Google Analytics and Search Console

Yes, you need GA code on your site to properly track it. If your code is just to track visits to any page, it can be placed in your theme’s footer template. To avoid needing to reapply the code after theme updates, create a child theme. Any other code placement would depend on what you are tracking.

There are plugins that help you place tracking code without editing template files.

The traffic you are seeing could be from pages cached in user’s browsers, or it may be from “ghost referrers” that register visits without actually visiting your site. They are a type of spam that throws off your GA statistics.

Thanks a lot, bcworkz ??
My GA and Search Console configurations were made some years ago, and I think they are somewhat messy, so I’m considering to create a new fresh account with GA and Seach Console. Will this be unwise? Will this be bad for my SEO? (I need to sumbmit a new sitemap anyway, for my new site). Or should I try to “clean” up my existing configuration?

I don’t think GA accounts affect SEO at all, but then no one truly knows what goes into Google search ranking except for a few Google engineers. I’m not that familiar with GA, so I may phrase the following incorrectly, but hopefully you understand my intent and do what’s required even if it’s not what I said ??

I don’t see the need to start a new account, just start new views for your data collection and generate fresh code for those views. Delete all existing GA code from your site and place the fresh code for the new views. You can delete the old views if you want, or just ignore them.

Ok. Thanks for your reply!