Issues with Monster Insights Plugin?

Hi,

Thank you for writing us!

There are some conflicts with “Monster Insight” plugin because it uses tracker name “__gaTracker” and our plugin uses “gtag.js” and all the enhanced ecommerce calls/events tracked by our plugin is fetched by this tracker.

So if you have “Monster Insight” plugin active and you leave the option “Add Global site Tracking Code ‘gtag.js’” disable, it won’t initialize the tracker to send the EE calls to your GA account.

Additionally, if you enable “Add Global site Tracking Code ‘gtag.js’” with “Monster Insight” plugin, it will result into double pageviews in your analytics account and also affect the bounce rate.

Hope this helps!

Thanks & Regards,

Thanks for confirming, so not really an option then – it just wouldn’t work.

If instead we used a plugin such as GA Google Analytics which allows you to choose and use gtag.js then that would be ok presumably?

Thanks.

Hi,

Yes, you can use the plugin like GADWP which allows you to add gtag.js from their plugin & it will work well with our plugin.

Regards,

Thanks – I downloaded GADWP and I note that where the setting to ‘use global site tag gtag.js’ it has in brackets next to it (not recommended). Why would that be?

@nratsey that’s because old sites may have tracking code customizations which aren’t compatible with the new tracking library. That recommendation is made for existent users which may encounter issues by simply switching to the new tracking code. Otherwise, gtag.js is fully supported.

I would also add gtag.js is a inferior standard to analytics.js. gtag is just a wrapper around analytics.js, that downloads it. You’ll lose user browser caching in the process and it will take longer to load, and some of the features of analyricsjs are not supported yet in gtag. Google explicitly does not recommend the use of gtag unless you are using other Google tag services, which is why MonsterInsights doesn’t support it. We also have an eCommerce add-on that supports both standard and enhanced WooCommerce tracking out of the box.

‘Google explicitly does not recommend the use of gtag unless you are using other Google tag services’ – is that right @chriscct ? Why then, when you go to the ‘Tacking Info’ page of a GA property do they provide the gtag code if they don’t recommend it? There is even a migration guide for migrating from anlaytics.js to gtag.js –>

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gtagjs/migration

They provide gtag as the default since Google’s hope is you will use multiple Google services on the same page, and using gtag.js facilitates that use case the easiest.

Gtag to be very clear is not a replacement for analytics.js. It is simply a convinience (for developers) wrapper around analytics.js because it makes the output in nice JSON.

It does not support the full functionality of analytics.js because it is not a complete wrapper.

Moreover as it is a unique query string request, by using it you are requiring visitors to your site to load an extra JS file that will then load analytics.js, and unlike analytics.js, gtag is not going to be in their browser cache because of that query string.

There are more downsides, but basically the bottom line is this, unless you are using multiple Google services, and not doing anything advanced with them (that the wrapper doesn’t support) you should not be using gtag.js. As MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics only do analytics, it doesn’t make sense for us to use or recommend gtag at the current time.

I’ve talked to a lot of people at Google about putting it back, because obviously with us supporting both MonsterInsights and ExactMetrics, their future plans are always of interest to us.

To quote Philip Walton for example (since it’s a public comment I can reference), the lead of autotrack.js at Google,
> I agree that it shouldn’t have been removed from the installation instructions in the Google Analytics admin section, and I’ve filed a bug about that internally. Ideally, there would be an article in the help center clearly explaining why there are three different options, and when it makes sense to use each option…….I know of know of no plans to deprecate analytics.js

If and when they want us, the largest GA partner on the planet by number of installs, to migrate over, we’ll be the first to know, and that will be communicated explicitly with all of our users, and we’ll handle the migration.