Are you looking for the best analytics solutions for your WordPress site? An analytics tool allows you to learn how many visitors are coming to your website, where they come from, and what they do on your site.
Many beginners rely on their best guesses when starting a new website or blog. You don’t have to do that, when you can collect data and make informed decisions to grow your business with these analytics solutions.
In this article, we have hand-picked the best analytics solutions for WordPress users. We will take a look at each one of them and their pros and cons.
Why Do You Need Analytics for Your WordPress Site?
Website analytics help you get detailed insights on your website visitors. Here are just a few things you can learn from your website analytics:
- Number of visitors coming to your website.
- Which sources are sending you traffic. For example, search engines, social media, advertisements, or referral links.
- What are your most popular pages.
- What users do when they are on your website.
A good WordPress analytics solution presents all this data in an easy to understand report. This enables you to make informed decisions about your website, which ultimately helps you get more traffic, customers, and sales.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best analytics solutions for WordPress.
1. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best analytics solution for your WordPress site. It allows you to easily install Google analytics in WordPress and shows you helpful reports in your WordPress dashboard.
It adds a website stats dashboard in your WordPress admin area showing your top traffic sources. MonsterInsights also displays the top ranking articles, pages, and more, so you can better understand user behavior and grow your business with confidence.
It also comes with eCommerce tracking which makes it super easy to track WooCommerce users in Google Analytics. You can also use this data to reduce cart abandonment on your website.
2. ExactMetrics
ExactMetrics (formerly Google Analytics Dashboard for WP) is one of the top Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. Many beginners find Google Analytics reports a bit hard to understand. ExactMetrics makes them easy to understand and shows beautiful reports right inside your WordPress admin area.
It includes demographics reports, enhanced link tracking, affiliate link tracking, real-time reports, and more.
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular analytics solution available. It is free and can be easily installed in WordPress using the plugins mentioned above. However, you can also install it directly by adding the code on your site.
You can use a single account to install it on multiple websites and view all your reports under one dashboard.
It not only shows you the number of visitors, but with advanced reports you can track links, perform A/B testing, track user engagement, get real time traffic insights, and more.
4. Heap
Heap is a powerful website analytics tool that allows you to codelessly capture data for every click, tap, change, swipe, and pageview.
It comes with advanced behavioral data that allows you to deeply analyze your website traffic. Made for people who love data, analytics, and stats, Heap makes it possible to generate custom reports, views, and tracking.
For eCommerce websites, Heap offers advanced attribution, conversion rate optimization, faster reports, and user tracking for not just acquisition but long term value.
5. WP Statistics
WP Statistics is a WordPress analytics plugin for your site. It displays tracking stats with simple graphs in your WordPress admin area.
The plugin helps in tracking redirects from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and more. You can manage user roles to display these stats in WordPress dashboard.
WP Statistics allows you to filter data according to browser versions, visitors country, search keywords, IPs, pages, and more. It can also automatically email reports for all statistics.
The downside is that it stores all the data on your WordPress site. After a period of time, this may increase your WordPress backup size.
6. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg shows you where your visitors are clicking on your site. This technology is called heat-mapping, and it allows you to visualize how your users interact with your website.
Other than heat-mapping, it shows you how far do the users scroll on your pages, so you can analyze the content of your website. Their Confetti tool allows you to segment the clicks into referrals, sources, search terms, etc.
It offers an A/B testing tool to pick the right color, font, and image based on the user stats. This helps you make data-driven action for your website’s design and landing pages.
7. Mixpanel
Mixpanel helps you add real-time event tracking for your campaigns. It is available for websites as well as mobile apps. It comes with a powerful user level targetting and helps you build user retention by sending push notifications and emails to your users.
It also allows you to create funnels to track customers and increase conversions. The pricing is based on actions people take on your site/app, so this could go higher than your expectation.
8. Matomo
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a free self-hosted open source analytics solution for your websites. It has a premium cloud-hosted version too. Matomo offers user-centric insights, data protection, custom and extensive analytics reports and more.
You can use it on enterprise level. Matomo’s support team actively helps you configure the analytics platform on your site. It has a mobile app that can display statistics on your phone.
9. Woopra
Woopra is another web analytics solution that offers real-time statistics and tracks users to the individual level. It focuses on customer trends, retention, segmentation, and more.
You can create funnels and monitor what’s stopping your users from taking an action on your site. Woopra has a WordPress plugin that makes the integration easy.
10. StatCounter
The StatCounter plugin allows you to connect your WordPress site to the StatCounter service. It is a cloud-based website stats counter service which offers a basic website statistics service.
You can see easy to follow reports for your traffic sources, visitor locations, browsers, and more. It is easy to use but lacks the advanced features that you get from other analytics solutions. For example, eCommerce tracking, affiliate link tracking, goals and event tracking, and more.
11. Jetpack
Jetpack by WordPress.com displays basic stats in your WordPress dashboard. You can use this plugin on any self-hosted WordPress site to track your visitors.
It is free to use and a good option for small blogs, offering simple and easy to understand traffic reports. You will need a free WordPress.com account to connect your website to WordPress.com servers and run Jetpack on your site.
We hope this article helped you find the best analytics solutions for WordPress. You may also want to see our expert pick of the best content marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.
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So many users have ad blocking software these days that blocks requests to googles analytic servers. Do any of these operate server side?
Most would not, have that option as that has a large chance of giving inaccurate data compared to using something like Google Analytics.
Nice Post. I kind of wish to reach the sky like you guys. I am dedicated to building my new blog which you guys encourage me to do so. Thanks #wpbeginner…..
Glad our articles could encourage you to get started
Such a great Article
Thank you
Thank you for the list! Analytics is my weak spot on my site. Next step in the process.
You’re welcome, glad our article could be helpful
I am so glad that I can learn how and what would be the smartest direction to take, as this is all new to me. With all the scams out there this will help me immensely. Thanks so much.
You’re welcome, glad our guide could be helpful
Thanks for sharing the best analytics solutions.
You’re welcome
I am confused with wp statics. Its show me very different stats from the google analytic. I am not sure which one is showing correct data. for example wp statics show me 2000 visitors for a day and google analytic show me 1200 visitors a day I am not sure which one is more trusted
They use different detection methods for tracking users visiting your site. We normally use Google Analytics as that is what Google sees about your site.
Hi everyone.
I have a question: If i install analytic plugin like jetpack or wp static, does it reduce overall speed of website?
It should not have a large effect on your site’s speed, you may want to take a look at: https://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/how-many-wordpress-plugins-should-you-install-on-your-site/
When you see plugins with dashboard and graphical display of website metrics.. where do they get this data from. Is that from your own Analytics data stored at google or is it from the plugins data within wordpress?
Hi Erik,
This data is collected from your website’s traffic. These Analytics plugins track your website visitors and then display this information in easy to understand graphs, charts, and reports.
I think Quantcast Measures should get a mention here. I don’t know how you could leave that.
Is there any way of telling where users of my site come from?
Please wpbeginner.com, can one use 2 or more analytics plugins @ same time? i love kissmetrics so much but would also love to have google analytics too.
PLEASE guide me on how to go about this.
Yes you can. Just paste the tracking code of both solutions on your website.
such a great post i would like to use these plugins.
My all time best Plugin to get Analytics data will be Google Analytics Counter Tracker just because of the convenience it gives and so easy to use not or little tutorial needed to use this plugin.
I never started to use another option for Analytics.
Well! Google analytics it’s always my favourite and will be always. but surely gonna try another platform as well!
After mucking around with many programs and services I always end up at statcounter. It’s free but simple
Thank you! Statcounter is totally awesome. It’s features are perfect for my WordPress site. There’s Statcounter and then all the rest of the analytics programs. I love Statcounter.
It’s free at 500 logs. If your site generates mor than 500 logs, pricing starts from 7$. This means Statcounter isn’t free
Google analytic gets spam everyday by ghost servers, I know I can filter it everyday, by I think this is not cool at all. the weird thing is that these servers never hit your website and they all spam you by your tracking id!
I filtered my data but I have more important things to do, and this is just Google’s problem, add this to cons!
I am just glad Yoast SEO did not make THIS list. I know it gets a lot of praise. But every time I have used it. My analytic account keeps on getting unlinked. My content does not seem to get indexed right either.
Good list, maybe you should add a few though. I have used gostats for a long time and I am quite satisfied with their service and it’s also easy to use. I’ve tried others like Google Analytics or Kissmetrics but gave up on them.
Good list. Quite some underdogs. But honestly spoken, never in my life I would have put Google Analytics on rank 1. Much better stuff in the market…
Good list, my personal favourite is Piwik in terms of having total control over the data. BTBuckets could be on the list too but is more of an advanced segmentation tool.
Wow, you missed a big one. Clicky.
Another vote for Clicky. I’m a big fan of this solution and use it to monitor all of my WordPress sites.
I enjoy StatCounter along with Google Analytics. It makes it nice seeing real-time stats inside your dashboard.