Purchase funnel analytics

Review data on the how often your customers visit your site, view products, add products to carts, and make purchases.

Last updated January 17, 2025

The Purchase funnel panel in Squarespace analytics is a report on your store’s sales funnel and how each stage of the funnel converts. With this data, you have insight into:

  • How many visits convert into purchases
  • Where customers are dropping off
  • How changes you make to your store affect conversion over time

Accessing this feature

The Purchase funnel panel is available in the Core, Plus, Advanced, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced plans. It's also available on sites that sell Digital Products. To learn more, visit Choosing the right Squarespace plan.

To filter results by product or member site, you must have both reporting and store manager permissions.

Review the Purchase funnel panel

  1. Open the Analytics panel, click Sales, then click Purchase funnel.
  2. Click the date range drop-down menu at the top of the panel to filter results by time frame. Data is available starting from August 2016.
  3. Search by product or member site to see how well it's selling or if a recent change affected conversion for the product or member site. As a best practice, keep track of when you make changes to see how your data responds.

The four stages in the purchase funnel

The funnel shows these four stages in a customer’s shopping experience, represented by four columns:

Visits > Viewed product > Added to cart or Started checkout > Purchased

Note

The purchase funnel doesn't include test orders or the recurring revenue from subscription product or member site renewals.

1. Visit

Visits represents the total number of visits in the selected time. A visit is one browsing session on your site, which could potentially include multiple pageviews.

2. Viewed product

Viewed product represents the number of visits in which a visitor viewed at least one product. These areas count toward Viewed product:

  • Product details pages
  • Quick view

Views of product blocks and member sign up blocks don't count toward this metric. If you only sell member sites (and not products), this column won’t contain data.

Note

Purchase funnel tracks quick views that occurred starting on April 6, 2016.

3. Added to cart or Started checkout

Added to cart represents the number of visits where a customer added at least one item to their carts. Each visitor’s cart counts once, no matter how many items they added.

If express checkout is enabled, this column will be Started checkout instead, representing the number of times customers clicked the Buy now button to start the purchase. This happens because express checkout disables the shopping cart and instead takes visitors directly to a checkout page.

Member sites

If you have a Member Site, the column you see in step three of the purchase funnel depends on whether you have express checkout enabled:

  • If you have express checkout enabled, this column will be Started checkout, and includes data for all customers who click the join button in a member sign up block on your site.
  • If you don’t have express checkout enabled, this column will be Added to cart and won’t include data for member site interactions. If you only sell member sites (and not products), this column won’t contain data.

Tip

If you only sell member site memberships and not products, enabling express checkout for your site won’t impact the checkout experience for your site visitors. To learn more about Digital product analytics, visit Digital product and pricing plan analytics.

4. Purchased

The Purchased column represents the final step in the funnel: how many visits resulted in a purchase in that same visit.

Percentages between stages

The percentages between columns are the rates of customers who moved to the next step.

For example, if you see "60%" between the first and second columns, then 60% of your site visitors in the selected time frame viewed a product or member site.

Line graph

Accessing this feature

The line graph doesn't appear in the Squarespace app.

The line graph at the bottom of the panel tracks changes to your purchase funnel over time. The four colors in the graph represent the different steps in the funnel from top (Visited) to bottom (Purchased).

Hover anywhere over the graph to see data for that specific day or time. Click the Daily drop-down menu to change the time scale. Time scale options depend on the number of available data points.

The percentages in the line graph represent the percentage of total events triggered by a single step in the purchase funnel. For example, if a point on the Viewed Product line is around the 40% mark, then the Viewed Product events triggered at that moment in time make up 40% of the total events triggered (visits, views, adds to cart, and purchases).

This graph is useful for seeing if a change in your store affected how often visits convert to purchases. For example, these changes could have an impact:

Potential discrepancies

Late-night browsing sessions

The purchase funnel is a very close estimate, but it may not be 100% precise. You may have purchases without earlier events in the funnel, depending on the time of day a visitor was shopping.

For example, if a visitor had a late-night shopping session that technically spanned multiple days because it straddled the midnight boundary, certain events will count toward different days.

For example, if a late-night browsing session went like this:

  • A visit started at 11:58pm.
  • They added Product A to their cart at 11:59pm.
  • They viewed Product B at 12:05am.
  • They purchased Product A at 12:10am.

We’ll count this purchase in the purchase funnel like this:

  • We’ll count 1 visit, 1 product view (Product A), and 1 add to cart on the first day.
  • We’ll count 1 visit, 1 product view (Product B), and 1 purchase for the following day.

Product views

Views of details pages and quick view count toward Viewed product. However, views of the product in other areas don’t count:

  • Main store page
  • Product block
  • Summary block

Carts in Purchase funnel vs. Added to cart in Abandoned cart

Usually, Added to Cart in Purchase funnel and Carts in Abandoned cart should be identical when you’re looking at the same date range. They both represent customers who added at least one product to their carts. However, there might be slight differences.

  • In Purchase funnel, Added to cart is based on the start of a visit where a customer added a product to a cart.
  • In Abandoned cart, Carts is based on the time when a customer added a product to their cart, regardless of when the visit started.

Depending on the date range you’re viewing, their cart could count in one panel and not the other. For example, a customer might have had a late-night shopping session, where they opened your site before midnight and added a product to their carts after midnight.

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