How To Use Squarespace Analytics

1 What is Squarespace Analytics?

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You’ll have already heard of web analytics platforms – such as Google Analytics – and how they provide website owners with insights into how their site is performing and being used. Well, website building tool Squarespace also offers its own built-in reporting platform that provides its users with similarly handy insights, directly through the Squarespace dashboard.

The platform provides site owners with clear visual reports on key statistics such as sales, referrers, bounce rate, and page views, offering its users valuable insight into their site’s visitors, and how they behave when interacting with the pages and elements there.

For those who own Squarespace Ecommerce stores, the analytics function will also help you track your online business’s health, by providing data on conversion rates, cart abandonment, and revenue.

2 What Squarespace Plan Do You Need?

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Not all Squarespace plans are created equal. After all, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the more you pay, the more you get. However, every plan does come with some level of insight.

Here is what you currently get with each plan:

• Personal – basic website analytics such as visits, traffic sources, visitor geography, site paths, and content popularity
• Business – as above, plus advanced website analytics including sales and conversion metrics
• Basic Commerce & Advanced Commerce – as above, but these plans also come with advanced ecommerce functionality, and therefore offer more advanced online sales tracking. This includes highlighting your best selling products, identifying sales trends, and allowing you to monitor conversions from first visit to purchase.

For a more granular deep dive into Squarespace pricing, check out our dedicated guide.

3 What Data Can You See With Squarespace Analytics?

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We’ve already discussed the various levels of info you can obtain from Squarespace analytics. So in this section, we’re going to give you the lowdown on exactly what data can be viewed on the platform, as well as some of the helpful functionality it provides.

• Sales – including revenue, order value, and conversions
• Traffic – info on traffic and engagement on your site
• Traffic Alerts – annotations on traffic analysis, with more detailed insights into what events may have caused spikes and dips
• Geography – site visits by location, including an interactive map
• Sales by Product – data on product performance including revenue, order volume, and conversions
• Purchase Funnel – data on how well each stage of your funnel converts
• Abandoned Cart – track abandoned carts and assess the success of your abandoned cart emails
• Traffic Sources – data on where traffic is coming from to your site, plus which referring sources are most valuable
• Search Keyword – highlighting which search terms visitors are typing into search engines (such as Google) before visiting your site
• Activity Log – a log of key info on every visitor to visit a specific site URL, including date, time, IP address, referrer, browser version, and operating system
• Form & Button Conversions – how many submissions or clicks your forms and buttons receive. This includes an overall conversion rate for your site as well individual form and button conversions
• Site Content – key data on your site content including views, time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate
• Site Search Keywords – info on the top 100 search terms typed into your site internal search function
• RSS Subscribers – an estimate of the amount of traffic your RSS feed receives in a selected time frame

4 How Can You Use Your Data?

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With a wealth of data to choose from, the possibilities of what you can do with it all are practically endless. Below, we’ve come up with a few common business scenarios, challenges, and goals, to highlight how the data included in Squarespace analytics could help you tackle them.

Challenge: You want to drive more traffic to your blog.

There are some helpful insights available on Squarespace analytics that can be used to help you drive more traffic to your site. For example, you can look at traffic – and traffic alerts – to identify which actions you’re taking are pushing the most traffic to your site. This could be anything from paid ad campaigns to search engines and organic social media – and everything in between!

You could also assess search terms to see what people are searching for when they visit your site. This will enable you to be more targeted with your SEO efforts, and increase the volume of already popular terms.

Challenge: You want to cut down your product range to just the most profitable products 

Assessing your sales by product with Squarespace analytics will quickly tell you which of our store’s products are most popular. Although other factors will come into play – such as the profit you make on each product – this information will play a crucial part in assessing which products are ‘cash cows’.

Challenge: You want to identify the next location to begin selling to.

The geographical information provided within Squarespace analytics can be extremely helpful when it comes to identifying locations that you do not yet serve – but could be highly lucrative markets.

5 Google Analytics

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Although Squarespace analytics is both useful and convenient, Google Analytics arguably offers a much more comprehensive set of insights and tools to help you improve your website and drive conversions.

In this section, we’ll show you how to add Google Analytics to your website, and what you can do with it once you have.

Can You Add Google Analytics to Squarespace?

Yep! In fact, adding Google Analytics to your website is fairly straightforward. You’ll just need to first locate your Google Analytics Tracking ID, then add it to your website.

Finding your Google Analytics Tracking ID:

1. Create a Google Analytics account (if you haven’t already)
2. Click ‘Admin’
3. Select an account from the ‘Account’ column
4. Select a property from the ‘Property’ column
5. Under ‘Property’ click ‘Tracking Info’, then ‘Tracking Code’
6. Copy the Tracking ID from the top of the page

Adding your Google Analytics Tracking ID to your website:

1. Go to your Squarespace home menu, then click ‘Settings’, followed by ‘Advanced’
2. Click ‘External API Keys’
3. Under ‘Google Analytics Account Number’ copy and paste your tracking ID
4. Click ‘Save’

Once you have done this Google Analytics will have been added to your site. However, it may take some time (up to 24 hours) for the data to appear on your dashboard.

How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website

You can use Google Analytics to improve your website much in the same way as with Squarespace analytics – it just puts even more data and tools at your disposal.

For example, you may use Google Analytics to spot pages on your site that have high bounce rates, then identify ways to improve those pages – such as adding videos or removing pop-ups. Alternatively, you may employ Google Analytics to find out which blog posts bring the most traffic from search engines, or funnel the most valuable traffic to your site. Knowing this allows you to create similar content, and keep doing more of what’s working best!

6 Using Squarespace Analytics

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Squarespace analytics is a useful tool for website owners who want to get more from their websites, boost conversions, and generate more revenue. The convenience of in-platform analytics makes the whole process of running an online business easier to use and more simple to understand.

However, for those who want a deeper understanding of how their website is used and how to improve their site, using Google Analytics is clearly the way to go.

Before you go, remember to share your experience of Squarespace analytics with us in the comments section below – or just let us know what you thought of this articles! And for more info about how to use Squarespace, check out our straightforward, jargon-free guide today.