How To Install Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, & Google Search Console On a WordPress Website

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today I'm going to be going over how to install Google tag manager Google Analytics and Google search console on your WordPress website we're gonna be doing all of this with a single wordpress plugin so you don't need to worry about if you're making any updates to your plugins your themes or your WordPress website they're always gonna stay installed no matter what so let's get started with the plug-in that we use and the one that I prefer to use is head footer and post injections so we want to install this on our WordPress website so the first thing you want to do is open up your WordPress website and go down to plugins and add new okay so what we want to do is come over to keyword here and we're gonna search plugins and usually what I'll do is you can see it's right here head footer and post injections but what I can do is just do head footer post injections if you type that in then it'll be the top one that comes up okay so you could see it right here it's H and a half you're gonna see it has over 200,000 active installations so it's a good plugin it's one very highly rated so we're gonna install it and activate it okay we'll click on activate now okay if we scroll down you can see that we have it installed and activated right now for our website so what you want to do is you want to go to settings on the left hand side and you're gonna see header and footer from the settings menu so that's where we want to go is header and footer that's gonna open up the settings page for head footer and post injections so now all we need to do is make sure we create our Google tag manager Google Analytics and Google search console accounts so I'm gonna start with Google tag manager so if you're not started with Google tag manager you can go to this page sign in if you already have a Google account or click on start for free and you're gonna have to create a new Google account if you don't have one already now the benefit of using Google tag manager as you can see here manage all of your website tags without editing code so essentially with Google tag manager what you do is you add one piece of code to your website and through Google tag manager you're able to implement every single type of tracking pixel that you need to add to your website whether it's Google Analytics whether it's your Facebook pixel whether it's the Pinterest ads pixel so any of these different things that you can add to your website you can do it directly through Google tag manager and it's much easier to manage using this piece of software so what we're going to do is we're gonna click on sign in to tag manager since I have an account already and for me it's gonna open up a page that looks like this so you can see I already have all my different accounts set up here so what we want to do is create a new account so we'll just create our account here so for account name I'm gonna be doing this for my website wicker guide.com so I'm just gonna name the account wicker guide ok so you want to set your country and now we want to do is do our container setup so for this it's gonna be web so that's gonna be our target platform and then my website is wicker guide comm so I'm gonna enter that here ok and it's that simple we need to click on create it's gonna tell us to agree to the terms of service agreement so we're gonna scroll down click I also accept data processing terms as required by the GDP R and we can click on yes ok so now it's gonna tell us to install Google tag manager and two pieces of code that we need to add to our website this piece of code as high in the header tag of the page as possible and this one in between the opening body tag so right after the opening body tag we want to add this piece of code and this one as high as possible in beneath the header tag of our page so we're gonna start here we're gonna copy so click right over here to copy it and we're gonna come back over to our website and you're gonna see head page section injection so we're gonna take it on every page and we're gonna enter that here so now we're gonna do is scroll down after the opening body tag so we want to add this for desktop and mobile so we're gonna come back over to Google tag manager we're gonna copy this piece of code come back over to our website and we're gonna paste it here and paste it here select mobile and now all we need to do is scroll to the bottom and click on save so now we have Google tag manager installed on our website it's really that easy so we can click on ok so it we're all set up the last thing we need to do here is click on container not publish so we just have to click on submit we need to publish our container so all we need to do here is just to publish container and we'll do the same thing here publish container so essentially what you're doing is you're making your Google tag manager live right now so you can see publish to environment live just click on publish so that's what you need to do to complete the process of installing Google tag manager on WordPress now what we'll do at the very end is you can use the tag assistant plug-in which is available through Google Chrome so you can see tag assistant it's offered by Google just install to Chrome you can see I have it up at the top here so you can make sure that you have your Google Analytics and Google tag manager properly installed on your website so the next thing that we want to do is we want to come over and we want to create and install our Google Analytics account so get to know your customers if you're not familiar with why you want to use Google Analytics essentially what its gonna do is show you where your website visitors are coming from how much traffic you're getting per day how many people are currently on your website you can track specific goals which pages people are visiting you can track marketing campaigns so essentially it's gonna track everything that's happening on your website who's visiting where they came from whether it was organic search whether it was social media a paid advertisement maybe you were referral from another website so what you want to do is install this again all three of these are completely free to install and use so we're gonna come over here and sign in to Google Analytics so you want to click here to sign in ok so if you don't have an account here already your page might look a little bit different than mine but what you want to do is come to the admin screen so at the very bottom of the lists here for all the different reports you can look at go to admin and what you're gonna do is you're gonna create an account so you're gonna create a new Google Analytics account so we're going to name our account again wicker guide case we'll scroll down you can see I just keep all of these checked here and then we can click on next it's gonna say what do you want to measure so for us it's just gonna be web if you have a website and an app then what you want to do is apps and web so what we're gonna do is click on next property details website name is gonna be wicker guide again website URL so for mine it's HTTP and what we're gonna do is wicker guide calm okay so industry categories so you want to select your industry category from this drop-down list you can search here as well for this I'm gonna do home-and-garden and then reporting time zone usually I set whichever time zone I'm in so for me it's the New York Times own so we'll come over and it's gonna be New York time okay so we'll click on create I also accept the data processing term so you have to make sure you accept that keep scrolling down you're gonna have to accept this as well and click on I accept okay so we've created our Google Analytics account so what we want to do is now install Google Analytics on our website and we don't need to add an additional piece of code here in head footer and post injections what we're gonna do is we're gonna install Google Analytics using our Google manager account so what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back over to tag manager and go to workspace and since we have Google tag manager implemented on our website already what we can do is add a new tag to our website so we're gonna click here we're gonna name our tag Google Analytics you're gonna click here on tag configuration and you're gonna see right at the very top Google Analytics Universal analytics now if you're doing app plus web then you want to select this here so for this I'm just gonna choose right here track type keep it as page view Google Analytics settings so what we're gonna have to do now is create a new variable so the variable is just gonna be our Google Analytics tracking code so that's what we're gonna name this here is Google Analytics or we can name it tracking ID okay so now variable configuration you can see Google Analytics settings so what your one I'm gonna do is go back to your account and take this tracking ID right here we're gonna copy it we're gonna come back over to our Google tag manager account and enter it right here in tracking ID okay so this is our Google Analytics tracking ID and all you need to do is enter it here and click on save okay so now that's a new variable so our Google Analytics settings is gonna use that variable so the tracking ID that we have right here is now going to be implemented right here triggering you want to trigger it on every single page so every time someone visits a page we want to make sure that this code triggers this tag triggers our Google Analytics use Universal analytics because that's gonna allow us to track everything that's happening on our website so we click on save okay so now the last part we have to do is submit so anytime you make changes in Google tag manager if you add 50 tags you need to submit that version of your workspace so you can see here our current workspace is default workspace so when you're making changes here our live version is version one the one we publish four minutes ago so we're gonna click on submit and you can do version name added Google Analytics and usually I'll just copy and paste this here if you have a very detailed description and you want to enter that there but we're gonna click on publish so now it's going to install Google Analytics on our website so you can see version changes we added a tagged Google Analytics we added a variable Google Analytics tracking ID so what we can do is come back over to our workspace and if you come over here to tags it'll show the tags that we have implemented if we come over here to variables it'll show that we have this variable implemented as well okay so as it stands right now we have Google tag manager implemented on our website we have Google Analytics implemented on our website so the last thing that we need to do is install Google search console so we're gonna start here improve your performance on Google search so if you're not familiar with Google search console it's a tool that Google has created to allow website to know which keywords are triggering their website which pages are ranking high how much search engine traffic they're driving you can find technical issues with your website and there's a lot of other things you can do with Google search console I would recommend checking out my google search console tutorial I'll put the link in the video description and will show you everything you need to know about Google search console especially as you're getting started as a user so we're gonna click here on start now and as you can see it's gonna open up my account so it opened up beach-front - core com so you're able to see this is my clicks - beachfront - core com from Google over the last three months you can see coverage so how many pages I have indexed in Google ending pages with errors so there's a lot of different things you can look at in search console but what we want to do is create a new account so we're gonna click on this drop down here and add property so what we want to do is add a URL prefix now you can do domain and just enter the domain here and you can verify it using your actual domain provider and what you need to do is add a DNS record to do this now I just refer to use the URL prefix method either way works I've used both methods before usually I'll just use URL prefix because I think it's a little bit easier so what we're gonna do is enter our URL here so HTTP Wicker guide.com and we're gonna click on continue okay and what you're gonna see here is ownership auto verified so since we already installed Google tag manager it's actually using that as our verification method so you don't need to do anything else all you need to do is click on go to property it's gonna open up our wicker guide com property so I previously had this installed already I just deleted it to make this video so you can see here we're already getting some web search clicks we have some valid pages indexed in Google so now we have Google tag manager Google Analytics and Google search console all installed on our website so if we come back to our WordPress website we're looking at the back end what we're gonna do is just open up our web page and we want to double check everything with the tag assistant plug-in so we're gonna come back over to our home page still working on this website I'm gonna be doing a lot of tutorials about this website but what we want to do is click on the tag assistant plug-in and we're gonna click on enable so you need to enable it first and then you need to refresh the page so we're gonna refresh the page and you can see right here at the top it's showing two so found two tags in one suggestion so if we click on it you can see we have Google Analytics Google tag manager additional permissions requested check if other extensions or blocking tags we can click on allow but it doesn't really matter so we'll just click on the X for now so we have everything installed properly if we come over to our Google Analytics account we come back here let's just come to real time and overview it should show that we're one active user on the home page so if we change pages really quick so if we come over here we'll just click on wicker chairs okay so now we're on this new page over here so we're gonna come back over to Google Analytics and you can see it changed that page so we have this perfectly installed on our website we're able to monitor everything that's happening on our website so people currently on our website our total audience where they're coming from what they do when they're on our website and any of the conversions or sales that we're making if we come over to Google search console now we're able to track all of the traffic going to our website what keywords are triggering pages on our website which pages are driving a lot of traffic so we're able to find a lot of opportunities and with Google tag manager what we're able to do is add any new tags that we want to so if we click here to add a new tag just to show you really quickly you can use Google Ads conversion tracking within tag manager if we keep scrolling down you can add custom HTML tags keep coming down so if you use add role you can add your smart pixel keep coming down and you can see all of these different tags that you can add so the LinkedIn insight tag Bing ads universal event tracking if we keep you can see Pinterest tags so all these different tags for different PPC advertising platforms different analytics platforms different ways you can track everything that's happening on your website Google tag manager can help you and if you don't see a built in tag here again you have this custom HTML and also custom image tags that you can easily add your website so now we're ready to keep work on our website and understand everything that's happening when people visit it where they're coming from and any of the opportunities that we're not taking advantage of hopefully this all made sense and hopefully it's easy to follow if you have any questions about how to install these three pieces of free software from Google please leave them in the comment section you can view the video description to see some timestamps thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC youtube channel