How to Use Squarespace Analytics to Improve Your Website (With Examples)
Website analytics can feel confusing, but it doesn’t have to be.
As a Squarespace user, you can dip your toes into the world of data with Squarespace Analytics. As a built-in reporting tool, Squarespace Analytics captures several key website stats such as unique visitors, pageviews, conversion, all in the simplified, user-friendly style of Squarespace.
With just a few steps, you can begin understanding your website performance and finding new opportunities, even if you don’t have any experience with data analysis (or being a total math-phobic, like me ^^).
Let’s put our analytical hat on and dive in!
Table of Contents
Get Started With Squarespace Analytics
Tip 1: Check your site health with Website Traffic
Tip 2: Evaluate each page with Site Content
Tip 3: Use Traffic Sources to make smart marketing decisions
Tip 4: See where you’re showing up on Google with Search Keywords
Tip 5: Review Search Keywords for opportunities
Tip 6: (for selling online): Use Purchase Funnel to improve the conversion rate
Get Started With Squarespace Analytics
Squarespace Analytics is a built-in tool for all Squarespace users. Depending on your pricing tier, you’ll get access to different levels of features:
Personal plan: access to traffic, geography, search keywords, and content-related analytics
Business plan: similar to personal plan, plus getting form & button conversions and some sales-related analytics
Commerce plan: access to all analytics features
Once you’re signed in to Squarespace, you can locate the Analytics features from the main menu. The Squarespace Analytics interfaces compose of 4 main components:
Navigational menu with different data categories
Date range selector which allows you to view data at different periods
Snapshot metrics which show the average numbers
Data graphs which show the data trends
Each data point by itself is not very meaningful, but when putting them in comparison to each other, you will start getting interesting insights.
For example, the snapshot metrics of one period by itself are not very meaningful. But when you compare these numbers to the months before, or the averages of all months, or to the same period last year (taking into account the seasonality factor), you can start seeing whether your marketing effort in that month was effective.
While snapshot metrics give you data on a specific period, the data graphs can help you see the overall trends. When you set the date range to be in the last 6 or 12 months, the data graphs can tell you immediately whether your site is improving or stagnant.
In short, you want to look at data in comparison to each other.
Don’t worry about comparing your own metrics with the industry averages. While there are reported industry averages for metrics like conversion rates, they can look vastly different for your specific business situation. Your focus only needs to be on continuously improving your own metrics over time.
With that, let’s dive into the most important modules in Squarespace Analytics for all business types.
Tip 1: Check your site health with Website Traffic
The website traffic module tells you two important pieces of information: how many people are visiting your website, and how effective your website is at converting visitors into customers.
Squarespace Analytics gives you 4 metrics in this module:
Unique visitors are the number of people who visit your website, regardless of what interaction they have with your site. This number is based on the visitor’s browser cookie, so if a person goes to your site from a different browser or clears cookies, it will be counted as a new person.
Visits: A person may go to your website several times, and each time they do so it’s counted as one visit. All of this person’s activities on your website in the next 30 minutes are considered the same visit, even if they exit your site then reopen it. After 30 minutes, it’s considered a new visit. Because of this, the number of visits is always higher than the number of unique visitors.
Pageviews: While a person is visiting your site, they may view more than one page. Each page viewed is counted towards the pageviews metrics. Unless you have a one-page website or your website navigation is really bad, the number of pageviews is always higher than the visits.
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of people who view only one page then exit right away, which is usually an indicator of how well the website engages with audiences.
The only metric you should really focus on here is unique visitors. This is because:
The number of visits is driven by the number of unique visitors you have, so there’s no reason to consider them separately. If it’s important for your business to separate between new and returning visitors, there’s a much better/more accurate way to get that data (we’ll talk about that in the last section).
Pageviews are hard to interpret. A high number of pageviews can mean that people are engaged with your site, but it can be people clicking on unwanted pages due to confusing navigation.
Bounce rate is much more actionable when being evaluated for each page rather than the entire site. We’ll review bounce rates later in the Content analytics module.
There are so many ways to use the unique visitors metric to inform your website decisions. Here are two examples to get your creative juices rolling:
Is your site getting enough visitors to expect consistent sales? If your site has less than 500 visitors/month, think of how you can encourage more people from social media to your site or improve SEO.
Calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of leads/clients by the number of unique visitors. For example, if you get 2 customer inquiries every month from your website, and you have 700 unique visitors, your conversion rate is 2/700 = 0.28%. With this number as a benchmark, you can experiment reorganizing your homepage content, changing your headline, or swapping out some images and see whether it gives a better result.
Tip 2: Evaluate each page with Site Content
If you’re pumping out blog posts on a regular basis, you will love the Site Content module in Squarespace Analytics.
Site Content gives you several important information:
Views: This gives you the most popular pages on your website
Time on page: How long visitors spend on each page
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who view only one page then exit right away.
Exit rate: The percentage of visits that end on this page.
Overview of Site Content module
Except for the number of views, which the more the merrier, other metrics will depend on your intention for each page. For example, long time on page is a positive thing for blog posts, but in a payment page or contact form, it may indicate usability issues.
Another example is with bounce rate. It’s a bad sign to have a high bounce rate for your homepage, but for comprehensive blog posts optimized for SEO (like this post you’re reading), it’s very normal to have people come with a specific question then leave after their question is resolved.
In short, think of how you want people to interact with each content page, then see whether the data match or clash with your intention.
Here are some ideas of how you can utilize these insights:
Your popular content pages will carry the most impact on your website. So if you don’t have a lot of time, focus on improving these pages only.
If one of your popular pages has a low time on page and a high bounce rate, try to turn them into longer pages or provide links to a natural next step. You’ve already done the hard work to get people to these pages, make the most out of them.
If you have a blog post with high views but also a high bounce rate, think of how you can encourage people to continue browsing. For example, you can provide links to a related post or a lead magnet. If you already have a lead magnet banner but still getting a high bounce rate, maybe place it higher on the page or use a more engaging graphic. Below is an example to illustrate this point (also a casual plug for my newsletter list ^^)
Tip 3: Use Traffic Sources to make smart marketing decisions
The third module to look at in Squarespace Analytics is Traffic Sources. This tells you where your visitors are coming from - ie. how effective each of your marketing channels is in driving website traffic.
This module is pretty straightforward. You have 4 categories of traffic sources:
Search: Google, Bing, and other search engines
Direct: Visitors who come to your site by directly typing your URL into their browser. If you do in-person networking and hand out your business cards, you’ll see a high number here.
Social: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all social media channels
Referral: These are all websites that are neither search engines nor social networks
With this information, you can decide where to invest your marketing time and money. Promoting your business all the time on Facebook but it’s not getting you traffic? Spending your time somewhere else. Seeing most of your visitors coming from just one channel? Double down on it and increase your impact even more.
Tip 4: See where you’re showing up on Google with Search Keywords
If I can just take a minute to tell you a story, this search keywords module is actually why I’m writing this entire post.
A few weeks ago, I had an SEO project client who came to me after working with another SEO specialist. I showed her how to use Squarespace Analytics so that she can check SEO performance by herself. She was surprised at how simple it was and revealed she fired the last person just based on a gut feeling that it wasn’t getting results, but now she can see the data confirming her intuition.
This made me realize how important it is for business owners to be able to view and understand their website analytics. Whether you’re doing SEO by yourself or hiring someone else, the Search Keywords module is a simple but effective way to track your SEO efforts.
You’ll find a number of SEO metrics in the Search Keywords module:
Impressions: The number of users who saw your website on Google search results.
Clicks: The number of users who visit your website from a Google search result page.
Click rate: The likelihood of people clicking on your website when seeing it appear on Google search results.
Average position: Average position of your website in Google search results for your most-searched keywords. Since each search result page has 10 organic website links, if your average position is 32, that means your top SEO pages often appear on the second position on page 3.
Keyword table: The keywords your site is ranking for and the above metrics for each page.
The keyword table is the most useful place because you get to see how people are finding your website. Are you showing up for the right keywords? Are you showing up… at all? What kind of expectations do people have about your website based on where you’re showing up? All this information can help you think about improving your website.
A couple of other tips:
You need to connect Google Search Console with Squarespace before seeing the data
Your impressions should trend upwards over time if you’re regularly adding fresh content. But, if you’re just starting to do this, you may not see any difference in the first 2-3 months and that’s totally normal.
If any of the pages that are ranked on page #1 has a low click rate, consider tweaking your page title or meta description to get more visitors.
Tip 5: Review Search Keywords for opportunities
You’re not experiencing deja vu, the site search keywords module is different from the search keyword ;)
If you use a search bar or have a search page on your site, this analytics feature tells you what search terms your site visitors are looking for.
You can use site search keywords for:
Seeing what information people are expecting from your site
Seeing what webpages people are having trouble finding
If you have a lot of site search keywords, consider improving your site navigation to make it easier for visitors to find information.
For example, my SEO services page used to be ranked for “Squarespace SEO Expert”. After removing this page, I saw a couple of searches for “SEO expert” on my site. It wasn’t a significant number so I didn’t take any action, but if there was more, I may have to set up a page to let people know I no longer offer this service.
Tip 6: (for selling online): Use Purchase Funnel to improve the conversion rate
Last but not least, if you have an online shop with Squarespace, the Purchase Funnel will be your new favorite Squarespace feature.
The Purchase Funnel shows you how well each stage of your funnel converts. The four funnel stages here are:
Visits: any time a new or returning visitor goes to your website
Viewed product: number of visits in which a visitor viewed at least one product, whether they click on the quick view or go to a product details page
Started checkout: number of visits where the visitor added one or more items to their carts
Purchased: number of visits that complete a purchase
Here are suggestions for how you can use these stats:
If selling is the primary function of your site, the viewed product metric should be very close to visits. When this isn’t the case, review your traffic sources and search keywords to see whether you’re attracting the right type of audience. If the problem is not about traffic quality, think of how you can make your website design and product shots more inviting to explore.
If there’s a huge gap between started checkout and purchased, consider using Abandoned Cart Recovery or offer some time-limited incentives to get people to take action. Also, think of what might cause people to leave without buying (eg. high shipping costs, limited payment options, long form etc.)
Final point: Squarespace Analytics vs Google Analytics
Before we close this topic, you may wonder: Do I need Google Analytics if I already use Squarespace Analytics?
I’d recommend still setting up Google Analytics even if you won’t be using it right away.
Squarespace Analytics is a great starting point to begin understanding your site performance without a steep learning curve. But, if you want to optimize your site further, you will want to access more comprehensive statistics which can only be offered through specialized software like Google Analytics.
You’ll get more granular data like user flows, visitor demographics, and able to set up funnel tracking for different goals aside from selling products.
Setting up Google Analytics for Squarespace is fairly quick and simple. Since you can’t retrospectively gather data before you set up Google Analytics, it’s best to set it up right after launching your Squarespace site and let it sit and collect data. This post walks you through the process of connecting Google Analytics with Squarespace and filtering your own traffic to get an accurate view of your site performance.
Hope this post has been helpful to you! If you have questions or want more ideas on utilizing website analytics, leave a comment and let me know.
