Some people found this plugin ‘accidently’ in their wordpress installation. Turns out, Google analytics by Yoast was sold and is now rebranded under Monster Insights. More over here.
This plugin displays your google analytics data inside your WordPress installation. So instead of going to the analytics dashboard to check your stats, you can simply do that from your WordPress dashboard.
With a name like that, I’ll be referring this plugin as Monster Insights from now on. Let’s get rolling.
Setup
After installing the plugin, you’ll need to authenticate it with your Google analytics account. Head over to the Sidebar > Insights and authenticate with GA(Google Analytics)
You need to authentication first.Authenticate with your Google account
Once done, it will display your site metrics in the dashboard section of the plugin.
Functionality
After authenticating with GA, the dashboard looks like this:
Monster Insights dashboard
This shows only a fraction of data compared to GA – however GA can looks very confusing for people not used to it so I can see where this plugin can be helpful.
This dashboard is not the only thing offered by Monster Insights. It offers more functionality through GA although you’ll need to enable most of these features. Head over to Sidebar > Insights > Settings to configure them.
The gist of these settings are:
Remove your impressions from GA if you’re logged in
Track downloads, enable link attrition, etc.
Track adsense ads(paid)
Track Woocommerce sales(paid)
And so on..
The core plugin doesn’t offer much, however you can add more functionality if you pay for add-ons.
Pricing
The core plugin is free. You can also grab the yearly billed plans for support, extra features, etc.
As with most plugins, you can also purchase add-ons individually from the plugin’s dashboard itself.
TLDR
To recap, the base functionality it offers is to recreate a dumbed-down interface of Google Analytics. You can extra features by purchasing add-ons from the plugin’s dashboard itself.
Personally I would stick with Google Analytics although I can understand how complicated it would seem to non-tech users and for those, I can recommend this plugin.
Verdict
If you want to view google analytics directly from your wordpress dashboard, this is the plugin for you.
4/5
Helpful disclosure
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