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Track Your Website’s Success: An In-Depth Review of WP Google Analytics Events Pro for WordPress (2023)

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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Ever wished that you could get more insights from Google Analytics? The default Google Analytics tracking code gives you some helpful information about where your traffic is coming from and what it’s doing on your site. But Google Analytics itself is way more powerful than that.

When you install the normal Google Analytics tracking code, you’re merely scratching the surface of everything that Google Analytics can offer. In our WP Google Analytics Events Pro review, we’ll tell you a little bit more about the features and then we’ll jump in and go hands-on to give you my thoughts on the plugin and how it works.

WP Google Analytics Events Pro

WP Google Analytics Events Pro can help you do both of those things without needing to be a code wizard. It also helps you add Google Analytics Event Tracking to your WordPress site without needing to use any code or go through a complicated setup. The plugin also helps you understand your site visitors’ activity. 

There is a free version that lets you track scroll tracking and click tracking. It’s good for tracking individual links (or scroll depth) but doesn’t give you that cool “one-click outbound link tracking”, placeholders, or video track.

However, WP Google Analytics Events Pro has a pro version. Here are the pricing plans depending on your needs and preferences:

  • Personal – $79/year for a single site license
  • Business – $149/year  for a five website license
  • Developer – $199/year for an unlimited website license

WP Google Analytics Events Pro Key Features

WP Google Analytics Events Pro allows you to: 

  • Click tracking – track form submissions, add to cart buttons, and more
  • Link tracking – track the internal and external links that people click on within seconds of setting up the plugin
  • Scroll tracking – track whether people actually engage with your content by scrolling
  • YouTube tracking – track whether people play or pause videos + lots more
  • Vimeo tracking – same idea as YouTube tracking 

And through that data, you can make better decisions and improve your website.

What’s cool is that the plugin also supports dynamic data for your Google Analytics Events. So you can, for example, automatically insert a page’s name in one of your Event Labels.

Currently, WP Google Analytics Events Pro supports the following dynamic placeholders:

  • Pagename
  • Page URL
  • Link URL
  • Alt attribute
  • Title attribute
  • Text wrapped by the element (e.g. button text)
  • Author
  • Id of the element
  • The actual username (if logged in)

You can dynamically insert any of those attributes into your Google Analytics Events. You can also specify whether or not to mark events as non-interaction in order to preserve your bounce rate calculations. Finally, WP Google Analytics Events Pro added support for Google Tag Manager in the most recent update. So now you can track your WordPress site whether you’re using traditional Event Tracking or Google Tag Manager.

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Pros

  • Ready to use reports
  • The data are in real time
  • Traffic are indeed, easy to see to all pages on the website

Cons

  • You need a background about Analytics to get the gist of it
  • Visual metrics on detailed actions are complicated to set up
  • The Google Analytics is not beginner friendly

WP Google Analytics Events Pro Installation & Setup

We’re going to dive into WP Google Analytics Events Pro on my test site. We’ll try to explain a bit about event tracking during the review. 

Basically, Event Tracking consists of two parts:

  • Adding the proper tracking codes to your WordPress site to track specific actions
  • Viewing your data in the Google Analytics dashboard.

The plugin helps with the former, and you use your normal Google Analytics dashboard for the latter. Once you install and activate the plugin, there’s not very much to configure. You can have the plugin automatically add your Google Analytics tracking code. Or, if you’ve already got it added (the likely scenario), you can check a box to turn that feature off.

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - general settings

Here’s how simple it is to start tracking outbound link clicks on your WordPress site. At the bottom of the General Settings tab, you can just check the Enable box next to Track Links and choose External. It’s also a good idea to add a 120 ms click delay:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - track links

And that’s literally all you need to do. Now, you can see event tracking in your Google Analytics Dashboard:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - events

By default, the plugin uses the page title for the category and the external URL for the label.

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - event label

So that’s…pretty dang easy. Let’s get a little more complex.

Tracking a Button Click

Saying you want to track a Submit click on your contact form. All you’d need to do is get the CSS class for your contact form:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - input

Then, you plug that into the Click Tracking tab of WP Google Analytics Events Pro and add some labels. I’ll set it up so that:

  • The Category is Contact Form
  • The Action is Submit
  • The Label is the username of whoever submits the form (which should show up as Guest if there’s not a logged-in user).
WP Google Analytics Events Pro - click tracking

Looks like the Contact Form category and action came through:

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WP Google Analytics Events Pro - contact form

As for the label? Yup! It’s there too:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - event category

The ability to track usernames is seriously awesome if you’re running any kind of membership site or eCommerce store. Imagine being able to track an event flow for specific usernames? You could use that data to improve your site in all kinds of ways.

Tracking Scroll Depth

As we look at one more example while we run WP Google Analytics Events Pro through the paces.

We want to see if it can track:

  • How many people scroll to the bottom of the page for each author on the site.

That can give you a pretty good idea of your most engaging authors, right?

For the purposes of this, I’ll define “bottom of the page” as my footer. But you can pick any element that you want. The div class of my footer is site-info. So we’ll set WP Google Analytics Events Pro up like this:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - scroll tracking

And let’s see if it works…yup! Here’s the Category and Action:

WP Google Analytics Events Pro - event action

Google Tag Manager Support

While the original version of the plugin only supported Google Analytics Events Tracking, the latest release supports Google Tag Manager as well. So even if you’re already using Google Tag Manager, you can still get the benefits of WP Google Analytics Events Pro by setting up a generic event tag in Tag Manager (instructions here)

Verdict

A couple of months ago, we added Google Analytics Event Tracking to all of the sites. So we can say that the data truly is helpful to optimizing and understanding your website.

At that time, we implemented the Event Tracking through Pods custom post templates, which worked fine for my specific situation. Also, if you’re not familiar with PHP (or using something like the Pods Template), there’s no way you could:

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  • Track events site-wide
  • Insert dynamic data into event categories and labels

We know this review was a little light on an explanation of Google Events tracking. But if you’re not familiar, you really should learn more about it. And if you already are familiar, this plugin is the easiest way we’ve found to add Google Analytics Event Tracking to WordPress.

So whether you’re looking to improve your own site or your clients’ sites, this is definitely an analytics plugin worth checking out.

Get WP Google Analytics Events Pro

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.