPress is, there are thousands of potential contractors who can help WordPress users set up a theme and modify it to their liking. Hiring one of these WordPress design contractors usually involves going to a freelancer website such as UpWork or Fiverr and choosing from the many experts who advertise themselves for hire there.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress’ plugin catalog offers powerful add-on tools so that WordPress can be adapted to whatever is needed. For instance, using WooCommerce (one of WordPress’ most popular plugins), you can turn your WordPress system into an online retail store. If you have a publishing site and want to have paywall content (pages and information that can only be accessed by people who have paid subscriptions), you can set that up using one of several different plugins in the WordPress directory that are designed specifically for that.

There are over 50,000 WordPress plugins that can be installed directly from the WordPress Plugins page inside the admin section of the CMS. These plugins include everything from mortgage calculators to contact forms to performance tools that help a WordPress website run more efficiently.

In addition to the 50,000+ plugins that currently exist in the WordPress automatic install directory, it is not hard to create a new plugin to serve a particular purpose. The popularity of WordPress as a publishing platform has created a large need for WordPress plugin developers, so if you can’t find what you need out of the box in the WordPress plugin directory, you can always hire someone to build a plugin that has what you need.

Most Popular WordPress Plugins

To give you an idea of what you can do with WordPress plugins, I’m going to introduce you to some of the most popular WordPress plugins. Each of these plugins has been installed by millions of users. Their popularity is a clear indicator of how useful they are.

Contact Form 7: A simple, flexible contact form

Yoast SEO: A powerful tool for optimizing content for search engines

Elementor Website Builder: A drag and drop page builder

Akismet Spam Protection: A spam blocker for comments on blog posts and contact forms.

WordFence Security: A firewall and malware scanner

MonsterInsights: An automated integration with Google Analytics

Learning WordPress

As with any type of content management system, WordPress takes some time and effort to become fluent enough to make the most effective use of it. Most people who use WordPress don’t have to understand how to write code in PHP or understand the technical details of how things work. However, depending upon your role (if you’re just writing and publishing without regard for what else is happening inside your organization’s WordPress CMS, you likely don’t need much of any training), spending 10-40 hours ensuring that you understand how to publish posts and pages, how to add and use new plugins, how to install and set up themes, and developing a few other useful basic and intermediate WordPress skills.

There are plenty of WordPress courses available from the popular online course platforms, including:

• Skillshare
• Udacity
• Udemy
• LinkedIn Learning

Alternatives to WordPress

While WordPress is hands down the most popular content management system on the internet, there are some popular alternatives that you can use if you decide there is something about WordPress that makes you want to keep shopping for something else. Depending upon what you intend to do with online publishing, the size of your organization, and other specific needs, here are some alternative platforms for publishing content online.

BlogSpot: This is one of the original blogging platforms. Google purchased BlogSpot several years ago and has made improvements to it over the years. BlogSpot is free (both the hosting and the blogging platform) and very popular for casual and serious bloggers.

HubSpot: HubSpot is a marketing platform. They have a robust CMS that they offer for companies and individuals who want to integrate calls-to-action into their published content.

Joomla: Joomla is comparable to WordPress. It can be downloaded and installed on your own web host. Although not as popular as WordPress, there are lots of hosts who have 1-click Joomla installs available.

Drupal: Drupal is yet another flavor of content management. Deciding between Joomla and Drupal as alternatives to WordPress is mostly a matter of preference.

Ghost: Ghost is popular among developers and other technical types for publishing content. Publishing with Ghost involves learning how to us the Markdown syntax as opposed to a standard text editor like WordPress.

Magento: Magento is normally used by larger companies and enterprises because of how complicated it is to set up and manage. Similar to WordPress, Magento has a streamlined shopping cart system that sits alongside its publishing tools.

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