Getting Started with ExactMetrics: Guide and Checklist for Advanced Metrics

Ready to take your business to the next level?

ExactMetrics is a best-in-class Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress website. We make analytics easy by providing the most useful information about your website in the easiest consumable way possible. We take care of the heavy lifting so you can simply focus on growing your business and tracking your progress.

Seeing improvements will depend on the goals you’ve established for your website. Some examples are:

  • Improve SEO.
  • Improve your marketing.
  • Increase visitor experience for your blog.
  • Track how well your eCommerce site is performing.
  • Gain insights on your Membership site.

As you work to improve your business website, you’ll find it’s all about being responsive to the metrics being provided. Based on the data you collect:

  • You may need to make changes you didn’t anticipate before.
  • You may need to adjust course entirely, especially if your data highlights something you may have overlooked before.
  • You may make some mistakes in the process while trying to understand all of your website’s data.

It’s all part of the experience. For you to create the best experience you can for your visitors, you will need to better understand what your visitors want from you.

If this is something that excites you, let’s get started!

Prerequisites and Setup

To get started, we assume the following:

  1. You have a Google Analytics account (or have access to the proper account).
  2. A property is already created for your website within Google Analytics.

If you’re not quite set up yet, here are some useful links to help you get ready:

Once you’ve completed the prerequisites, you can move onto the rest of the guide. 🙂

Getting Started With ExactMetrics

Easily set up Google Analytics tracking on your website with ExactMetrics.

To start gathering data and viewing insights:

  1. Install ExactMetrics.
  2. Connect ExactMetrics to Google Analytics.
  3. Enable Demographics and Interest Reports in ExactMetrics.
  4. Enable Demographics and Interest Reports in Google Analytics.

Within a few clicks, you’ll have advanced tracking integrated into your website, with reports easily accessible from within your WordPress dashboard.

Getting Started with ExactMetrics eCommerce

If you’re running an eCommerce store, the most important thing you can do from a business perspective is to understand your market and your visitors.

With ExactMetrics it’s not a problem. Our Ecommerce Tracking gives you all the data you need on your visitors’ behavior, whether you’re using a WooCommerce shop, a LifterLMS training site, a MemberPress membership site, or Easy Digital Downloads store, we’ve got your website analytics covered.

In a few clicks, you’ll have integrated Google Analytics eCommerce tracking with your WordPress store, no coding required:

  1. Activate The ExactMetrics eCommerce Addon.
  2. Enable enhanced eCommerce Tracking in Google Analytics.

For Membership Sites, Forums, and more

For user tracking for membership sites, LMS/Learning Academy style sites or WordPress-based forums and social networks you can utilize our User ID tracking feature.

This will allow you to:

  • See the behavior of individual users on your membership site.
  • Track logged-in users vs non-logged in users with custom dimensions.

Follow these guides to get set up:

  1. Set up User Tracking in WordPress.
  2. Setup the Logged-in and User-ID Custom Dimension.

Advanced Marketing Setups: Conversion Tracking and Remarketing Pixels

Did you know it can take up to 5 to 7 interactions before your potential customer becomes familiar with your brand? Customers are more likely to make a purchase on your website after getting comfortable with your business.

Have you noticed after you’ve visited a website, the ads can “follow you” around the web? Then you know the importance of “retargeting” or “remarketing.” This advanced marketing tactic can take your online store to the next level when done right:

  1. How to install the Facebook remarketing retargeting pixel in WordPress.
  2. Setup Google Analytics for AdWords conversion tracking.

Getting Started with Forms Tracking

Use our form tracking feature on your contact, sign-up, email opt-in or web forms. See overview reports right within your WordPress, and gain insights on your conversion rates.

Our advanced tracking also details visitor data such as:

  • Lead source
  • Visitor country
  • Visitor city
  • User ID
  • Device used

If you need more granular tracking of the stats, our advanced users can navigate to Google Analytics and really dig into the advanced details.

Without forms tracking, you only know how many submissions you have. With forms tracking, you can see exactly the percentage of users that filled out your forms.

To set up forms tracking, Get started with the ExactMetrics Forms Addon. If you don’t have a good forms plugin yet, we recommend our own WPForms.

Custom Dimensions

ExactMetrics comes with custom dimensions integrated for even more advanced tracking:

Do you run a blog with multiple contributors or authors? Our Author custom dimension tracking tracks and provides insights for individual authors and their posts.

Wondering about your visitors with login access to your website? Our Logged-in Tracking custom dimension tracks whether your visitors are logged in or not.

Have an eCommerce or membership site? With our User ID Tracking, you can track each logged-in user’s activity through the User-ID custom dimension.

Do you have several custom post types? With our Custom Post Type Tracking, you can track the performance of each post type.

Have different categories on your site? Our Category custom dimension gives you insight on what content is performing the best within your website.

Track the performance of your posts based on when it was published on your site using our “Published At” custom dimension.

Utilize multiple tags on your website? Our Tag Tracking provides detailed metrics on what specific topics are popular on your site.

Do you use the Yoast SEO plugin? With our SEO Score and Focus Keyword custom dimensions, you can analyze the SEO score and Focus Keywords of your posts and pages.

Here’s how to get started with Custom Dimensions:

  1. Read the Beginner’s guide to custom dimensions in Google Analytics.
  2. Learn how to set up custom dimensions.
If you’re experiencing problems when trying to view your custom dimensions report, review step 3 and step 4 in the guide: How to set up custom dimensions.

Search Console

The Google Search Console allows you to gain insight on how your page is ranking for certain keywords in Google Search.

ExactMetrics can show you where you’re ranking for traffic and where your leads are coming from.

With the Google Search Console connected to your Google Analytics, ExactMetrics Plus users or higher will be able to view their stats within their ExactMetrics reports.

Get your Google Search Console configured by following the steps:

  1. Verify a site on Google Search Console with Google Analytics.
  2. Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics.
If you see a 403 response error message, this is caused due to a misconfiguration while setting up your Google Search Console. Check out this guide to fix the problem:

How to fix: API returned a 403 response error message user does not have sufficient permissions for this profile.

Enable AMP

The AMP project provides a simple way to create web pages that load faster and are more optimal for visitors on mobile devices or slower internet connections.

On WordPress, you can set up AMP quickly with a plugin. Being more mobile-friendly through AMP helps to improve your Google Analytics search results ranking.

With AMP pages enabled on your website, you can then effectively track these pages with the ExactMetrics AMP Addon.

Get started here: How to get started with the Google AMP addon.

Make sure to download the Google AMP plugin by Automattic (required by ExactMetrics Addon to work).

Getting Started with EU Compliance

ExactMetrics makes it easy to get started with EU Compliance with our 1-click-addon:

  1. GDPR and ExactMetrics everything you need to know.
  2. Getting started with the EU Compliance Addon.
  3. Troubleshooting a drop in traffic numbers EU compliance.

 

You did it!

Did you know companies using analytics have 126% profit improvement over competitors and top-performing organizations use analytics 5x more than bottom performers?

This means you’re on your way to improving your business and gaining the edge you need to elevate your organization to where you want it to go.

If you want to read the latest in advanced analytics, check out our blog. If you have more questions you can always navigate to our documentation to search for the answers you’re looking for.