Understanding Squarespace Analytics (for beginners)
Table of Contents
📌 Pin it!
When you first launch the website, you’re likely wondering how things are going right?
How many people are seeing it? Which pages are people going to? How are they finding me?
These are all good questions to ask!
You’ll want to link your site up to Google Analytics for the most accurate & detailed information, but until you do Squarespace has built-in analytics that will still be helpful for you to collect this kind of info.
Maybe you’ve seen it in the home menu in your account, and maybe you’ve even clicked on it before to see what’s there, but got overwhelmed or don’t understand the terminology.
I totally understand! So let’s walk through it together; it’s not as scary as it sounds, I promise!
A couple important things to note before we dive in:
Google Analytics is “king” for website data tracking, and will be able to give you LOADS more details than Squarespace can. Whether you’re using Squarespace Analytics or not, I’d encourage you to connect Google Analytics from the get-go so it can be collecting data in the background that you can go back & use later. It’s free to use and simple to hook up. If you’d like to do so, there’s a tutorial link at the bottom of this post (not an affiliate link).
Squarespace Analytics doesn’t allow you to export the data, so if you want to keep records you’ll have to take screenshots & save, or write down the numbers you want to track in a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet. You can always look back in time, but doing so may not help you easily track how you’re growing, say, over a year or more.
If you want some help learning how to take screenshots, read my post How to get device screenshots for tips, –or press Command+Shift+3 on a Mac to take a screenshot of your entire screen, or Command+Shift+4 to click-and-drag-select an area to grab a screenshot from.
Using Squarespace Analytics:
What does it all mean?!
Everybody’s home menu looks a little different depending on how you customize it or what plan you’re on, but you always get there from the main home menu, by clicking Analytics in the menu list.
Once that page comes up, you’ll notice lots of menu items for the Analytics area.
Let’s break those down real quick:
Section-by-section: what do these terms mean?
Overview section:
This area is literally just an overview of your incoming sales, traffic & visitor geography.
Sales shows you stats like revenue, order volume and conversion rates. This info will tell you how much your customers order on average, how much your sales rates change over time and how much a “unique visit” is worth in sales to you, on average.
Squarespace’s exact definitions of those terms are:
Revenue is the sum of all subtotals and excludes costs like shipping fees and taxes.
AOV / Average Order Volume is The average revenue earned per order, or Revenue ÷ Orders.
Conversion Rates: A good indicator of how visitor behaviors convert into actions, such as sales or engagement. The number is calculated differently depending on the panel.
Traffic will be a summary of visitors & engagement on your website. It will help track the growth of your audience over time.
Squarespace’s exact definition of these terms are:
Visits: a single browsing session, and can encompass multiple pageviews. We track visits with a browser cookie that expires after 30 minutes. Any hits from a single user within that 30-minute browsing session count as one visit. This means that one person can register multiple visits a day if they close their browser and return to your site at least 30 minutes later. Visits are a good measure of attention on your site because they correlate with a single browsing session and are frequently used in marketing applications.
Pageviews tracks how many actual page requests your site saw in the selected time period. Requests for specific image URLs or other scripts don’t count toward this number—only full page loads do. For password-protected pages, a visitor must enter the password to count as a pageview.
Unique Visitors is an estimate of the total number of actual visitors that reached your site in the selected time period. We track this number with a browser cookie created when someone first visits your site. This cookie lasts for two years. Unique Visitors is a good measure of your loyal audience and readership. Every time a visitor clears their cookies or opens your site from a different browser, Analytics counts their first new visit toward Unique Visitors.
Geography shows stats on your site visits by location. You can use an interactive map to see where people are coming to your site from. This panel gives you more info on which countries send you the most visitors, where you could focus marketing efforts and generally how your website’s reach is growing.
Commerce section:
*NOTE: Sales by Product and Purchase Funnel sections are only available for those on the Commerce Basic or Commerce Advanced plans!
Product Sales breaks down which products are selling in your shop.
Purchase Funnels shows you the percentage of visits that ended up purchasing from you.
Abandoned carts tells you how many people put an item in the cart, but didn’t check out & whether they’re recoverable purchases or not.
The abandoned cart area can be quite useful if you’re on the Commerce Advanced plan. There’s a feature in that plan that auto-sends an email to people who put an item in their cart but never checked out, with a button to complete the purchase if they still want it.
If you’re not on that higher level plan, then this Abandoned cart area will just show you the stats, but you won’t be able to recover any lost purchases.
Acquisition section:
Traffic Sources will show you where your viewers are coming from, specifically.
Search: how many people search for a topic in any search engine & land on your site from their search
Social: how many people get to your site from social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter
Direct: how many people type in your specific URL, instead of searching.
Referral: this is often when other websites link back to your site, such as guest blog posts, community directories, or your affiliate links on other sites
Email: this shows how many people get to your site from emails, such as your newsletter or other email marketing
Google Search keywords show you which search terms drive search traffic to your website from Google (specifically).
Use this area to see how people are searching & getting to your site from Google. You’ll see which keywords result in the most click-throughs to your website, and what position in those searches your site ranks for those keywords (for example if you’re in position number 20, you’re probably not on the first page of search results for those keyword terms).
You can use all of this data to create content that’s geared toward what people are actually searching the interwebs for, and get more traffic from strategically planning this out, while simultaneously helping people more because you’re listening to what they want. 🙌🏻
If you haven’t set this part up & connected it to Google Search Console yet, you’ll see a blurry background of stats and a black button on top of it that says something like, “Connect to Google.” Click the button, log into whatever Google account you want to associate with tracking the analytics for that website, and the connection has been made!
(NOTE: this area is still not available on the mobile app as of May 2022)
Other Search Keywords will show you how your site does in other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc.) & what keywords are used to find your site there.
Engagement section:
This section shows you how viewers interact with you on your website.
Activity Log is the specific page-by-page breakdown for each viewer. It shows data like the Date, Time, IP Address, Referrer, Browser Version (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.), and Operating System (Mac, PC, etc) each viewer listed is using to access your site.
This area is most useful to understand more about the people visiting your site during a traffic spike, for example.
This log only tracks 7 days at a time
only shows the previous 7 days
a viewer’s privacy settings within their own browser can affect what info is collected
Forms & Button Conversions helps you understand how visitors interact with your forms and buttons. This area shows you percentages & specific numbers for how often people click each button or fill out each form on your site. (*Available in current & legacy Business & Commerce plans.)
Popular content shows which pages of your site are viewed most frequently, by pageviews. All pages of your site are included in this breakdown, including home, events, products, posts, and more.
Site search keywords shows you what people search for directly on your site. It shows the top 100 search queries, from any of the following search methods:
The Search Block (which you can add almost anywhere)
A built-in search in your template’s header (the icon you can show in your primary or secondary navigation area)
Your Search page (which will always be: www.exampledomain.com/search)
RSS subscribers shows you the current count of how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed.
Don’t know what an RSS feed is? Squarespace’s definition is: “Short for Really Simple Syndication. A way of allowing visitors to receive your blog posts in their browser or RSS feed readers as soon as they're published. Blog Pages in Squarespace automatically include RSS feeds.”
For podcasters, you’ll be interested to know that “Traffic from Apple Podcasts is included as traffic to your podcast’s RSS feed. Note that this doesn’t measure your podcast subscribers - it’s only a measure of traffic.” (copied from this Squarespace Support page)
That’s all I’ll say on the topic for now, but if you’d like to dive in EVEN further, make sure you check out these pages in Squarespace’s Support:
Using Google Analytics with Squarespace (👈🏻Also shows you how to link it up with your site!)
Hiding your analytics activity from Squarespace (privacy issues)
Analytics panels (has its own section-by-section breakdown for each area of the analytics page)
Want to connect analytics to Wordpress or Shopify? Try this post instead.
Want to learn more about connecting Google Analytics
There’s a whole lesson in my FREE mini-course devoted to connecting free but powerful tools to your website to help you monitor its growth & progress after launching, along with basic tips on:
Lesson 1 - brand strategy
Lesson 2 - website strategy
Lesson 3 - content strategy
Lesson 4 - launch tips
Lesson 5 - monitoring & analyzing ⭐️
Lesson 6 - marketing tips
More details at the link below! 👇🏻
