Understanding your site's traffic patterns

Helpful tips for understanding who's visiting your site and how they're engaging with your content.

Last updated October 13, 2023

Analytics can help you understand who's visiting your site, where they came from, and how they engage with your content.

This guide offers tips for viewing site traffic depending on your goals. For a list of all analytics panels and their availability by plan, visit Understanding your Squarespace analytics panels.

Get started

If you're new to analytics, here are some good starting points:

Analyze visitor behavior

Use these tools to see how visitors interact with your site:

  • Site content shows the pages visitors view most frequently, how much time they spend engaging with your content, and at what rate they exit or bounce from your site.
  • Form & button conversions shows how many people see and click your buttons and forms.
  • Site search keywords lists what people are looking for in your site's internal search.

If you're curious about where your visitors come from:

  • Geography shows where they access the web.
  • Traffic sources shows if they arrived on your site from search, emails, social media, and more. If they came from Google search, Search keywords shows the keywords they used.

Tip

Your site content and traffic sources can help you decide which content to gate in a member site.

Track sales

If you have an online store, these analytics panels will give you insight into sales, revenue, and conversion:

  • Sales gives an overview of how much you've sold and earned.
  • Abandoned cart gives insight into how often customers add items to carts without purchasing, and tracks the success of abandoned checkout recovery emails.
  • Purchase funnel shows a visual report on your store’s sales funnel and conversion rate.
  • Sales by product shows how each item you sell is performing.
  • Traffic sources shows how much revenue each channel drives to your business.

Subscription sales data

The sale of a subscription product involves two types of purchases: the initial purchase of the subscription, and the subscription renewal every billing period. Where your subscription analytics data appears depends on the type of purchase:

  • Initial purchase: Sales data appears in each of the analytics panels listed above except for the Abandoned cart panel.
  • Subscription renewals: Sales data appears in Sales analytics as revenue attributed to the direct source. Renewal sales are filtered out of the Purchase funnel, Abandoned cart, and Traffic sources panels.

See how your blog or podcast is performing

If you're a blogger or podcaster, RSS subscribers estimates the number of people who subscribe to your RSS feed.

Why am I not seeing the traffic I expect?

Analytics is a useful tool for tracking how your site is performing, but it's always to some extent an estimate. For example, if several people in the same office read a blog post, all using same IP address, they may display as one unique visitor. Also, data in analytics can take up to three hours to update, so very recent activity won't always appear instantly.

To get the most out of analytics, check it frequently. Pay attention to long-term trends and unexpected spikes or dips in traffic.

To increase site traffic over time:

Google Analytics vs. Squarespace analytics

You can use our built-in integration to connect your site with Google analytics, Google's web analytics service. We also have a Search keywords panel that shows which search keywords visitors use to find your site.

Some of what you see in Google Analytics will be different than what you see in Squarespace analytics, since our two platforms are built differently. To learn more, visit our list of differences between Google Analytics and Squarespace analytics.

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Understanding your site's traffic patterns