Google is dropping support for Universal Analytics soon, see in this article how to activate Google Analytics 4 if you don´t want to lose web traffic tracking for your website.
Watch these two short videos to see how to activate GA4 in your Google Analytics account and your WordPress website.
Step 1: How to activate GA4 in your Google Analytics.
Step 2: How to activate GA4 in WordPress.
Step 1: Create a new GA4 property in Google Analytics
- Log in to your Google Analytics account
- At the top, you will find a prominent info box that is asking you to activate GA4
- Clicking the button will open the Setup Assistant for the GA4 property
- Click on the button to create a new GA4 property.
- A dialog will pop up that explains what is going to happen. Just approve by clicking the button.
- Congratulations. You have created your new GA4 property. Now you still need to connect it to your WordPress website.
Step 2: Connect your GA4 property with your WordPress Website.
- Install the Beehive Analytics plugin in WordPress.
- Copy the Measurement ID of your GA4 property.
- In Beehive, connect your Google account and select the right website.
- Paste the GA4 Measurement ID in the appropriately named field. I suggest not using automatic detection as this function could get confused if you accidentally created several properties for your website.
- Don´t forget to save the changes!
- That´s it, you are all set. But you will not immediately see any traffic data as you need to wait for GA4 to start collecting data from your website.
I am a LONG-TIME WordPress user and keep very close tabs on professional WordPress setups.
Over the years, I played around with many Google Analytics plugins for WordPress, both free and paid. I am looking for a simple solution that will display the most essential info directly in my WordPress admin. So that I do not have to log in to Google Analytics all the time.
There are many plugins that will do this job but what is super annoying to my is that most are freemium, meaning they only display the most important 4 stats and you need to upgrade to get the rest of your (free) data that is available in Google – if you just log into your Account.
And yes, Google is not doing the best job of displaying the data in a way that makes sense and is user-friendly. The sole reason why those plugins even exist.
I finally solved this for myself and settled on just ONE WordPress GA plugin to rule them all. This Google Analytics plugin is called Beehive Analytics from WPMU DEV.
So for everyone that wants to go from a super limited data report to a complete data overview, just compare the two images below.
Screenshot of the popular Monsterinsights Analytics plugin. Why is this so popular anyway?
Screenshot of the FREE Beehive Analytics plugin. I guess the difference is obvious right? If you need more data than this, just log in to your Google Analytics account and take a look yourself. No need to pay for your own free data anymore!