[Video] How Do I Find Google Analytics on My WordPress Website?

So this week I had an inquiry from one of my subscribers asking me what to do if you try to remove Google Analytics from your website so that you can install that as part of Google Tag Manager or another system but you can’t find where Google Analytics is actually installed. Now, this can definitely happen on WordPress websites. I see this all the time.

So the person who inquired was, in fact, using a web WordPress website and the problem that happens here is WordPress websites use a lot of different plugins. And plugins can make life really easy but they can also make life really tricky if you don’t know where something is.

So what I typically see is you’ll have all sorts of different plugins that will attempt to install Google Analytics. You can have plugins that are specifically for Google Analytics or you can have plugins that just add Google Analytics as a side effect and they’re doing something else. So that might be SEO plugins for example and then you can have plugins that allow you to add custom code in your header and those plugins won’t necessarily say they’re for Google Analytics. They would be just a custom code plugin.

But then, in addition, every theme usually has a way to add to the header as well. So when you purchased your WordPress theme or you got a WordPress theme built by a developer, you would have, either yourself or your developer, would have looked for a section in the theme that lets you add to the header of your website and you could have put Google Analytics in there as well.

So most themes that you can purchase off the shelf do actually have a way as part of the WordPress menu, it just has a section and it says header or has edit theme and then under the theme, it’ll say edit header. Whereas some, some themes or WordPress builders like Divi for example, will actually have their own settings and they might have a tab called “Integration” and it will let you add your Google Analytics information in there.

So there are all these different places where you might find Google Analytics. And the tricky thing is with all these different plugins going on you don’t want to have Google Analytics installed twice and the reason for that is if you have more than one install of Google Analytics, there is a possibility that your information will actually duplicate in Google Analytics itself and I have seen this especially if you have two different versions of Google Analytics running at the same time, that will guarantee you’d have duplicates. But I have definitely seen this so what will happen is you’ll think that you’ve had a thousand page views for the month when an actual fact you’ve had 500 but everything’s been duplicated.

Now, one way that you can check to see how many instances of Google Analytics do you actually have is to go and use a tool called “GA Checker” and that tool is available at www.gachecker.com. What you need to do is type in your URL and it will go through every single page on your website and tell you how many instances of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, etcetera you have on there. So if you see Google Analytics and you have it says two or more listed on there then you definitely want to start removing the extra ones.

Now, the way that I recommend installing Google Analytics is actually through a tool called Google Tag Manager. Now if you already have Google Tag Manager it’s really easy to add Google Analytics and that is one of their standard setups so you can literally click the button that says Universal Analytics and it just asks you for your analytics ID and it pretty much sets it all up for you.

If you are — if you’ve never heard of Google Tag Manager, I don’t want to go into detail here about exactly what it is and what it does but if you do want to just install Google Analytics without Tag Manager, personally I recommend putting the code manually into the header rather than using a plugin and the reason for that is then you know exactly where it is and also you have control over exactly what the code is that’s going on to your website. If you use a plugin, a lot of that is hidden from you and you don’t know exactly what’s it putting on there and you don’t know if that plugin has put anything additional over and above Google Analytics.

Alright, well if you are in a situation where you are looking for where your Google Analytics is installed on your website, good luck. It can on WordPress, it can take a little bit of hunting to go through all of those plugins but hopefully, those tools have been helpful for you. Now, if you would like to ask me a question and the best way to do that is to become a subscriber to my newsletter. So you can do that by going to my website at www.thequantifiedweb.com.

Alright, have a great day. Bye!