Plugin Highlight: Monster Insights

Unlike a lot of Google Analytics data plugins, MonsterInsights is straightforward to install. Other plugins require multiple verifications, the addition of coding, and complicated Google Analytics linking. What used to take Web Developers like us upwards of two hours for installation now takes a fraction of the time! Interested in using MonsterInsights on your website? Check out the extremely handy video below for instructions! We install MonsterInsights on every single one of our sites. To install on our client’s site we need access to the Gmail login details for the business that is attached to Google Analytics. While the verification process for us to log in with Gmail can be tedious the results are well worth it.

The amount of information MonsterInsights can provide is honestly a bit overwhelming. Even we as a web development company don’t use it all! But we do pay attention to a few key pieces of information, such as post type tracking. This allows us to focus and narrow the types of content we post by showing us which kinds of posts bring visitors to our sites. A great example of this is our How-To posts! We noticed, using MonsterInsights, that the vast majority of users who find our sites are taking advantage of our How-To posts, particularly our Divi and WordPress How-To posts.

This information is absolutely crucial for understanding your users and refining your content. Think of it in terms of fishing. Let’s say in the beginning you throw out 100 different lures with 100 different types of bait. After you start to catch some fish, you gain data on what types of fish you are catching in that pond and what type of bait is best. Now you can still throw out 100 lures, but 100 lures with the right type of bait to catch your fish!

The Analytics Overview Report that shows on your WordPress dashboard is incredible. The Overview report is an incredibly handy tool that provides you with an incredible snapshot of how your site is doing. On our Overview Report, we can see how many people have visited our site within the past 30 days, how many pages people have visited, how long on average they have spent, and our current bounce rate.

On our MonsterInsights Dashboard, the real magic happens. Here we can choose between session view and pageview, view our New vs. Returning visitor ratio, check out our device breakdown, and so much more. We can see our top 10 countries, our top 10 referrals (extremely useful information!), and our top posts/pages. With this data we can see why people are visiting our website, how they are coming to our site, and what interests them the most. This helps us narrow down and focus our content marketing efforts to provide the right kind of content to draw visitors in, and keep them on our site! Remember the principles of SEO? We want more visitors on our site staying for longer periods of time to organically raise our website in the search engine ranking.

A beautiful thing about MonsterInsights is that it can show you so much more than your Google Analytics data. MonsterInsights integrates with a VAST number of plugins and applications including WooCommerce, MemberPress, Gravity Forms, All WordPress Forms, and so much more. Instead of throwing money willy-nilly at marketing efforts for your online store now you can see exactly how well, or how poorly, your marketing efforts have paid off. This is a big deal. Instead of blindly throwing money at various marketing avenues you can tailor your marketing money and efforts to suit your exact, and best needs. This is especially helpful for those smaller businesses trying to get off the ground who perhaps don’t have thousands of dollars a month to waste on marketing. Think back to the fishing analogy I mentioned earlier, we want to bait our hooks with the best bait to catch the right type of fish. Why would we waste money on bait for an anchovy when we’re trying to catch a tuna?