Google Analytics is something every website needs to use. It’s a form of feedback on how your website performs and how it interacts with the audience, but of course it’s much more than that. Building websites in WordPress we spend a lot of time in the backend.

Google Analytics is a complex tool, and sometimes you just want to see some basic website performance statistics right in your dashboard, instead of going to Google Analytics directly. Also, your clients might not know much about Google Analytics and just want to have a nice looking, easy to understand basic graphs when they are in the backend of WordPress.

WordPress plugin repository used to have a plugin called GADWP aka Google Analytics Dashboard for WP and that plugin was just amazing, it had most of the analytics displayed in your dashboard for free. Then, it got acquired by another company and basically turned into something that is far from what the users wanted to have. I was searching for a good replacement and checked out many Google Analytics Dashboard plugins for WordPress. It came down to a plugin called Beehive Pro Analytics Dashboard by WPMU Dev who are well known for their Smush image optimization plugin.

In any case I was looking which plugin offers the most features for free and even has Google Analytics 4 metrics available (or at least tracking until the new API develops).

This was only my personal research as I needed this kind of plugin, not just putting GA code on the website. If you know a plugin that offers even more data displays than this one and is well coded and maintained, please let me know in the comments below!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
00:00 Intro
01:20 How GADWP (the best plugin of this kind) looked like
02:13 GAinWP (a fork of GADWP, in fact exact copy)
04:22 Lara’s Google Analytics plugin testing
05:05 Beehive Pro Analytics Dashboard plugin overview
05:53 Google Tag Manager and Analytics 4 metrics
08:00 IP anonymization for laws such as GDPR
08:26 Statistics available for individual pages
09:15 What kind of data/graphs you can see
10:20 Setting custom data range and comparisons

MUSIC
Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4985-danger-storm
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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