After launching a website, most small business owners rely on their best guesses to make important marketing decisions. Not only does that add huge risk, it also significantly slows down growth. In this guide, we will share the top website marketing data that you must track on every WordPress site, so you can make data-drive decisions to grow your business.
Why You Need to Track Marketing Data in WordPress?
We believe it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website.
Most business owners do not realize how easy it is to track important marketing metrics on your WordPress site.
For example with a few clicks, you can find out who are your visitors, where are they coming from, and what they do on your website. You can learn which of your articles are getting more visits and which pages on your site are not getting any views.
If you run an online store, then you can see what’s your website conversion rate, which page drives the most sales, what are your top referral sources, etc.
You can use all this marketing data to make informed business decisions and grow your business with confidence.
That being said, let’s take a look at top website marketing stats that you must track on every WordPress site (and how to easily do it).
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics software in the world. It is loved by businesses, bloggers, and marketers because it provides a treasure trove of information.
For example, you can use Google Analytics to learn:
- The numbers of visits and pageviews on your website
- Who is visiting your website (visitor location, browser, operating system, screensize, and more)
- How they found your website
- How users interact with your website
- and a whole lot more
Google Analytics is an essential tool in our own business. We recommend using Google Analytics on all your WordPress websites from day one. See our step by step tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
2. Track Outbound Links Using Google Analytics
Any link that takes users away from your website is called an outbound link. If you use affiliate marketing to make money from your website, then those outbound links are also known as affiliate links.
Tracking these outbound links help you see how much traffic you are sending to other sites, and you can use this data to build stronger partnerships with those sites.
As a blogger / affiliate, you can see which affiliate links are clicked more often by your visitors. This information can help you make a proper affiliate marketing strategy and boost your referral earnings.
The easiest way to track affiliate links in WordPress is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and allows you to easily track outbound links.
You also get easy to understand reports inside your WordPress dashboard, including one showing your top affiliate links. For detailed instructions see our guide on how to track outbound links in WordPress.
3. Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking with Google Analytics
If you run an online store, then you need to enable enhanced eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics. This would allow you to track the following customer information on your online store.
- Shopping behavior of your customers
- Checkout behavior and tracking the abandoned cart information
- Product lists performance
- Sales performance
Setting up enhanced eCommerce tracking on your WordPress store can be difficult. We built MonsterInsights to make it easy for you (literally takes 1 click).
It works seamlessly with both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (both are listed in our best eCommerce plugins for WordPress).
For details, see our guide on how to enable customer tracking in WooCommerce with Google Analytics.
4. Track User Engagement Data with Google Analytics
User engagement shows you what users do when they arrive on your website. It helps you identify patterns of highly engaged user behavior which leads to more conversions and sales.
For example, you may found out that users visiting a specific page are 10 times more likely to make a purchase. You can then use this insight to send more users to that page, or replicate the similar experience on other pages of your website.
Basically, you will be tracking data about how users interact with your website. For example:
- Tracking your most popular content
- Form submission tracking
- Ecommerce tracking
- Ads tracking to understand how users interact with ads on your website
- Monitoring bounce rate
- Time users spend on your website
- Pageviews per session
For detailed instructions, follow our step by step guide on how to track user engagement in WordPress.
5. Track Campaign Links with UTM Codes
Google Analytics is really good at tracking where your website website traffic comes from. It can even categorize your traffic based on their source (organic, social, referral, and more).
But when you’re running paid ad campaigns, email marketing campaigns, or social media promotions, you need detailed campaign tracking.
That’s where UTM tracking comes in.
Campaign level tracking allows you to see exactly which email, ad, or specific call-to-action link helped you get the most traffic or sales.
To make it easy for you to generate UTM links, MonsterInsights comes with a free campaign URL builder, so you can get more detailed reports:
These tags include native analytics parameters which are tracked by Google Analytics and are included in your reports.
To learn more see this guide on how to create campaign URLs in MonsterInsights.
6. Track and Improve Facebook Retargeting Campaigns
Did you know that Facebook allows you to display targeted ads to people who have visited your website in the past? Yes, it’s called retargeting.
You can install a Facebook pixel and display targeted ads to anyone who visited your website in the last 180 days.
But this only works if you have the Facebook pixel installed. For example, if you install Facebook retargeting pixel today, then you will only be able to show your ads to people who visited today and onward.
Even if you are not running a Facebook advertising campaign right now, we recommend installing the retargeting pixel, so you have a built-in audience when you’re ready to get started.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to install Facebook remarketing/retargeting pixel in WordPress.
Once you start running Facebook advertising campaigns, you can see your ad performance with Facebook Insights. You can also add improved Facebook ad tracking in Google Analytics.
For more details, see this guide on how to improve Facebook ad targeting with Google Analytics.
7. Tracking Google AdWords Campaigns
If you run PPC campaigns using Google AdWords, then you can easily see how your ads are performing in the AdWords dashboard. However, these reports only tell you how users interact with your ads not what they do after that.
For that, you’ll once again need Google Analytics which comes with built-in integration with your AdWords account. This integration enables you to easily track your paid traffic conversions.
For step by step instructions, see this complete guide on how to use Google Analytics for AdWords conversion tracking.
8. Monitor Your Site with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a set of free tools offered by Google to give publishers a look at how their website is seen by the search engine.
It provides immensely useful information like how your pages rank for different keywords (more on this later), the overall performance of your site in search engine, and any errors Google crawler found on your website.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.
9. Track Your Keyword Rankings
Keywords are the phrases users enter in search engines to find what they’re looking for. To get more traffic from search engines, you need to know exactly which keywords are bringing you the most traffic to your website, so you can focus on what’s working.
We have a complete WordPress SEO guide that you can use to learn how to optimize your content for specific keywords.
Normally, beginners rely on manually entering keywords in Google search to see if their site is ranking. This is highly inefficient as you would miss out on thousands of keywords where your site can be easily ranked.
Google Search Console is a free tool that provides you with valuable keyword data with the average position. You can see which keywords are ranking high, search impressions, and how many average clicks you get.
However, it only allows you to see your own site’s keyword data. If you want to research your competitors, then you’ll need SEMRush. This incredibly powerful SEO tool allows you to view in-depth keyword data for any website.
For more on this topic, please take a look at our guide on how to track keyword rankings for your WordPress site.
10. Track Your Email List Growth and Performance
Most popular email marketing services come with stats and insights that you can track. These reports provide useful data like open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe rate, and more.
You can also see the traffic coming from your email campaigns to your website in your Google Analytics reports under Acquisition » Campaigns. From here you can see how well your email newsletter traffic converts, and what you can do to improve.
Tracking email marketing data helps you grow your email list. You can create new email forms, change form placements, and use popups to boost subscribers.
While there are definitely other marketing metrics that you can track, we believe these are the top marketing data that every business owner must track on their WordPress site.
You might see a lot of mentions of MonsterInsights and might be wondering if this is a sponsored article. It’s not.
MonsterInsights is our sister company. We built this tool for our own business, so we can make data-driven decisions.
The goal of MonsterInsights is to help makes analytics easy by showing you the stats that matter. It has become the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Over 2 million websites use MonsterInsights including the likes of Microsoft, Bloomberg, Yelp, FedEx, and of course WPBeginner.
If you want to grow your business with confidence, then get started with MonsterInsights today.
We hope this article helped you track the right website marketing data on all your WordPress sites. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress security guide to keep your website safe.
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Very useful and timely tips, thank you. I’ve been trying to do a better job of tracking outbounds.
Thank you. I will address it.