Any blogger should do a few things well, such as creating content that provides value, promoting it, bringing traffic to the blog, and monetizing it.
But as website owners, there are other tasks on our list, such as constantly optimizing the pages on the blog to rank them higher and improve the domain authority. This also includes speeding up the site, making it look professional, and adding all necessary branding and legal elements.
To make sure you’re always working on the right things though, you should be analyzing your website’s performance over time.
Website analytics can help you:
- Keep an eye on the most important metrics;
- See which content performs best (it’s often not the articles you think are most popular);
- Get updates in real time;
- See your traffic and find out where people are coming from;
- Analyze people’s behavior on your website;
- Get access to analytics reports;
- See how your blog is ranking in Google,
And more.
Luckily, we all have (and must use) Google Analytics. If you haven’t set it up yet, now’s the time. It can give you access to details about your website, audience and content that will help you 10x your traffic and income.
However, that’s not the only tool you need in your arsenal. MonsterInsights is Google Analytics’s best friend – the plugin you can install for free to analyze your site straight from your WordPress Dashboard.
How to Get Started with MonsterInsights
Find MonsterInsights in the plugin directory and install and activate it. Then, add the Google Analytics tracking code and get access to the valuable reports it provides.
I’ve been using it for years now and love the information it gives at a glance. Here’s what I see when I log into my blog:
I don’t really log into Google Analytics that often, maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks. But with MonsterInsights, I’m always up to date with how my site is performing.
I can immediately spot when the traffic increasing (which means that one of my Pins went viral, for example), see what content performs best, and make sure everything’s in order.
A sudden drop in traffic should immediately be looked into as it can mean broken links on your site or else that requires your attention.
Once you’re a user of MonsterInsights, you’ll be able to see an Overview report in your dashboard.
When you scroll down the Insights page, you will see graphs displaying the New vs Returning Visitors and the Device Breakdown (what percentage of people browse from desktop, tablet and mobile).
Below, are lists of the top 10 countries (which is part of the demographics of your audience) and the top 10 referrals (sites referring visitors to you).
Mine look like this:
In addition, clicking the blue buttons at the bottom brings you directly to the page in Google Analytics showing more results.
Last but not least, the free MonsterInsights plugin shows your top performing posts and pages – the ones that got the most views in the last 30 days.
Here are mine:
From here, I like to click the title and go to the page so I can update it.
Your top blog posts should be updated regularly as Google likes fresh content and crawls such pages again, which increases their chances of ranking higher.
Need more features?
The free version of MonsterInsights is convenient, easy to use and the data from it can help you grow your blog traffic and make more sales if used wisely.
However, you can check out MonsterInsights Pro for more features. More than 2 million WordPress users are trusting the tool and you get to track your ads, online stores, downloads, and optin forms.
With the paid packages, you can also improve your GDPR compliance, integrate Facebook Instant Articles, see metrics for individual posts and pages on your blog and more.
Please keep in mind that basic website analytics is a must for every blogger. It can help you provide a better experience for your readers, optimize your pages, rank higher and make more money from your blog.
Connecting your site to Google Analytics is one of the first steps when starting a blog and growing it. At any next stage, you should test new tools and see if they can take your blog to the next level.
Are you using a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress site?