You may have heard that MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It’s highly rated with reviews across the web and is used on millions of sites, including big name brands like Microsoft, Bloomberg, FedEx, Zillow, and more.
While there’s a free version, you’ll need to purchase MonsterInsights Pro to unlock all its advanced features like eCommerce reports, conversion tracking, and priority support.
So you might be wondering: is MonsterInsights worth it for you?
In this article, we’ll explain the real benefits that MonsterInsights provides, so you can decide for yourself. Plus, we’ll show you some MonsterInsights reviews from real users.
Table of Contents
- MonsterInsights vs. Google Analytics: What’s the Difference?
- Benefits of Using MonsterInsights on Your Site
- Make Informed Decisions with MonsterInsights Reports
- MonsterInsights vs. Other WordPress Analytics Plugins
- MonsterInsights Reviews
- Final Words: Is MonsterInsights Worth It?
MonsterInsights vs. Google Analytics: What’s the Difference?
You might be wondering, why spend money on MonsterInsights when you can just copy and paste the Google Analytics tracking code yourself?
This is the biggest misconception people have about MonsterInsights. It offers so much more than just the default tracking code.
Did you know that by default, Google Analytics does NOT accurately track:
- WordPress categories, tags, or authors
- How many clicks each outbound link and affiliate link gets
- Your eCommerce purchases and conversion rate
- What files people are downloading from your site
- Form submissions
- Video plays
- And more!
To track those, you’d need to modify your tracking code and configure each one separately in your Google Analytics account. That’s a lot of work, especially if you have multiple sites. Not to mention that making a mistake in the code could mess up your analytics, or even bring your whole site down.
Besides that, if you add Google Analytics tracking yourself, you’ll need to know how to run reports in Google Analytics to get all the data you need. This can be time-consuming and confusing if you’re not an analytics expert.
So, if you want to focus on growing your business instead of learning code and advanced analytics, MonsterInsights is a great solution.
It makes it extremely easy to connect our websites to our Google Analytics accounts. Plus, the dashboard reports are very user-friendly and give you easy-to-understand reports right in your WordPress admin area. Plus, MonsterInsights connects with Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the newest version of Google Analytics.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits that MonsterInsights offers.
Benefits of Using MonsterInsights on Your Site
What exactly does MonsterInsights do that you can’t do by yourself? Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits.
1. Easy Google Analytics Setup
If you run a website, be it a blog, eCommerce store, or a business site, then you know the importance of data when it comes to making decisions.
MonsterInsights makes things simple. You can properly set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site with just a few clicks, no need to touch any code.
Its setup wizard will guide you through all the steps, so you don’t have to worry about making any mistakes while setting up Analytics or facing inaccuracies in data reporting.
2. Understand Your Audience with Advanced Tracking
MonsterInsights is more than just a plugin for integrating Google Analytics with your website. It lets you understand your website visitors and get to know the content they like, which device they use, how they find your site, and a lot more.
Here’s a closer look at some of the data you can track using MonsterInsights:
- eCommerce Tracking – See how well your online store is performing, which are your top products, and more
- Forms Tracking – Find out which forms convert the best on your website
- EU Compliance – Make your website CCPA and GDPR compliant by automatically anonymizing the user’s personal data
- Custom Dimensions –Create custom dimensions to track the performance of authors, categories, tags, search terms, logged-in users, and more
- Track File Downloads – Track downloads on your website without performing any additional setup
- Cross-Domain Tracking – Understand user behavior across multiple websites with cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics
- Media Tracking – See how many users are watching your videos and how much of each video they’re watching
- Campaigns – Do you use UTM parameters to track marketing campaigns like emails, social media posts, and more? MonsterInsights provides a super straightforward and easy-to-read Campaigns report along with a Campaign URL generator tool.
- Social Media – See how many of your visitors are coming to your site from Social Media in one report
3. Save Time on Finding and Viewing Reports
One of the problems many users face with Google Analytics is its complexity and high learning curve. That makes you question…is Google Analytics worth it? You’d have to be an expert to navigate your way around Analytics, find the right report, and then use the stats that matter for your business.
But with MonsterInsights, you can view reports inside your WordPress dashboard. You can check how well your website is doing at a glance, without having to leave the dashboard.
You also get reports that are important for growing your business. It makes it super easy for anyone to find valuable data and get insights for boosting your site’s performance.
For a full tour of MonsterInsights reports, check out Your Ultimate Guide to MonsterInsgiths Dashboard Reports.
4. Helps to Increase Your Website Traffic
Once you’ve got an understanding of how your visitors use your site, you can then use the data to increase your website traffic.
For example, you can find out your best pages and then cover similar topics that your audience likes to get more visitors. Or you can look at the keywords that are ranked high on Google, so you can bring in more organic traffic.
5. Helps You Learn How to Grow Your Email List
As you start to get more visitors, you can then grow your email list and capture leads. MonsterInsights reports can help in optimizing your website to get more subscribers.
You can start by looking at your top landing pages and placing a popup on them to collect emails.
Another way MonsterInsights can help is by highlighting pages that have a high bounce rate. To lower the bounce rate, you can offer content upgrades or deals to increase your email signups.
6. Shows You How to Boost Your Sales Conversions
Along with collecting emails, you can even increase your sales conversions.
For example, MonsterInsights lets you see the average scroll depth of your website. You can use this information to place your calls to action (CTAs) in the right place and boost conversions.
If you have an eCommerce store, then the plugin can help you focus your marketing efforts on top-converting sources or on promoting the products that convert the best.
With that, let’s look at each MonsterInsights report in detail.
Make Informed Decisions with MonsterInsights Reports
MonsterInsights offers multiple reports that are super simple to understand and provide you with insights to grow your website. These reports help you keep up with modern tracking standards. We’ll start with its overview report.
Overview Report
As you install the WordPress Google Analytics plugin, the first report you’ll see is the Overview report. You can access it by logging into your admin area and from your dashboard, click Insights » Reports.
In the Overview report, you get to see all the important metrics needed for checking a website’s performance. You can see the number of sessions, pageviews, average session duration, and total users of your website for the selected date range.
If you scroll down, you’ll find more stats like new vs. returning visitors, device breakdown, your top 10 countries, top 10 referral sources, and top posts/pages.
Traffic Reports
Next in line, you’ll find the Traffic reports. These 6 reports have TONS of useful data that you can use to gather valuable insights about your visitors. Get information on:
- Traffic Sources: How did your visitors find you?
- Landing Page Details: Dive further into your top landing pages to see if they’re resulting in conversions and engaged sessions.
- Source/Medium: Go beyond the general traffic sources to get more information about exactly where your traffic is coming from and whether or not it converts.
- Technology: Find out what device categories and browsers your visitors are on when they visit your site.
- Campaigns: If you use UTM parameters, you’ll find a detailed report here on how your campaigns are performing.
- Social Media: Find a comprehensive report on traffic to your site from all the top social media platforms.
Publishers Reports
The next report you’ll see is the Publishers Overview report that’s available for users who have a MonsterInsights Plus plan and up. The report gives you insights into how visitors use your website.
For instance, you can view your top landing pages and how many visits each got. The report provides insights into the content topics your audience likes.
Further down, you’ll see more important reports like top outbound links and top affiliate links.
Using the information from these reports, you can form partnerships, find opportunities for getting backlinks, and increase your revenue by promoting your best affiliates.
And if you offer downloadable content on your website, then MonsterInsights automatically tracks their performance.
It provides a report that shows your top download links. Using the data, you can get insights about the type of content that gets the most downloads, so you can create similar content in the future.
If you scroll down, you’ll find more information in the Publishers report. You can see demographic information of your audiences, like their age and gender. You can also view their top interests and the average scroll depth of your site.
Also under the Publishers heading, you’ll find the Pages Report. This in-depth report gives you a list of your top pages along with their page views, bounce rate, and more.
For more information, check out our guide to Google Analytics for Publishers.
Search Console Report
Do you want to know how people find your website on search engines? Through MonsterInsights, you can view your Google Search Console reports in your WordPress dashboard.
The report shows the top 50 Google Search Terms your site is ranking for. For each keyword, you can see the number of clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.
The data from the report is highly valuable as it helps you target search terms that generate organic traffic. It also lets you narrow down content ideas, so you can create posts covering similar keywords.
Learn more by reading How to See the Google Analytics Keywords for Your Website.
Forms Report
Another feature offered by MonsterInsights is that it lets you track all kinds of forms on your WordPress website in Google Analytics.
Using its Forms Addon, you can track views, submissions, and conversions of your forms. The best part is, that it supports other form plugins like WPForms, Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms, and more.
For more on forms tracking, read How to Use Google Analytics to Track Form Submissions in WordPress.
eCommerce Report
If you have an online store, then MonsterInsights helps you track its performance without having to do any additional setup.
MonsterInsights eCommerce addon lets you add Google Analytics eCommerce tracking to your WooCommerce, LifterLMS, MemberPress, GiveWP, and Easy Digital Downloads store.
The report offers insights about your site’s conversion rate, transactions, revenue, and average order value. That’s not all, you can also find out your best-performing products, their total order, percentage of sales, and total revenue.
You can even look at your top conversion sources and optimize your marketing campaigns for visitors from those websites. That way, you can maximize your revenue.
Other metrics the report tracks for you is total add to carts, total removed from cart, new customers and abandoned checkouts.
Dimensions Report
Through the MonsterInsights Dimensions addon, you can set up advanced WordPress visitor tracking. The addon lets you set up custom dimensions, which Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track.
You can and see the performance of things that matter to your business, such as the performance of authors on your site, find the most popular post types, categories, tags, best publication time, and popular focus keywords.
For more details, you can check out our beginner’s guide to custom dimensions in Google Analytics.
Realtime Report
With the realtime report, MonsterInsights shows you the number of active users at a given moment on your website.
The report is useful if you have a campaign going on and want to see how many people are visiting your website as a result of that campaign.
If you want to learn more, then go through our article on how to find and use real-time reports in Google Analytics.
Site Speed Report
Next, you’ll see a Site Speed tab. You can come to this tab any time for up-to-the-minute site speed and Core Web Vitals reports.
Media Report
Finally, if you have videos embedded on your site, you’ll want to use the Media addon. With the addon enabled, you’ll be able to track how many of your visitors are watching your videos, how far into the videos they’re getting, and more.
To learn more about video tracking, check out How to Track Video Plays in Google Analytics (No GTM!).
MonsterInsights vs. Other WordPress Analytics Plugins
By now, we hope you know how useful MonsterInsights is for your website. And how detailed and easy its reports are for finding insights for your business.
But how does it compare to other Google Analytics WordPress plugins? Here are a few things MonsterInsights excels at:
1. More Tracking Options
When it comes to tracking data, MonsterInsights offers more features and lets you set up advanced tracking.
For instance, if you compare MonsterInsights with most other Google Analytics plugins, you’ll see that MonsterInsights allows you to track your eCommerce store and forms, configure custom dimensions, and more.
2. Dedicated Customer Support
In terms of customer support, you get dedicated support from MonsterInsights if you run into any trouble. You also get detailed documentation consisting of over 200 articles to help you succeed with MonsterInsights.
This differentiates MosnterInsights from other plugins, which don’t have a proper channel for resolving customer queries, and you’d have to rely on forums to get answers.
3. Easy to Use and Lightweight Plugin
If you’re looking for a plugin that’s easy to use and lightweight, then MonsterInsights performs far better than the rest.
Take the case of Jetpack and MonsterInsights. Jetpack is bloated, requires additional steps to set up Google Analytics, and doesn’t offer the additional tracking options as MonsterInsights.
4. Helps You Make Decisions
After doing an extensive MonsterInsights review, another area that comes out on top is its reporting features. As we explained earlier, the plugin provides data that matters the most for your business.
Most plugins offer basic reports that offer information that’s not enough to make decisions. For example, if you compare MonsterInsights with Google Site Kit (Google’s own WordPress plugin), you’ll see a lot of differences in reporting.
Google Site Kit offers very basic reports that are good for a quick summary of your website, but that’s it.
5. GDPR Compliant
Ever since the EU launched GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), you’d need the consent of users to track and use their information. Because of GDPR, many plugins don’t work in regions with strict data protection laws.
However, MonsterInsights is available in every part of the world. Not only that, but it’s also the best WordPress GDPR plugin and offers an EU Compliance addon that allows you to make your website more GDPR compliant.
MonsterInsights Reviews
With over 2,000 5-star ratings, MonsterInsights has some great reviews from our users. Here are just a couple of those reviews:
Great Easy to use and simple!
This plugin is simple, easy to use and a great way to get a quick look at analytics.
– ncasares
Does what it promises.
I would recommend this plugin. It works efficiently and does what it says it will do. And it does it very well. My thanks to the developers.
– mistyblue17
Totally fantastic.
This Google Analytics plugin is a must-have for any new and fresh WordPress install. It provides easy to view analytics right on the spot. Best part of all, its easy to setup.
– tyrannon
Final Words: Is MonsterInsights Worth It?
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics WordPress plugin out there. You get more features, tracking options, and user-friendliness than any other WordPress analytics plugin. This makes MonsterInsights totally worth it.
And that’s it!
We hope you liked our article on whether MonsterInsights is worth it. You can also check out our guides:
MonsterInsights vs. Google Analytics, What’s the Real Difference?
How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress
And don’t forget to follow us on X, Facebook and YouTube for more helpful reviews, tutorials, and Google Analytics tips.