Hi Chris- turns out Siteground was giving me wrong info which sent me in all sorts of directions (confirmed by google app support when I rang today).
I’m not sure if it’s working yet but it seems to have verified my account- I needed to create a separate google analytics account – which I didn’t realise, because When one clicks the ‘authenticate button’ on the WP dashboard it produces a tracking code which doesn’t work – connecting automatially with one’s gmail account. But creating a google analytics account provided me with a diff tracking code which I used to authenticate the account and it seems to work. Does the plugin automatically insert tracking code to all my pages? when I will start seeing stats? usually I get about 60 views per day but I have 0 ??