Are you wondering if you should use the Google Site Kit WordPress Plugin?
Google Site Kit is a free plugin that lets you integrate different Google services. You can then view the data inside your WordPress dashboard from these services.
In this article, we’ll show you Google Site Kit: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And we’ll also explain how MonsterInsights is a better alternative to Google Site Kit and provides more actionable insights for your business.
Let’s start with a brief introduction about Google Site Kit…
What is Google Site Kit?
Google Site Kit is a WordPress plugin by Google and was recently launched in October 2019. The plugin is free to use and is open source.
You can integrate different Google tools using the plugin on your WordPress website. These include:
- Analytics – Google Analytics shows how users interact with your website, what’s their usage behavior, where you’re getting traffic from, allows you to track different goals, and more.
- Search Console – Using Google Search Console, you can see which keywords people use to find your website and helps you improve your search engine rankings along with fixing different bugs and errors.
- AdSense – Track all your paid advertisement campaigns and improve their performance
- PageSpeed Insights – Check your website’s loading speeds on desktop and mobile devices, and make changes to reduce their load time
- Tag Manager – Helps you track different marketing tags on your website but it requires coding to implement and track those tags
- Optimize – Conduct experiments on your site by A/B testing different pages for improving conversions
What Can You Do with the Google Site Kit Plugin?
Using the plugin, you can get basic data about your visitors, how they use your website, and find your site on the web.
And by integrating different Google services, you can view limited information in a single dashboard. It helps you add these services without the need for editing the source code.
But for beginners, it’s tricky getting around Google Site Kit. The interface is clean but designed for more seasoned professionals.
This is where alternatives to Google Site Kit like MonsterInsights are better, as they provide a proper onboarding workflow and guide first-time users, more on this later.
With that, let’s look at different features of Google Site Kit in detail.
The Good: Google Site Kit Features and Reports
With Google Site Kit, you can view different reports. These aren’t as detailed or provide an in-depth understanding to make quick decisions. But you can use them to get an overview.
Some of the key reports of Google Site Kit include:
All Traffic
When you connect your Google Analytics with Google Site Kit, you’ll get a report for All Traffic. It shows you different traffic sources that people use to visit your site. These include:
- Organic: People who use search engines to find your site
- Referral: When users click a link from another website to land on your site
- Direct: These are visitors that enter the URL of your website in the web browser or have bookmarked your site
- Email: Visitors that click on a link in the email that you sent and then visit your website
Search Funnel
Search funnel report by Google Site Kit shows the impressions and clicks your website got over a time period. It combines data from Google Analytics and Search Console to present you with the report.
From the report, you can see how many people viewed your website (impressions), how many clicks you got, the number of unique visitors, and how many goals were completed.
Popularity
If you’re wondering what search terms people use to find your website, then this is the report you should look for. It gives you the top search queries for your site, so you know which keywords are ranking on the first page of Google. You can then use the data to improve your search rankings.
The Popularity report in Google Site Kit also shows the most popular content on your website. It displays pages that get the most traffic, including the top search term that’s associated with the page.
Speed
Using the Speed report from Google Site Kit, you can improve your website’s loading speeds. It integrates the Google PageSpeed Insights tool in your WordPress website, so you can view its performance on desktop and mobile from your dashboard.
The plugin assigns scores to indicate how fast is your website on both the devices. For instance, if you get a speed score between 90 and 100, your website is fast. But if it’s between 0 – 49, then it’s slow.
This data is valuable for your developers, as they can use it to find ways to increase the load time of your website.
AdSense
The last report that Google Site Kit shows is AdSense. It provides you an overview of your site’s overall Google AdSense performance. If you’re using AdSense to monetize your website, then this report is important for you.
It shows the estimated earnings for today, yesterday, this month, and last month. Using the AdSense report, you can also view your ad impressions, earnings per thousand pageviews (RPM), and top-earning pages.
The Bad: Shortcomings of Google Site Kit
Now that you know the key reports and benefits of using Google Site Kit, let’s look at some of its limitations.
Insufficient Data to Make Decisions
For starters, the reports by Site Kit provides you with data that’s good for a quick summary and keep track of your site’s performance. But you don’t get actionable insights that you can use to make business decisions.
You’ll have to be an Analytics expert to drill down the data from different Google tools and then find out what’s happening on your website. This would take a lot of time and you may need to hire a professional.
GDPR Compliance
GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is a data protection law in the EU to safeguard user’s privacy. So, if you’re operating in Europe, then you’ll have to comply with GDPR.
And to do that, you’ll need to get consent from the user to track their information in Google Analytics. If they decline, then you’ll have to anonymize IPs, disable demographic tracking, disable user IDs and other types of tracking.
With Google Site Kit, you cannot automatically disable tracking, hide IP addresses, and have to manually set up GDPR compliance – which will require coding.
No Enhanced eCommerce Integration
If you have an eCommerce store or have multiple forms on your website, then sadly Google Site Kit won’t be of much use.
It offers no integration for automatic tracking of different elements on your website. For instance, it will not show you the revenue or the average order size of your online store. You also cannot see your top-performing products using Google Site Kit.
In addition, Google Site Kit doesn’t track different forms on your website. Let’s say you have a contact us form or an order form on your website and you want to know about their conversions. This is where you would need an alternative to Google Site Kit.
So, is there a way you can overcome these limitations? Let’s take a quick look at a Google Site Kit alternative.
MonsterInsights – The Best Alternative for Google Site Kit
When it comes to finding data about your website and getting actionable insights to grow your business, then nothing beats MonsterInsights.
It’s the best WordPress plugin for Google Analytics and overcomes all the shortcomings of Google Site Kit.
What makes MonsterInsights better than Google Site Kit? Let’s go over some of the ways MonsterInsights is a better Google Analytics plugin.
MonsterInsights vs Site Kit
- Reports That Offer Actionable Insights
- Track eCommerce Performance
- Form Conversion Tracking
- GDPR Compliance
Reports That Offer Actionable Insights
With MonsterInsights, you get all the reports that Site Kit has to offer, but more detailed and useful. You don’t have to be an expert to understand the reports since they are designed for new business owners in mind.
For instance, in the Overview report, you get overall data about your site like the number of sessions, pageviews, average session duration, bounce rate, new vs. returning visit, and traffic from different devices.
It also shows you the top referral sources and countries that send the most traffic. You can use this data in different ways. For instance, with the top referral report, you can find new partnership opportunities to grow your traffic.
And with top countries report, you can geotarget visitors with different marketing and promotional campaigns. You can also create content for users from your top regions to make more money.
MonsterInsights also offers other reports like Publishers report where you can view your top exit pages, outbound links, top download links, demographics, and user’s interests. These reports are not automatically tracked by Google Site Kit.
You follow our detailed guide for more information on MonsterInsights dashboard reports.
Track eCommerce Performance
Do you want to know how well your online store is performing? Then with MonsterInsights, you can track your conversions with ease. With Enhanced eCommerce addon, you see the conversation rate of your store, the number of transactions, revenue, and average order size.
That’s not all, you can also see your top-performing products, the total items added to cart and removed from cart, time to purchase, and sessions to purchase.
Here’s a complete guide for tracking eCommerce performance using MonsterInsights.
Form Conversion Tracking
Another benefit of using MonsterInsights is that you can automatically track form conversions on your website – no additional setup required.
The Form Conversion Tracking addon by MonsterInsights makes it super easy to track all types of forms on your site. It supports popular form plugins for WordPress and all you have to do is install the plugin, activate the addon, and let MonsterInsights take care of the rest.
Easily Make Your Site GDPR Compliant
MonsterInsights makes up for another feature where Google Site Kit lacks – GDPR compliance.
It offers a simple EU Compliance addon which you can use to disable tracking and anonymize user information. By default, you cannot anonymize IPs on its own. But MonsterInsights makes it super simple and automates the process.
Simply enable the option to hide IP addresses from Google Analytics, disable demographics, user ID tracking and more, you can comply with the regulation, that too without any coding,
You can read our complete guide on GDPR and MonsterInsights for more information about making your site compliant in the EU.
And that’s it!
Google Site Kit is a plugin that provides easy integration of different Google tools for WordPress users. However, it has some limitations and to overcome them, we recommend using MonsterInsights.
We hope you liked our article on Google Site Kit: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You also take a look at our guide on how to track user engagement in WordPress using Google Analytics and a detailed MonsterInsights review.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more helpful Google Analytics tips and tutorials.