How to use SiteKit to add Google Analytics and Tag Manager?

SiteKit is a very helpful pluggin that gives you insight on how people find and use your site and you can use it to add Google Analytics and Tag Manager and this is how you do it!

Video transcript:

LaVonya: I have a question. So if Tricia go, well, if we go in and set up a Google Analytics with the tag managers, if I understand that’s where we going at, will I have to add code to my site for that even though I have a Site Kit?

David: So there’s a couple things in their statement that we need to clarify. So okay, Site Kit is a plugin on WordPress sites that allows you to add code to a website. You can add all kinds of different codes. You can add Google Analytics, you can add Google Tag Manager.

LaVonya: Right.

David: If you are using Tag Manager to serve your code, you should not also use Site Kit to serve Google Analytics. Let me say that again. If you’re using Google Tag Manager to serve your Google Analytics, do not also serve Google Analytics in Site Kit.

Tricia: When you say serve, like connect them?

David: Well, so here’s the thing. You can connect them and then tell Site Kit, “Don’t send this information to the website.” Because you’re sending it to the website through Tag Manager.

Tricia: Okay.

David: I made this mistake…

Tricia: I need to check that.

LaVonya: I need to…
David: …and it double-counted every visitor to a client’s website.

Tricia: Okay.

LaVonya: All right. So I need to check that because I remember…

Tricia: Yeah. I’m not sure. I’m just having a look at it.

David: Okay. Let me see…

LaVonya: Maybe I’m getting confused with Google Analytics 4 is setting up Tag Manager. Maybe I’m getting that confused.

David: So, pardon me. Let me just log in and see if I can show a screen.

Tricia: Okay. So, you know what? I have Tag Manager connected, Analytics is connected, but I don’t see where you say don’t serve it. Let me see…

David: Okay, okay. Let’s…

Tricia: Are you sharing your screen?

David: I’m gonna share my screen.

Tricia: Okay.

David: So here is Site Kit for Curious Ants.

Tricia: Yes.

David: And, I go to Settings under Site Kit. And I’ve got all four of these things set up through Site Kit, Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager. This is the feature we want, Snippet is not Inserted.

Tricia: Okay, so let me see what mine says. Mine says snippet is inserted.

LaVonya: Wait a minute. Okay, so I went into settings, and then where do we go at this then?

David: Okay, let’s just, okay. Settings, and so if in your Tag Manager account, not in Site Kit, but in your Tag Manager you’re serving Google Analytics, okay, this means Tag Manager is adding Google Analytics to your website, right? So if that’s the case, I want to make sure that Tag Manager is not inserting the Google Analytics code also,

LaVonya: Oh, mine says it is.

Tricia: Actually mine does too.

David: So if you’re using Tag Manager, you go and you edit and you click this button. Place Universal Analytics Code, but I don’t want to because I’m using Tag Manager to do that.

Tricia: Okay. So edit. Okay, so undo Place Universal Analytics, and then say confirm change.

David: Right. Site Kit will not add the code to your site, which we don’t need to do because Tag Manager is doing that for us, right?

LaVonya: Oh, okay.

David: I’d hit Confirm Changes if I hadn’t already done this.

Tricia: Okay. So…

LaVonya: I have a question. If we had the Snippet inserted along with Tag Manager, and then I guess now that we’ve changed it to not insert it, would that make any difference on reports or anything?

Tricia: Yeah, it means your reports will double…

David: Double reporting.

LaVonya: Oh, okay.

David: So the advantage of connecting your Analytics account but not adding it, not inserting the snippet, is that it will allow you to see your information in your WordPress dashboard.

Tricia: I see. Okay.

David: That’s why most people do that.

Tricia: Okay.

David: So you can see, oh, look, I got this many visitors. Isn’t this awesome. Wow. I’m amazing. Right, Page Speed Experience. Okay, great. Like, this tells you speed and all that jazz.

Tricia: Okay.

David: So that’s what…but what I’m recommending you do is set up Tag Manager, then use Tag Manager to add your code. This offers several advantages to you mostly that you can manage all your code in one space, in your Tag Manager account. Just make sure that…oh, that’s interesting. I tell you, don’t feel bad. I realized I was doing this with a client.

Tricia: I’m glad you did tell me this, because I need to go back and check. So I think when I connected this, I don’t know what I was doing. So, and I also have it set for like the raw backup data, is that correct? What do you have yours set on? Oh, come on computer. Oops, I didn’t mean to do that. When you click on your Edit there…

David: Edit in analytics?

Tricia: Uh-huh.

David: That should go…

Tricia: Oh, no, just edit it there at the bottom. You have All Insight Data.

David: Always. Okay, so I don’t know, let me see. So that would be like my master view, I think.

LaVonya: That’s probably what you have it…

David: Yeah. I think that’s probably what you haven’t named. Remember, we created these views. There’s a testing one for when we got to change something, back-up that we never ever change. What all this is doing is saying, which view do you want to see the snapshot of in Google Analytics?

Tricia: Okay. So that really…

David: Because Google Analytics code shows data to all the views. So this is really stating, which view do you want to see…

Tricia: In WordPress dashboard?

David: In WordPress with Site Kit.

Tricia: Yes. Okay. So that really…

David: Okay. The property gives us the ID number, that’s how it knows which code to send information to.

Tricia: Okay. Yeah.

David: But, yeah. And…

Tricia: That’s was…I’m glad we got into this.

David: Yeah.

LaVonya: So next week, when we get our report on Mondays, it will probably be less this time because it’s not double reporting.

David: So if you made that mistake, what I would do is go into Google Analytics today, and make a note to yourself that says, “Removed extraneous Google Analytics code,” or something that you will remember. You know how to do that?

LaVonya: No. Can you show me?

David: All right, let’s do that.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Let me stop sharing in case it shows something I don’t want to show. Okay. All right. I’m gonna share screen again. All right. This is where it took me. So all I really wanna go to is…I can go to any of my reports. Let’s just go to all traffic channels. And I have to have today selected, because by the…remember Google Analytics works late. It doesn’t show, at least Universal Analytics doesn’t show very good real-time. GA4 will start to show more real-time data, which is really advantageous. So I really have to, because this includes up to yesterday, I really have to go and select the date to be today, which has to be September 1st. And see this little arrow down here underneath the date? It’s really subtle. Click on that, and it opens up this little thing to create new annotation. If I create new annotation, I can put whatever I want in there. So I’m just gonna put that in there. So now, whenever I view any…well actually, that’s not gonna work really well. But like I select a time period, as long as it includes a day with a note, whenever I go here and open this note, it makes a note here. You’ll see, well this isn’t a good example, but you’ll see there’s a little note here as well. Let me show you a better example. Let’s go into August 18th. Okay, see how there’s a little note marker here?

Tricia: Yeah.

David: On August 18th? Really small, but that tells you something happened on August 18th that might affect your data in this case. So if you make a note on today in your Google Analytics, because you did something that’s going to affect your data, when you come back in a couple months, you’re looking at, why did data suddenly decrease on September 1st? You remember, oh yeah, I fixed that, or I did that. I always do this whenever I launch a new website, right? So like, at the very least like remember when it launched because years down the line I wanna go, “When did we launch?” You can also create a private annotation that is only available to you. So shared means anybody who has access to this Google Analytics account, not your Google Analytics password, but this account. So anybody who, like if you had a business, and anybody who has access that Google Analytics profile would be able to see it. Private means only you, the person logging into Google Analytics can see that note. So let’s say I had a staff, if I made it private only me logging in, would get it. But if LaVonya had her own separate login to Google Analytics for my website, she would not see the private notes, she would only she shared notes.

Yep. So that’s really nice feature because it’s so easy to forget when things happen. So for instance, like one other feature I could use with the adding notes, why was there a ton of traffic on Sunday? I don’t know. What if like I have a partner who is gonna talk about me on a podcast. This is coming up. And so when they talk about me in the podcast, they’re not interviewing me. I could go in and make an annotation, this is when the podcast was launched. That’s really helpful because he’s just talking about me in a podcast, he’s not like linking to me where I could add UTM codes to know where it came from. It would be just a spike, right? If one of the reasons…so I could add a note on this day to say, “Oh, this is when the podcast was launched.” So at that point forward, there’s all kinds of really great things you can do with the annotation features within Google Analytics.

Tricia: Okay, good. Yeah, I just went in the site that launched last night and put a note that it…when it launched.

David: There you go.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Yeah. I mean, I think that’ll help you, right? Because what you could do is you could create a really long time scale. I wanna see everything for the last two years, and then you find out, what were the big moments in this website’s history that might affect data?

Tricia: Yeah. And this is one that before like, it was just a forwarded domain. So…

David: Yeah.

Tricia: Okay.

David: It’s really helpful when it goes to things like, okay, since we launched the new website, our traffic has doubled. I set a timeframe between when it launched to today, and I have compared to previous period, immediately know how that how other traffic has performed since we launched.