As a blogger, Google Analytics has been a go-to place for revisions and planning for my blog.
However, using MonsterInsights has made Google Analytics a lot easier to use, and in this article, I will share my perspective on MonsterInsights.
Before going into the review, I will introduce MonsterInsights, and I urge you to watch this video below for a better understanding of my article.
MonsterInsights in a Nutshell
MonsterInsights is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that is user-friendly and unique.
It allows you to manage efficiently, add, and customize Google Analytics tracking services on your WordPress site.
There are two versions of MonsterInsights—the free and Pro versions. The free version lets you install Google Analytics and track primary website data.
The features of the free plugin include simple installation, single click on/off tracking, visitor metrics and reports, and IP traffic control. The pro version comes with all these features and a lot more.
Also read this guide on optimizing your website speed.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an application that helps you understand your site better. It tracks your content, marketing performance, products, and more services to ensure you stay on top of your game.
Google Analytics gives you access to unique insights and capabilities by sharing the data of the visitors on your website. Analytics opens possibilities to share more user-friendly content while giving you suggestions that can help improve your marketing.
However, with Google Analytics, you have to utilize tracking codes, and if you have no coding experience, it will be difficult to use without help. Also, changing themes and templates on Analytics affects your tracking code.
For more information on Google Analytics, here is an article by Forbes.
Why Plugins and Tools Help
Google Analytics has so much valuable data and is such a powerful tool that it gets overwhelming. An analytics expert may not have so much hassle using the app, but a beginner will struggle with where to start or how to use the data.
Because of these few limitations with Google Analytics, using plugins and tools makes the application more comfortable to use and more beginner-friendly. It gives you all your information at a glance.
Having an excellent analytics tool will help you in the following areas:
- Improving and optimizing your site by setting and tracking your conversion goals
- Showing you the types of content your audience likes to help you in creating content.
- Helping you with tactical marketing by showing you how people find your site
Review of MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a rebrand of Google Analytics by Yoast and has an essential goal of making analytics easy for beginners.
Boasting over 2 million installations, MonsterInsights is one of the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress.
Search Engine Journal named MonsterInsights as the number one of the three best Google Analytics plugins—comparing it to Analytify and Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, and I have to say I agree with them.
Features
MonsterInsights comes with several features.
Some are universal tracking, Google Analytics dashboard, page-level analytics, real-time statistics, affiliate links and Ads tracking, Enhanced eCommerce tracking, EU compliance, custom dimensions, performance and optimization, and monitoring and integration with other popular WordPress plugins and services.
In this section, I will highlight two broad features categories and shed light on them.
1. Dashboard
The dashboard offers the option of viewing your website’s data without logging in to Google Analytics. The dashboard has three main sections: overview, reports, and custom dimension report.
Overview Tab
Once you open the dashboard, there are two visible metrics for sessions and bounce rates
- Sessions are known as individual visits to Analytics. It is a group of interactions that occur on your website. There are usually more pageviews than sessions because every interaction a single user has with your site takes place in a single session. The session metric gives you a general sense of your website’s traffic. It contains multiple clicks, multiple pageviews, and numerous conversions or purchases.
- Bounce Rate measures the number of times a user opened a single page and left the site. If your website was among a Google search result and a user opened it and went back to Google, it counts as a bounce, except they open a second page from your website. Usually, the length of time spent on your page doesn’t matter, but this depends on your settings. This metric is not very useful without additional information, but it is an excellent gauge for the usability and content quality of your website. A lousy bounce rate may be a good sign based on the content of your website; it could mean one page solved all the queries your viewer had.
Reports Tab
The reports tab gives a three-dimensional traffic report on countries, accessible pages, and traffic sources. The specific report tab can be accessed from a “select dimension” dropdown menu.
In Google Analytics, metric refers to a numerical value, while dimension refers to a name.
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- Traffic Sources Report shows you the sources of your sites traffic and their session counts. Search engines are usually at the top of the list because your website could be included in their search results. Also, sites with links to your website can be a source of traffic. This feature is also useful in a case of spam websites linking to your page and skewing traffic data. You can set up data filters if the unrecognizable website activities continue.
- Popular Pages Report shows the popular pages on your website.
- Countries Report lets you see the countries that are the source of your website’s traffic. If you do not want a specific country to have access to your site, you can block them with an IP blocker.
2. Tracking
A few of the tracking features you can easily enable with MonsterInsights are:
- With EU compliance, you can improve your accordance with privacy and GDPR. This feature is especially helpful with international clients.
- Understanding which advert slot brings in the most revenue with Ads tracking.
- Forms tracking helps you follow-up on-site forms while gathering data on them.
- Tags, categories, logged in users, authors, searches and more on your website can be tracked with Custom dimensions.
- Google optimize helps you to start conducting A/B tests on your site.
- Using File download tracking, you can find out the number of times users download your files.
- Ecommerce tracking can be enabled for WooCommerce or digital download stores.
- Facebook Instant Articles tracking tracks your Facebook instant articles.
Benefits
The people that need MonsterInsights include Bloggers and publishers, Business websites, eCommerce store owners, and Developers and agencies.
In case you are in doubt of your need for a plugin, here are some of my reasons for recommending MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights helps you Find Analytical Reports in Your WordPress Dashboard
Using MonsterInsights helps you avoid unnecessary logins to your analytics account because it displays the performance of your site on your dashboard.
A simple login to your WordPress dashboard gives you all the performance statistics information of your site.
The dashboard also helps when you have multiple editors; you can let them view your insights without breaching unnecessary privacy.
MonsterInsights helps you Set up Google Analytics with Ease
Without having to set up codes, making a few clicks can connect your website with Google Analytics.
Installing, setting up, and using MonsterInsights on your website and linking to Google Analytics is a straightforward process that I will discuss later in this article.
MonsterInsights Increases the Ease of Making Informed Decisions
With Google Analytics, there is a lot of data available to you, but the challenge is with interpretation into useful information.
The data provided by Google Analytics is comprehensive and much more comfortable for an analytics expert to understand. Not having any experience in utilizing analytics data, converting the reports into a website helping information may be overwhelming.
To make more informed business decisions, you need to separate vital information from redundant information, so you do not drown in the process of improving your webpage.
MonsterInsights organizes crucial information and reports in a format that is easy to understand and use.
MonsterInsights Integrates Advanced Tracking Features
With MonsterInsights, you can enable several analytics tracking features that you may have missed on your website with ease.
Setting up basic analytics tracking is quite simple but is limited and does not enable enhanced tracking reports like form tracking, download tracking, eCommerce tracking, and more.
Without a plugin, adding new tracking codes on your site on Google Analytics would be a manual process. To err is human, so you could make slight mistakes that can mess up your Analytics data.
MonsterInsights helps you avoid a human error that will skew your data because you will not have to use codes to set up.
Some tracking features enabled in MonsterInsights include EU compliance, custom dimensions, eCommerce tracking, Facebook Instant Articles tracking, Google optimize, Ads tracking, Google AMP tracking, File download tracking, and forms tracking.
What Could be Better
MonsterInsights is one of the few tools that have great features that work.
For me, the only possible limitation with Analytics, in general, is the possibility of getting hacked and losing sensitive customer information that was saved as cookies.
This possibility will cause a severe security breach. As a user, the best way to prevent the use of your data for anything other than business is to delete cache after browsing on cookies using pages.
Pricing
There are three payment options for MonsterInsights. These are,
- Agency for companies and agencies at 399.50-799.00 USD every year. It can be used on 25 different sites and comes with all custom reports and tracking solutions.
- Pro includes five sites and charges 199.50-399.00 USD annually. It also comes with fully supported tracking solutions and custom reports.
- Plus, for growing businesses at 99.50-199.00 USD annually. It only supports a single site.
This plan supports some tracking solutions except Ecommerce tracking, Enhanced Ecommerce, Form conversion, Google optimize, SEO score tracking, category/ tags tracking, custom post types, logged-in user tracking, author tracking, WooCommerce, easy digital downloads, MembersPress, and custom dimensions.
Apart from custom dimensions, form conversions, and Ecommerce reports, this plan supports all other custom reports.
Due to the guarantee their product has, they offer a 14-days return policy.
Competition Comparison
There are multiple plugins on WordPress, but my preference for MonsterInsights is based on these factors.
It Doesn’t Require Third-Party Accounts
If you do not want to share your traffic statistics with WordPress, you cannot use a plugin like Jetpack Stats; because Jetpack Stats requires you to connect your site with WordPress to allow tracking.
Google Analytics already does the tracking; MonsterInsights connects your website to it and avoids creating new accounts.
Flawless User Experience
Due to ease of setup and beginner-friendly workflow, MonsterInsights tops its competition.
Monsterinsights is point-and-click without the need to touch codes to set up Analytics.
It is Budget-Friendly and Suits all Website Sizes
There are different pricing for different features and the free lite versions that are all budget-friendly. You can also test the waters with the free version to see if it works for you.
It is a Single Product With all the Tracking Features you will Need
Whatever you do, you will find MonsterInsights useful because it helps you track multiple features at once.
If you are a blogger and you get a publisher-specific plugin, you will not be able to enjoy some other features.
How to Use MonsterInsights
- Login to your WordPress admin dashboard and install the MonsterInsights plugin.
- Activate the MonsterInsights plugin and click launch the wizard in the redirected page.
- Configure settings and select whether your website is a business site, publisher site or eCommerce site.
- Connect MonsterInsights to your website.
- Then connect your Google Analytics account.
- Grant necessary permissions.
- Pick your website profile and complete connection.
- Modify recommended settings to install updates if you like or not, then save and continue.
- Pick what every addon you want from the recommendations then save and continue.
- Finish and exit. Then you can start your insights experience, and view reports from your dashboard directly.
Wrapping up!
Sometimes, you may doubt the worth of a plugin, but if you use MonsterInsights, you will get your money’s worth in site improvement choices you will make.
As a blogger, I recommend MonsterInsight for your site business. Try not to fly blind and optimize a plugin made to help you get your best website growth yet.
If you have any questions or plugins you want me to feature, tell me in the comments. Also, be kind to share this article with someone that struggles with the use of Google Analytics.
For further reading on website optimization, check out these articles.
