With over 10 million downloads, Google Analytics for WordPress is the most popular analytics plugin in the WordPress.org plugin directory.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we have acquired Google Analytics for WordPress from team Yoast and rebranded it as MonsterInsights.
If you aren’t familiar with team Yoast, they’re known for their extremely popular Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
As they focus on expanding their SEO tools and training, they were looking for a new home for this extremely useful plugin.
Since analytics is a crucial part of conversion optimization and business growth, it was a perfect fit for our family of products.
Who are “we”?
Hi, my name is Syed Balkhi, and I’m the founder of WPBeginner, one of the largest free WordPress resource site.
Along with my team, we have created some amazing products including:
- OptinMonster, the most popular conversion optimization software, that helps you convert abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers.
- Envira Gallery – the best WordPress gallery plugin.
- SoliloquyWP – the fastest responsive WordPress slider plugin.
- WPForms – the most beginner friendly WordPress contact form plugin.
Yes, we know a thing or two about building awesome products that customers love.
What does this acquisition mean for existing users?
Aside from new ownership and the new name, it’s business as usual. You can continue to use the plugin that you love without any interruptions.
With our experience and a dedicated team, we will be adding new features and improvements to MonsterInsights in the near future.
What’s coming next?
Our work is just starting.
Analytics are supposed to help you make data-driven decisions to grow your business. The problem is most people don’t know what to do with analytics because they don’t understand them.
Google Analytics is so robust that even if you go through a week long training program, you still won’t know all that it can do.
Our goal is to make analytics easy by showing you the stats that matter.
Whether you have a simple blog, an agency business, or an online store, we will give you actionable insights that you can use to grow your traffic and conversions.
It is a massive task, but we’re up for a challenge. Over the next 8 months, we will be adding some amazing new features that I know you will love.
Since it’s a plugin that we will be using across our suite of products and websites, you can expect it to be the best.
I want to thank Joost and the entire Yoast team for all the hard work they put in this product. I want to thank all users who have supported this plugin so far, and I hope to earn your support for years to come.
Let’s build the best analytics plugin for WordPress.
Sincerely,
Syed Balkhi
CEO of MonsterInsights
Thank you very much Syed for your explanation. Regarding this bit: “Over the next 8 months, we will be adding some amazing new features that I know you will love.” Could you go into more detail regarding the upcoming features you are planning on adding? I would be interested to learn more about the roadmap of what is ahead for MonsterInsights. Thank you.
You’re welcome Stijn.
There will be 3 main areas that we’ll focus on.
– Ecommerce – while there’s an add-on right now, it can use significant improvement. From leveraging analytics in our other businesses, we have developed tons of cool reports that can really help business owners get ahead.
– Publishers – the stats dashboard will get a revamp to highlight what’s trending right now, most popular posts, more custom event tracking.
– Training – while everyone installs analytics, most people don’t use it. The above two will show you the stats that matter, so the training will show you how to leverage that.
That’s the goal in a nutshell.
For our immediate goal (next 3 weeks) is to clean up some legacy code and prepare the plugin for these new additions. Fix some outstanding bugs and add few enhancements that users have been requesting. First week of May, we’ll have our partners meeting to draw out the exact 6 month roadmap with deadlines for each feature release.
We will do our best to keep everyone updated.
“… trending right now, most popular posts …”
If you do include this functionality, please code it so that it doesn’t hit admin-ajax too hard. Perhaps include a “sampling” option, that tracks every X pageviews. We’ve found that “trending” plugins can put a significant hit on the server when pageviews exceed a few thousand concurrent readers.
Another feature request, perhaps for your “Premium” plugin — pull in and merge analytics from across several Analytics accounts. It would be AWESOME to be able to view close-to-real-time stats for 20 of our websites at a time, for example, spitting out a list of headlines that shows what’s currently popular across our network.
Finally (for now), we use Post Pay Counter PRO on some of our sites, to track pageviews by author, so we can pay them $X plus $Y per 1,000 pageviews. If you included that functionality in your plugin, that’d be awesome!
Since we’re using Google Analytics, we don’t need to use admin-ajax for tracking – we’ll make sure to not throttle the performance. We run a viral site ourselves at List25 so everything will be tested there first 🙂
The second feature is a bit broad and outside our existing scope.
The third feature is definitely going to be added in this plugin.
Do you have any plans to incorporate Autotrack.js or Google Tag Manager? Or even an automated way to set up custom dimensions for media query tracking?
I’ll add this in our scope discussion 🙂
Great product already very excited to see the changes coming!
Awesome! I’m using the Optin Monster plugin and I’m loving it! I hope this will get amazing as well! I would want to say “Goodbye” to Jetpack stats (that kind of expectation!)
It will definitely happen 🙂
Will current subscribers of Google Analytics by Yoast Premium be converted to MonsterInsights Pro?
All subscribers have been converted over
Absolutely 🙂
However, if you want it to be the best Analytics plugin, then users won’t like the PRO plan! (I’m one of them!)
Sorry to hear that. Our hope is to deliver enough value that users don’t mind upgrading to Pro.
Well, I appreciate the PRO plan Syed. But, the free version literally does nothing now. It just shows what Google Analytics easily gives. At least you could try giving some of the custom dimensions for free.
The reason why I’m saying it cuz you plan it to be the best analytics plugin for WordPress.. And, if the free version would only show what Google Analytics can easily show then it can’t be claimed as the best analytics plugin for WordPress. But, may be the best “premium analytics plugin” for WordPress.
I’m already a PRO user of OptinMonster so I wouldn’t mind paying for it as well. But It’s like I want this plugin to be like of CloudFlare’s service, WordFence plugin. They offer almost 50%-60% of their plugin for free : It’s just my opinion 😀
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing your opinion Ankush. We definitely appreciate it.
Right now we haven’t changed anything. We bought the plugin as-is. I’ll surely keep your thoughts in mind when we start building new features.
Congrats bro, I hope you further improve and develope this awesome plugin 🙂
Exciting news! Two questions:
1) Will you continue to support the Premium plugin (we purchased a 20-site license), perhaps with an expanded feature set?
2) Will you make quality control a top priority? The previous developers had some great ideas, but their work has been aggravatingly buggy
Hi Ted,
1. We will continue to support your premium license. All premium users should have already received their new username / password. Old license keys will continue to work. You will also get all new features for as long as your license is active.
2. Absolutely. Quality control is our top priority.
We’re users of the premium plugin & haven’t yet received any information regarding username/password. Please advise
You should have received an email with your login information.
If not, use the this link to reset your password. Your username is your email address you used when you bought the plugins on Yoast’s site.
Congrats bro, looking forward to the new set of features. I have seen Joast talk about how he’s missing the opportunity for Pro version of this plugin. I say, this acquisition makes a lot of sense.
Looking forward to what you guys build next. Your team/products are getting amazing day by day. ??
As one of those “Analytics users who don’t really understand it or use it, but would like to more,” one of my requests would be to have the plugin pull more Analytics data directly into the WP Dashboard. I have the Premium version of the plugin (because I was hoping it would bring more analytics data to the Dashboard without having to go to Analytics itself), and that’s the main thing I was hoping for. Is that part of the plan? 😀
Will our current Yoast premium accounts migrate?
Yes, they’re already migrated. You should have received an email with your login information.
If not, use the this link to reset your password. Your username is your email address you used when you bought the plugins on Yoast’s site.
Will this change how Google Analytics works and looks?
No it will not change the functionality. We may improve some of the plugin settings interface to make it easier for users.
I’ve been a fan of WPBeginner for a while now, so I’m confident that you guys are going to do great work with taking Yoast’s former plugin to new levels. Well done, and good luck.
Thanks John 🙂
Congrats on acquiring. I’ve been using Google Analytics for WordPress…. for many years, and will continue to do so. I use OptinMonster as well, and so I know this plugin is in great hands.
I look forward to seeing what you will do with it.
Thanks Nile 🙂
Wow! Congratulations Syed, and the team!
I am not a MonsterInsights user “Yet!”, so I am looking forward to see what you guys are cooking in the kitchen.
Good luck!
There’s never been a better time to become a user 🙂
We’re really excited to share over the next several months some new features
This is good new Syed, you doing good and it’s showing. I really do hope you and the dedicated team take this plugin and take it to another level. I have only one “request”. Please don’t stop considering users opinion. Want to take it to the sky? Take your users with you.
Wish you the best,
a wpbeginner.
Congratz! While I must admit to never having used previous products by your team, they sound wonderful! This is I’m sure a huge achievement for you all.
I only wish to offer some feedback on this transition period, which obviously will expect some bumpiness along the way:
“You can continue with the plugin as normal” … almost immediately after updating to the MonsterInsights version, a giant red warning has now dug itself into the header of our store’s backend administrative panel:
“You need to install or update either Google Analytics By MonsterInsights or MonsterInsights Pro before you can use the MonsterInsights eCommerce addon!”
The whole purpose behind our having used this plugin was that I am not always available to help our marketing team when server side development is required. Then why, if you say updates are all that is required, are we being prompted to install new plugins?
Hi there,
If you are using the ecommerce addon, you have to have either the MonsterInsights free or Pro plugin also active. This was also true prior to acquisition.
There is a known bug we’re about to issue an update for that fixes an issue where when you have the latest versions of both free/Pro and eCommerce that that warning still shows.
-Chris
Citation Needed: “the largest free WordPress resource site.”
Having been in the industry for the last 10 years and running WPBeginner for the last 6+ years, I have yet to come across an independent free WordPress resource site that’s larger than WPBeginner that’s not called WordPress.org (official site for WordPress).
Knowing and following you for a long time i trust you will keep and later improve all about Google Analytics for WordPress.
Thanks Betty 🙂
Congratulations!
I will defiantly try the new pro version.
Rami Y.
GenerateWP.com
Thanks Rami 🙂
Congratulations, old friend! Am excited to see where you take things, because I know you demand the best!
Thanks Lara 🙂
I use this plugin in higher ed and non of my users are administrators. We have limited administrators and most users are editors or authors.
It would be nice if editors and authors can get permission to see the dashboard for reports only.
Good suggestion. Thanks Jonathan.
Plus 1 for giving access to the stats dashboard to authors and even possibly editors, most of my clients want me to hide the majority of the complexity of their site, leaving them with just the content they need to edit and add to.
It’s coming very soon in the 6.0 release!
Congrats and good luck going forward.
This thing I have always liked about the Yoast Analytics plugin is that it provided a good set of basic tracking options and not much else. It was way better than just dropping the tracking code into my theme but didn’t take over the dashboard (unlike some other Yoast plugins…)
Please don’t overdo it with the new features! If the plugin were to get more assertive in the Dashboard, I’d like switch my 30+ client sites to a different plugin.
We won’t get more assertive in the dashboard. The base plugin will retain all the similar functionality. Those who want to add more would be able to simply turn on / off the new features by installing additional add-ons.
Thanks Mark
I hope that the first thing you guys will do is to remove the annoying WordPress notices that Yoast used to show almost at every update…
I’m also hoping that you won’t be too aggressive promoting the pro version…
Anyhow, congrats on your new business acquisition!
Thanks Julien.
Hi,
first of all, congratulations for the great acquisition. Have you thought about changing the pricing model and make it more similare to OptinMonster one?
MonsterInsights would be incredibly powerful in combination with OptinMonster and have a similar pricing model could be a big benefit for customers.
Also, you know people love unlimited formula 🙂
Best,
Francesco
Absolutely that is something we have talked about. As we rebuild the plugin and add more add-ons, it’s likely that we will switch to a similar pricing model.
Good luck, looks good.
Hi Syed. I am one of those users who had installed Google Analytics by Yoast ages ago, got my code from Google and plugged it in… somewhere.. then didn’t know what to do! A pantser, a DIY-er, I am excited about your taking it over because I already value your great training. I am so ready to learn GA! Thanks for keeping us all so updated. As a writer and social media coach I am more focused on content but I know I need to understand GA and this is the next phase of my biz dev.
Thanks Glenda 🙂