Welcome to Digital Marketing FAQs - the series where I answer your digital marketing questions with simple, concise answers.
Today we are looking at the following question:
“Which Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress is the best?”
Wordpress is one of the world’s most popular website building platforms (the technical term being Content Management System or CMS for short).
If your website runs on Wordpress, then you might be interested in knowing how to install Google Analytics on your website as easily as possible.
The most popular approach to achieving this is to use a Wordpress plugin that makes it easy to add the Google Analytics code, rather than you having to manually install any code via the theme editor etc.
So, which Google Analytics plugin on Wordpress is the best to use?
My recommendation is actually not to use a plugin at all!
Instead, you should look to use Google Tag Manager.
This is a free platform provided by Google that basically acts as a ‘container’ for any codes you want to install on to your site (like the Google Analytics tracking code).
It can be a little bit hard to get your head around at first, but once you get used to using Tag Manager it is incredibly effective.
It makes managing all your tracking codes like Facebook pixels, Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion tag etc so much easier.
You install Google Tag Manager once and then control all your other 'codes' from within the Tag Manager interface.
The reason I think that Google Tag Manager is better than any Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress is that it is very lightweight, safe and trusted - you need to be careful with installing plugins off the Wordpress plugin database "willy nilly" as some of them can be very poor quality, have security flaws etc.
Tag Manager is a lot more stable, and gives you far more future flexibility.
It also makes event and conversion tracking easier down the line (for example if you want to track people clicking on PDF downloads, it's much easier to do with Tag Manager).
So, which Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress is the best? Google Tag Manager!
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