Wildly expensive–to do what you can DIY for free

  • kellye

    (@kellye)


    11 months ago

    I wanted to like it. The interface is lovely, and the setup couldn’t be easier.

    But the “Lite” version tells almost nothing. Everything Google Analytics can tell you for free is locked behind a very expensive paywall. If premium features (their own analysis, SEO recommendations, I dunno what else…) cost money to access, I’d understand, but this is literally my own free-to-access data now locked up until I disable this and get GA4 placed into my header… which is about three minutes of “work,” if that.

    They’re selling the easy setup and fear of screwing up. Not for a hundred bucks, which I might ? have considered to get the smooth interface—but for a hundred bucks FOR THE FIRST YEAR, and going up-up-up after that.

    They’re also selling “I already put this in, it would probably be hard to change,” and “I forgot I put this in, so it got auto-renewed.” Well, it’s not hard to change out, and I gave it a week to convince me that I might love it hundreds-of-dollars-worth, there’s just no way my business needs this added cost, for little or no added value. Will be uninstalling this weekend, putting in the three minutes’ work, and getting access to all my free-to-access data for free from GA.

    • This topic was modified 11 months ago by kellye. Reason: Forgot to change stars
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  • Plugin Support Michelle D.

    (@devmich)

    Hi @kellye,

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I’m sorry about our free version seeming not useful or feeling too limited.

    If you wanted to just use vanilla Google Analytics alone, you definitely could. Our goal at MonsterInsights is to take care of the heavy lifting so website owners don’t need to worry about inserting tracking code and keeping things up to date when Google changes something (for example, when Google Analytics 4 replaced Universal Analytics properties last year).

    Once MonsterInsights is connected to a Google Analytics property, tracking is automatically inserted into your WordPress site. In addition, we include reports viewable inside of your WordPress dashboard so it’s easier to view the stats that matter. You can learn more about the differences between Google Analytics and MonsterInsights here: https://www.monsterinsights.com/monsterinsights-vs-google-analytics-whats-the-real-difference/

    With MonsterInsights Lite, you’re able to track and view critical site statistics (such as page views in the last 30 days, top posts and pages, etc). In addition to tracking page views, we automatically help track the following custom events:

    • Download link tracking
    • Affiliate link tracking
    • Outbound link tracking
    • Telephone link tracking
    • Email link tracking
    • Custom link click events

    We also include a monthly email summary report, alongside other useful tools like a headline analyzer, a UTM URL builder, a widget for displaying the most popular posts, to help increase site engagement. When making any changes to your site, you can also add a site note to help keep track of the impact it has on your analytics.

    More advanced tracking and reporting features aren’t available or enabled for websites using Lite, but we try to provide as much value as possible to our users by communicating the Pro version features because a lot of users aren’t aware of them and can benefit greatly. For the data we do help track in our free version, all of it is accessible within your Google Analytics property at analytics.google.com. To learn more about our tracking features in Lite, please see here: https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-get-an-unlimited-free-trial-of-monsterinsights-forever/

    We really appreciate you for giving us a try and if you have any suggestions for the things you’d like to see in the Lite version, please let me know and I’d be happy to share your feedback with the team.

    Thank you.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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