Unlock your website's potential using Squarespace analytics

Having a beautifully-designed website is great, but it is only one part of the digital success equation. If you want to make sure your website is really supporting your business goals, you need to understand how visitors interact with your site and use that knowledge to drive improvements and create consistently better user experiences than your competitors. Thankfully, Squarespace analytics is a tool that empowers you to monitor and analyse how visitors find and use your website and it can help you uncover valuable insights on how to enhance your website’s performance.

In this blog post, we'll delve into how you can use Squarespace analytics to make your website even more impactful.

Demystifying Squarespace analytics

Before we get into the specific ways Squarespace analytics can help you enhance your website’s performance, let me explain the scope of the tool and what information it provides. Squarespace analytics will show you how people find your website, what content they view after they land on your site and, if you’re an ecommerce site, what they are buying. There are three main reports:

The Traffic Report will show you the number of visitors your site has over a specified period of time (you can change this to report by week, month etc.). You can see how the number is increasing or decreasing over time. You can see where the traffic is coming from - Direct (people that type your URL into their browser), Search (people that find your site via Google and other search engines), Social (links from your social media channels), Email (links from email marketing) or Referral (links from other websites to you). It will also show you what devices your website visitors are using so you can tell whether most people are viewing your site on desktop, mobile or tablet, as well as what browsers and operating systems they are on. For your Search traffic - as long as you’ve connected your Squarespace site to Google Search Console - you’ll be able to see exactly which search terms visitors are using to find you (there can be surprises in there!). And lastly, it will show you where your site visitors are from down to country and city level.
The Engagement Report is where you can learn how users are interacting with your site’s content. It shows you what the most popular pages on your site are, how many times each page has been viewed for the selected time period, how long on average people spend on the page, and the bounce rate of each page (explained below). You can also see the number of times people have filled out forms on your website (such as your contact form, or an email capture form if you have one)
The Sales Report is only for sites with ecommerce functionality. It will show you how much you’ve sold, number of units and total sales revenue, your conversion rate, average order value and much more.

Hopefully you’re starting to see that Squarespace analytics is a very rich source of data - it can give you invaluable insights into how users find and interact with your site that will ultimately empower you to optimise your website's performance and maximise it's effectiveness.

Using insights to improve your site’s content and design

To fine tune your website, you’ll want to regularly monitor some of the essential metrics from the reports described above to make sure they are aligned with and meeting your overarching goals and objectives. I suggest looking at your analytics at least monthly, but ideally every week. Some of the specific things you should track and measure include

Use the traffic report to see what devices and browsers your visitors are using. If the majority of your site visitors are coming from desktop using the Chrome browser - you’ll want to make sure the design and user experience for Chrome on desktop is top notch. Generally - I recommend making sure the experience is optimised for any device/browser combo that is used by more than 5% of your visitors.
Also in traffic - use the traffic sources report to determine how well your marketing efforts are working. You can see which channels are helping you grow traffic over time and which channels you should maybe put more effort into. For example, if you’re see that traffic from search is growing - why not double down on that channel - create more content, publish more blogs, do your link-building etc - to maximise your traffic potential from search.
In the site content report - check which pages are getting the most pageviews. This tells you which pages on your site are most useful to your visitors. If some of those pages are not linked from your homepage or main navigation - you might want to a link to them in a more prominent place for example. You’ll also want to make sure to keep an eye on bounce rate (bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page). Bounce rate variation from one page to the next can indicate which content people find more (or less!) useful. Sometimes a high bounce rate is ok - for example for a store, their opening hours page could have a very high bounce rate and that would be fine - people found what they were looking for, and ‘bounced off’ - hopefully to go to the store. Not an issue. If however your main services page has a high bounce rate - you should examine the page and try to figure out how to improve it…
Which brings me to my next and final recommendation - walk your store! In retail, the first thing a good store manager does each morning is stroll around the store to make sure everything is in its place and looking good. As a website owner, you should do the same. Go through the site - trying to see it through the eyes of a customer - and see what you can spot that might be unclear, unhelpful or unnecessary. Always strive to improve the experience and make it quicker and easier for your site visitors to do what they came to do!

Hopefully, you’re starting to see much more clearly, how data from Squarespace analytics can help you make informed choices to enhance your website’s content and design. By refining your website based on data driven insights, you can keep it relevant, engaging and effective in meeting your business goals.

Establishing objectives and tracking progress

A final piece of advise - alongside monitoring metrics, it's crucial to set goals for your website and monitor progress towards achieving them. Whether you aim to boost traffic, increase conversions, or enhance user engagement - Squarespace analytics offers data for evaluating progress and adjusting strategies as needed. Define SMART goals like a 20% rise in search traffic, or a 10% decrease in bounce rate leveraging Squarespace analytics to monitor performance over time.

Conclusion - maximising the potential of your website

In today’s competitive world, it’s no longer enough to ‘set and forget’ your website. Optimising your website’s performance with Squarespace analytics can help unlock huge potential. By keeping an eye on your metrics, you can glean insights to enhance your content and design, keep tabs on your progress, and consistently enhance the performance of your website to make sure it’s meeting your business goals.

If you would like any help with your Squarespace analytics - do reach out for a chat!