As a website owner, you need to know where your site visitors are coming from. There can be a lot of places where they might be coming from – it can be from a simple Google search result, from a video description on YouTube, a partner/affiliate website, your Quora answer, or from anywhere on the web. But, all of this information is not tracked by default in WordPress.
You will have to track them using a web analytics service like Google Analytics.
In this article, I’ll show you how to track your website traffic source using Google Analytics in WordPress. But before that, let’s see why you need to track it in the first place, especially if you make a living from your website.
Why you should track website traffic source
By tracking where your site visitors are coming from, you can see how your site is performing organically and how it is reacting to your latest marketing efforts. You can also view the traffic source for each of your posts. This can really be helpful when you’re running a targeted marketing campaign or performing split testing (commonly known as A/B testing).
And as a business owner, you need to gather every bit of information you can from your users to optimize your products and services. Here are a few reasons why you must track your website traffic source –
- Understand where your website visitors are from
- Find which traffic sources contribute the most page views on your website
- Discover which marketing channel works the best for you
- Find which keywords are working well and create new content
- Find which content is performing poorly and you need to update the existing content
- Monitor traffic trends to different pages on your website
- Find out which pages are contributing the highest to your bounce rate
Now that you know why tracking your website traffic is important, let’s see how you can see where your traffic is coming from straight from your WordPress dashboard.
How to check traffic source in WordPress
Although Google Analytics can help you with everything mentioned above, some people find it hard to configure it on their WordPress site since there are a lot of additional things that it can do for you. It’s like a swiss army knife of web analytics.
Another reason why people struggle with Google Analytics despite its popularity is that sometimes it can be hard to get the data from Google Analytics in a human-readable and digestible report format. Since there are a few extra steps that you need to do every time you want to view some specific data, it puts off many people. Also, its user interface isn’t that intuitive.
That’s why many people aren’t aware of all the features of Google Analytics and how powerful it is.
But, that needn’t be the case always. Using a simple Google Analytics WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights, you can put together all the collected data in a report format which can help you make decisions seamlessly, especially related to your marketing efforts and website performance.
MonsterInsights makes it very easy for you to view your traffic sources in WordPress. That’s why it is simply the best WordPress plugin for Google Analytics and used by over three million website owners.
It even allows new WordPress users like hobby bloggers and complete newbies with no technical background to understand what’s going on with their site. You needn’t hire a developer to integrate Google Analytics with your website and you can view all the important analytics-related data straight from your WordPress dashboard.
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try MonsterInsights now!
If you are still looking for more information on deciding whether it would be a perfect fit for your site, consider reading my MonsterInsights review and other related posts on my site. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t look anywhere else after reading them. Good luck!
Thank you so much for your kind information but I always prefer Google analytics as I know WordPress’s Analytics uses Google Analytics to track their own traffic.