How Web Designers Use Squarespace Analytics
When you build a website for a client, you’re accountable for how it performs. That responsibility doesn’t end at handoff.
Squarespace analytics is the built-in reporting dashboard that tracks visitor behavior, traffic sources, and page performance for every Squarespace website. Understanding how to interpret that data is what backs up your design decisions and gives you something concrete to bring to every client conversation.
Select a section to begin.
What is Squarespace analytics?
Squarespace analytics is a native analytics solution that gives Squarespace website owners a deeper understanding of their site visitors. It provides an overall view of site traffic, as well as granular data on site engagement and conversion. Both key performance indicators (KPIs) are valuable, but pay close attention to metrics that reflect the site’s goals.
What metrics does Squarespace analytics offer?
Squarespace analytics tracks a wide range of data. The following metrics are most useful for evaluating a client’s site performance and informing your design decisions.
The Traffic panel:
Visits: The number of times people have visited a site. A visit represents a single browsing session.
Unique visitors: An estimate of the total number of actual visitors who’ve landed on a site. Some unique visitors may browse a site multiple times, so this metric can help measure audience engagement.
Pageviews: The number of actual page requests a site received. This is distinct from unique visitors, as it highlights content resonance and visitor interest.
The Engagement panel:
Site content: A summary of the most-read pages on a site, along with their bounce and engagement rates.
Form & button conversions: A measure of how often visitors click tracked buttons or submit forms, showing how effectively individual calls-to-action perform.
The Sales panel:
Revenue: The total amount of all orders and donations. This does not include taxes, shipping, and payment processor fees.
Units sold: The total number of products sold.
Conversion rate: The percentage of visits that result in at least one completed purchase.
Average order value (AOV): The average amount buyers spend on a site per order.
Revenue per visit (RPV): The average revenue generated per visit, including those resulting in no purchase.
The Purchase funnel:
Visit: The total number of browsing sessions on a site in the selected time period.
Viewed product: The number of visits where the visitor viewed at least one product on your site.
Added to cart or Started checkout: The number of visits where the visitor added at least one item to their cart.
Purchased: The number of visits that resulted in a completed purchase.
Additional metrics worth tracking:
Abandoned cart: A report showing checkout recovery rates and where in the checkout process visitors drop off.
Average time on page: The average amount of time visitors spend on a particular page on a website.
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a site and leave after viewing only one page.
Exit rate: The percentage of views to a page that didn’t result in additional pageviews.
Geography: An interactive map showing site visits by country, region, or city.
Search keywords: The search terms driving site traffic from search engines like Google. Accessing this data requires verifying your site with Google Search Console.
Traffic sources: The channels site visitors arrive from, including direct, organic, referral, social, and email.
For more metrics and other common terms, visit the Help Center.
Deep dive: How to interpret conversion rate data
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visits that result in at least one completed purchase. The metric answers a direct question: Are visitors taking the action that gets me closer to my site’s goal?
Analyzing conversion rates can help you make better business decisions in the following areas:
Sales
Conversion rates can help you determine where along the sales funnel visitors drop off and why. If one offering isn’t converting as well as another, review the relevant images, description, price, and internal links to that offering. Compare these to how similar, top-performing offerings from competitors are positioned on their sites and revise accordingly.
Visitor experience
By analyzing conversion rate, you can identify site design attributes that cause unintended visitor behaviors due to friction or frustration. For example, if visitors spend time on a page without taking your desired action for that page, you may need to revise the page’s content to be clearer and make the CTA more prominent.
Engagement
Conversion rate can help you determine which pages do and don’t engage visitors. By understanding the site content that performs best, you can link to that content on more pages and create related content. Conversely, low-performing content may need revisions or to be removed to maintain the client’s subject-matter authority in traditional and AI search.
Deep dive: How to read traffic sources
Analyzing traffic sources tells you where visitors come from, how they found your client’s site, and how they interact with it. Understanding what each source signals, and what action to take, is where this panel becomes useful for client conversations.
Direct: Visitors who typed the URL directly or arrived from an untracked source. High direct traffic points to strong brand awareness or an active email list. If it’s unexpectedly high, some referral traffic may be misattributed.
Organic: Visitors from unpaid search results. Low organic traffic signals keyword gaps, thin content, or indexing issues. Cross-reference with the search keywords and Google Search Console to pinpoint what’s underperforming.
Referral: Visitors from external sites or LLMs that link to your client’s site. Identify which sites send the most traffic and why. High-performing referral sources are strong candidates for an ongoing backlink strategy.
Social: Visitors from social platforms. This tells you whether a client’s social activity actually drives site traffic, not just on-platform engagement metrics.
Email: Visitors from email campaigns. Low email traffic on a send date is a clear diagnostic signal. Investigate subject lines, list health, or deliverability before assuming the content is the problem.
Use this information to:
Learn how marketing channels affect site traffic
Traffic sources are useful for refining a marketing strategy and allocating resources to the most effective channels. For example, if you find your paid search campaigns drive the most traffic to your site, you can allocate more budget to paid search to maximize ROI.
Identify trends and patterns in visitor behavior
Use traffic source data to make more informed decisions about optimizing your site’s visitor experience, conversion rates, and engagement.
Improve SEO and AEO strategies
SEO and AEO directly affect conversions. Use traffic source data to understand how your pages and content perform in search. Then, restructure underperforming content around high-performing content to improve engagement and conversions.
Use location-based marketing
Geography data tells you whether a client’s site is reaching the right people in the right places. If a local business draws most of its traffic from outside the area, that’s a signal to prioritize local marketing channels like city-specific social content or geo-targeted ads. If traffic from a particular region is stronger than expected, flag it to the client as a potential growth area.
Deep dive: How to use site content analytics
Knowing which site content (e.g., blog posts, images, videos, and graphics) resonates most with visitors can give you insight into what content your client should focus on. Evaluate site content analytics to:
Prioritize redesign work
High-traffic pages need to perform the hardest. If a popular page has a high bounce rate or low time on page, that’s a design problem worth flagging. Bring your client the data, a hypothesis about why it’s underperforming, and a proposed fix.
Guide content strategy
Clients may ask what they should add to their site or write about next. Site content analytics answer that with evidence. Pages with strong engagement show which topics and formats land. Pages with high traffic but low conversion show where a CTA is missing or where the content is attracting the wrong audience.
Surface the case for a content audit
If a significant portion of a site’s pages get minimal traffic, the site has likely grown in ways that no longer serve its goals. A content audit, which involves consolidating, redirecting, or removing underperforming pages, improves both SEO and the overall site experience. Site content analytics make that conversation much easier to initiate.
Deep dive: How to diagnose ecommerce analytics
For clients running online stores, the analytics ecommerce panels give you a level of insight that goes beyond basic traffic data. These metrics tell a specific story: how many visitors become customers, where they drop off, and how much revenue each visit generates on average.
Start with the purchase funnel
The funnel tracks every stage from visit to purchase. A high product view count with low add-to-cart numbers points to a product page problem: pricing, imagery, or the product description. A strong add-to-cart rate with low purchase completion points to a checkout issue. The data turns observations into concrete recommendations.
Use abandoned cart data to identify checkout friction
The abandoned cart panel shows recovery rates and where checkout breaks down. Use it to make specific recommendations: a missing payment method, a confusing checkout flow, or the absence of a guest checkout option. If your client uses Email Campaigns, this data also supports an abandoned cart email sequence, which is a reliable win for ecommerce sites.
Distinguish revenue per visit from conversion rate
Conversion rate tells you how often visitors buy. Revenue per visit (RPV) tells you how much each visit is worth on average, including visits that don't convert. For clients running paid advertising, RPV is the more useful benchmark: it tells them the maximum they can spend per visit and still turn a profit. When both metrics are low, the problem is likely traffic quality or acquisition. When conversion rate is low but RPV is reasonable, the issue is somewhere in the purchase experience.
Squarespace analytics vs. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another website analytics tool that complements native site data. The two tools can run in parallel, and for most client sites, they should.
Before getting into the specifics, four differences are worth flagging for your client conversations: pricing, internal traffic handling, data sampling, and commerce tracking.
| Squarespace Analytics | Google Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Included with every site plan; advanced panels require a Core plan or higher | Free; Google Analytics 360 available for enterprise at additional cost |
| Location accessed | From the Analytics panel in the editor for any site attached to your Squarespace account | Accessed via a separate platform (analytics.google.com) using your Google account |
| Counting internal traffic when logged in | Doesn't count internal traffic when logged in | Counts internal traffic by default; you can exclude specific IP addresses via a filter |
| How cookies affect site visitor count | If visitors decline analytics cookies, visitor counts may be slightly overstated | Models untracked visitor behavior using data from tracked visitors |
| Rounding numbers based on sample data | Calculates from full visitor activity, regardless of audience size | Some numbers may be estimates based on a sample of visitors |
| Tracking commerce conversion | Logs all orders sold through the site | Occasionally misses orders made through the Squarespace site |
| Attributing traffic to a source | Identifies referrers based on a visitor's last click | Uses a similar last-click model, though attribution differences can cause direct traffic to appear higher in Squarespace than in GA4 |
| Recording location data | Identifies visitor location by country, region, or city | Uses a similar IP-based method; differences in how IP addresses are recorded can create discrepancies between the two tools |
To get the most comprehensive understanding of site performance, use both Squarespace analytics and Google Analytics. Learn more about using Google Analytics with Squarespace.
How to present Squarespace analytics to clients
Presenting analytics well is one of the most underrated things you can do for a client relationship. When you help clients understand how their site is performing, you position yourself as a strategic partner: someone who's accountable for results, not just delivery.
Here’s how to guide those conversations:
Step 1: Outline the most important metrics first
Traffic sources, visits, unique visitors, pageviews, conversion rate, bounce rate, and exit rate are key metrics for clients to understand, as these together tell a holistic site performance story. With them, your client will know where visitors come from and how many land on their site, as well as how many purchase their offerings versus how many leave without converting.
Step 2: Walk through the Analytics panel
Walk your client through where to find their analytics and how to read what's in front of them. The goal is client independence. They should be able to check in on their site without needing to come back to you for every question.
Keep the walkthrough focused on the metrics from Step 1, and leave the deeper panels for when they’re ready. If you’ve already handed off the site, a screen recording works just as well as a live session.
Step 3: Explain more detailed metrics as needed
As your client gets more comfortable with Squarespace analytics, they may want more in-depth site performance data. Metrics including site content, activity log, form and button conversions, average order value, revenue per visit, average time on page, and geography can be useful to your client depending on their needs and goals.
Be careful not to overload clients with information. For example, if your client sells access to fitness videos or recipes to customers around the world, it might not be necessary for them to spend time learning about the Geography panel. Focus your efforts on the metrics most relevant to the client and their business.
Consider scheduling a brief analytics review at 30, 60, and 90 days after launch. This gives you a natural cadence to show the site's performance, surface any issues early, and make a case for ongoing work. When numbers trend in the wrong direction, lead with context: seasonality, a recent algorithm update, or an under-resourced marketing channel are usually more accurate explanations than a site problem. Come with a plan, not just a diagnosis.
Build stronger sites with Squarespace analytics
Squarespace analytics gives you a clear picture of how a site is performing. Track what matters for each client and walk them through what you find. The designers who do that consistently build relationships that last well beyond the initial project.
Related resources:
This article was originally published on May 18, 2023. It has since been updated.
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