Squarespace Analytics: Tracking and Analyzing Your Website's Performance
With websites playing such a crucial role in modern business models, it’s vital that you always have the best data to monitor site performance. When you have the right data, you can make more informed decisions about your business strategy. This can lead to more sustainable, predictable growth, and serve as a valuable method of risk identification and management.
When you have insights into your site performance, you can learn more about your target audience and how your website is living up to their expectations.
What’s more, a good understanding of Squarespace analytics will help you understand how to align your business operations and marketing strategies with your audience.
The first thing we’ll dive into is how to set up analytics on Squarespace. Then, we’ll start looking closely at the main metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll want to know as you track your website’s performance and visitors’ behavior.
How to Set Up Squarespace Analytics
To get started, log in to Squarespace. From the home page, click on “Analytics.” Then you can click on individual panels and view reports. The built-in reporting platform on Squarespace means you don’t have to worry about plug-ins, integrations, or learning any other type of software to understand how your site is performing.
Squarespace analytics offer both big-picture metrics and individual KPIs to help you understand specific page performance. When you’re A/B testing content, the duality of the analytics are immensely helpful.
If you run an ecommerce store on Squarespace, you’ll have access to additional metrics that measure factors like cart abandonment data and conversion rates.
Before you begin, make sure to enable JavaScript in your browser. You’ll also have to be a site owner or administrator to view Squarespace analytics. If you plan on having a third-party do this for you, then you’ll need to grant them access to your account and make them an admin.
Currently, Squarespace doesn’t report data exporting, so you’ll have to monitor everything on the platform. You can take screenshots if you want to share the data outside of Squarespace.
Metrics and KPIs on Squarespace are different depending on the type of site you run, your subscription, and whether or not your site is connected to a payment processor.
This page by Squarespace runs through all the different analytics available based on your billing plan.
Analytics are automatically enabled on Squarespace, so there’s nothing you have to do on your end to make sure your site’s metrics are tracked. The platform handles all the heavy-lifting, making it easy for you to pop over to the Analytics panel and review your Squarespace data.
Next, we’ll take a look at each individual panel, so you can get a better understanding of how Squarespace website analytics are baked into the platform.
Squarespace Analytics Panels
Once you click the “Analytics” panel, you’ll be able to filter reports by different categories. Keep in mind that some metrics are not available to users based on their billing plan.
We’re offering a broad overview of the most common KPIs you’ll find under each panel and how they can benefit your business.
Sales
The sales panel is for Squarespace business accounts that sell goods through the platform. It’s an ultra-convenient way for you to manage your business without having to rely on an external point-of-sale (POS) software.
There are six primary sales metrics you’ll be able to track as a business on Squarespace:
Revenue
Simple and essential, revenue tells you how much money your business generates after expenses are taken out. You need to know how much revenue you’re generating to stay sustainable and optimize your product or service offerings.
Units Sold
This handy metric tells you how many products you’ve sold in any given period. You can also track how many units of each product have been sold to determine what your best and worst sellers are.
Orders
With the orders metric, you can know how many orders have been placed and how many have been fulfilled by your business on Squarespace.
Conversion Rate
This metric is the most important one to track when it comes to business growth and marketing analytics. Conversion rates reveal how many website views became customers after landing on your site. You’ll want to track conversion by page, as well as originating source. How did someone find your business’s site, and what led them to become a customer?
Leveraging conversion rate data will be your strongest strategy when it comes to making your site even more successful. More conversions = more units sold, more orders places, and higher revenue.
AOV — Average Order Value
This figure tells you how much money the average customer spends at your business. It’s super helpful for financial forecasting and consumer research, as it gives you a better idea of what products people value the most and even what their budgets are.
The calculation for AOV is easy. You just divide your revenue in any given period by the number of orders in that same timeframe. You could do it yourself, but you don’t have to. Squarespace will update your AOV in real time.
RPV — Revenue Per Visitor
You know how much the average person spends at your business with AOV, but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could know how much money you make from each person that lands on your site? You can with ROV.
Revenue per visitor is a great metric for gauging the profitability of a website based on conversion rate and average order value. Ultimately, it provides you with a clearer perspective on how much money your company makes per person that comes to your site.
Low figures with high traffic indicate a need to revisit your page design, site navigation, or even your product pricing.
Graphs
Graphs make it easy to draw inferences from data quickly, and they’re imperative when you’re dealing with a large volume of information that you couldn’t easily sift through on your own.
There are two types of graphs for sorting your sales KPIs in Squarespace: line and bar. Line graphs are best for showing trends over time, while bar graphs do a good job comparing current figures.
For example, you might use a line graph to track your revenue and conversions over the last 30 days. A bar graph could be helpful measuring the units sold across a product line.
These visualizations will make it easier for you to both understand your sales data and apply it more effectively to your strategy. When you can clearly illustrate what’s going on with your business, you can make better decisions to nurture or sustain its growth.
Traffic Sources
There are a lot of great traffic analytics to help you understand your site performance better. Namely, these analytics reveal how many people visit your site and how they got there.
Traffic analytics on Squarespace include:
Visits — How many people visited your site.
Page views — How many times different pages were viewed.
Unique visitors — How many original visitors came to your site (excludes return viewers or customers)
Line graphs — This graph displays trends among site visitors over time.
Pie and bar charts — The pie chart reveals what percentage of web traffic comes from different sources, and the bar chart illustrates all traffic sources in a given time frame.
You can view traffic sources graphs for 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, a week, or 30 days. It’s a handy feature that allows you to better understand where your site’s main traffic sources are, so you can improve them and start bringing even more visitors to your site.
When it comes to SEO optimizations, traffic analytics are important as they help identify your top-performing pages and inbound links.
Geography
When you’re optimizing a business, it’s important to know where your sales come from. While brick-and-mortar stores drive 99% of their traffic from the surrounding community, ecommerce stores can attract people from all over the world.
The geography analytics on Squarespace can reveal where your visitors come from via a map or table. There’s also an unknown report that shows which percentage of your site traffic comes from an unidentifiable geographic region. This is a more common occurrence now that people have greater control over their privacy settings and use VPNs.
Search Keywords
Keywords help your site get found online, and the knowing ones people find to discover your business’s web page can make a huge difference in your overall marketing strategy. To help you optimize your site for search engines, Squarespace analytics feature an entire panel dedicated to search keywords.
To get started, you’ll need to verify your site with Google Search Console, or GCS. This is the platform that helps you manage your Squarespace site on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you want to get seen by the right people, you have to know what they’re looking for, then build a website crafted to fulfill their needs. That means keywords, primarily, followed by a user-friendly design and good technical support, like meta descriptions and alt tags.
To verify Squarespace with Google Search Console, make sure you remove any page-specific or site-wide passwords. Head over to the Analytics panel from your dashboard, then click the “Search Keywords” panel.
From here, click “Connect,” and log into the Google account you want connected to your site. Hit “Allow” after reviewing the required permissions you need to grant Google, and you’re good to go.
It will take 72 hours for your Google data to show up on Squarespace, so grab yourself a drink and take it easy.
Three days passed? Great! Now we can get into the search keyword analytics! There are a lot of KPIs you can view, like total clicks, average clickthrough rate, average position on Google SERPs for specific keywords (like “NYC wedding photographer” or “Hawaiian coffee”).
The domain keywords over time graph displays your domain keyword performance by day or week; the keywords table will reveal your display results for up to 200 keywords, including:
Total number of clicks
Clickthrough percentage
Impressions (Number of times your site is shown on SERPs)
Average position for each keyword on SERPs
For more in-depth rating details, click on “Pages” in the upper right-hand corner of the table to reveal how each page ranks by keyword.
Squarespace Engagement Analytics
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Now that we’ve looked at your site’s sales data and search engine ranking, let’s talk about how to track user behavior across your site. A great website will take people on a journey, and there will be well-positioned touch points along the way that encourage them to interact with, or engage, with your site.
Here’s a rundown of all the Squarespace engagement analytics that you can track:
Your Page Averages
Squarespace can tell you how much time people spend on your site’s pages on average, as well as the bounce rates and exit rates across your site. The bounce rate indicates how many users leave a web page after landing on it; the exit rate reveals what pages people navigated to before they left your site.
A high bounce rate on any given page means that people aren’t finding what they’re looking for in the content. Exit pages, however, track users’ journeys across your site and generally help you better understand your site’s navigation effectiveness.
Your goal is to have low bounce rates overall, and exit pages on desired locations, like checkout or a thank-you page after signing up for your newsletter.
Activity Log
The activity log is a searchable database that allows you to view a user’s activity on your site over the last week. Each user has their own activity log that contains their IP address, date and time of access, info about their browser and operating system, and their referrer.
You can use the activity log analytics to investigate any abnormal spikes in traffic or find out more about where individual users are coming from, either by their geographic location or referring URL.
Form & Button Conversions
Which forms and buttons work well on your site? Find out with these conversion analytics. You’ll be able to view a graph and table of form and button performance across your site, as well as historical data to see how user engagement has changed in the past.
If your form and button conversions are low, here are are a few ways you may be able to increase them:
Change their position on your website
Change the prompts (e.g., swapping “read now” to “learn more”)
Alter the color of buttons and see which one performs best
Create lead-in content for forms that don’t see a lot of engagement
Offer and promote an instant downloadable for joining your newsletter
Squarespace Commerce Analytics
Coming back around to where we started, we’ll now look at commerce analytics on Squarespace. These are slightly different from sales in that they focus more on your purchase funnel and abandoned cart behavior than actual inventory and revenue.
While sales analytics give you a closer look at business health, commerce analytics can reveal valuable information about your audience’s behavior.
Sales by Product Panel
You can view graphs, tables, and KPIs highlighting user behavior at various touchpoints. Squarespace analytics divide this engagement among two categories: the purchase funnel and abandoned cart.
The purchase funnel panel addresses actions visitors took at the four stages of the funnel — visit, viewed product, added to cart, checked out. It can be valuable for you to know which stage sees the highest exit rate in order to optimize your site.
If your abandoned cart rate is high, then you’ll want to address why people are ultimately choosing to leave without closing the sale. And if most people leave after reading a product description page, then you know where you need to focus your attention for improvements.
The abandoned cart panel focuses on carts that have been abandoned and are recoverable. Once you send a cart abandonment email, you’ll be able to see which users have been notified and how many carts were successfully recovered.
Where to Find Additional Squarespace Site Data
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Squarespace analytics are comprehensive, but there may be times that you want to home in on a particular type of marketing data. In that case, you can check out these four features for more insights:
Acuity Scheduling — This is an online scheduling tool that automates appointments and reminders for your business; it also sends out automated emails and texts to your audience, and has great payment processor integrations for added insights and smoother workflows.
Google Analytics — If you want even more details on your visitors and site’s ranking, check out Google Analytics for Squarespace. Google Analytics 4 just went live in June, so it’s the perfect time to start harnessing the power of the world’s number-one search engine for your marketing strategy.
Commerce Analytics — Commerce analytics are available for users that upgrade to a Commerce plan.
Email Campaigns — By creating and monitoring email campaigns, you can learn more about consumer behavior through KPIs like open rates.
Key Metrics to Track on Your Squarespace Site
We’ve covered a lot in this post, and you may be wondering which metrics are actually worth measuring on your site. That’s a great question, and the truth is that every site will have its own goals and corresponding KPIs to focus on.
That being said, there are some fundamental KPIs to monitor in Squarespace analytics:
Number of unique visitors: How many people came to your website in the last week? How about within the last month? Keep track of this figure to monitor consecutive performance.
Average time spent on page: Some pages do better than others, and you want to ensure that the pages optimized for conversion are all performing the best on your Squarespace site.
Traffic by source: You’ll want to know where your site gets the most referrals, as well as which channels are underperforming. If you notice you get a lot of great traffic from social media but email referrals are low, then you know where to start focusing your efforts more.
Conversion rate: This figure is vital because it makes the difference between getting a lot of visitors and ultimately making money on your site. A website’s conversion rate should be at least 2%, but 5% is ideal.
These examples highlight the versatility and depth of Squarespace analytics. With so many options to choose from, it’s easy for you to build custom marketing goals that you can track over the course of a week, month, or quarter.
In fact, it’s a good idea to establish objectives for every 30-days and every four months to ensure you have the full picture on your site performance.
Analyzing Squarespace Analytics Website Traffic Patterns
Once you know how to track metrics, it’s important to know how to actually review them effectively. When it comes to analyzing web traffic, make sure that you focus on identifying peak traffic periods and your most popular content.
Peak traffic periods reveal what time of day your site has the most traffic, and popular content should serve as inspiration for future posts. Looking at your popular content can also help you make more impactful site-wide improvements.
It’s also important to pay attention to your top referrers and traffic channels. Some businesses find that they thrive with email campaigns while others are getting the most traffic through social media platforms and Google.
Find what works best for your brand, and build from it. You can always try to make improvements on other channels, too, but for the sake of success, focus on growing the channels your audience already loves the most.
Understanding User Behavior on Your Squarespace Site
Do you hear the term “consumer research” and freeze up? Don’t worry, it’s not as daunting as it seems. In fact, with Squarespace analytics, it’s actually pretty easy. All you need to do is focus on identifying the most relevant behaviors for your audience, then turning those insights into actions that improve your site.
Be sure to take advantage of the conversion metrics and goal tracking feature built into the platform. This will ensure your marketing efforts are aligned with clear objectives. You should also be paying attention to KPIs like average time spent on page, exit rate, cart abandonment rate, and page depth.
Page depth is particularly interesting when analyzing user behavior because it reveals how many pages someone clicked through during a single session before leaving. Page depth can help you piece together the average customer’s journey, and you can even break down journeys by referrer for a more comprehensive idea of how your brand experiences may differ for various consumers.
Making Data-Driven Decisions for Your Squarespace Site
Learning how to interpret data is a skill, and the truth is that there is no copy-and-paste formula for doing it well. Every business owner needs to develop their own method for identifying target KPIs, tracking them on a schedule, and applying what they’ve learned to their marketing strategy.
If you are looking to become more informed about your audience, then use their behavior metrics as a starting point. Focus on your site’s strengths and weaknesses. Use your top-performing sites and content to improve your pages with the least engagement and highest bounce rates.
Data is powerful because it leverages your audience to make improvements. Rather than spending hours editing your site, hoping that this will lead to growth, you can use real consumer data to optimize your design, enhance product descriptions, and strengthen your marketing strategies.
Need More Help With Squarespace?
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