Have you ever thought about building a website? How about starting your own eCommerce store, running your own blog, or maybe even creating your own online portfolio? If so, Squarespace may be the perfect tool for you! Once you get your website up and running you're going to want to get us a tool that will help keep track of the traffic flowing to and from your website. Google Analytics is a great fit for this thanks to its free, user-friendly design. But how do we get these two programs to work together, and what kind of things can you accomplish with their union? Not to worry, in this blog, we will walk you through the basics of Squarespace and show you how you can use Google Analytics to improve your site even further!
Squarespace is an online website builder that uses a simple and easy drag-and-drop system for constructing layouts. The websites created using Squarespace are free to create and view for the creator, however, if you want to publish your website publicly, you’ll need to pay for the associated fees, like the domain fee.
Squarespace is focused on being user-friendly and easy to understand. It comes with plenty of webpage templates. These templates can be altered and edited simply by clicking on them in the editor and pressing the edit button. This allows people with little to no design or programming skills to create websites that look appealing.
Google Analytics 4 can do wonders for your website. Image courtesy of Blog.Google.
When using Google Analytics with other webpage creators, or with websites created from scratch, you’ll need to add a special line of code provided by the Google Analytics software. This code needs to be added to every page you wish for Google Analytics to function on and it can get really tedious adding a single line of code one page at a time, especially if your website has a lot of pages or if you add new pages to the website on a regular basis.
Squarespace can allow you to avoid this hassle thanks to its built-in integration with Google Analytics. Squarespace offers integration with both Google Analytics 4 and Google Universal Analytics. According to Google’s support site-- Universal Analytics will stop processing information on July 1, 2023, because of this we will be focusing on Google Analytics 4 since it is the most up-to-date version of the software and is the one that will continue to receive support.
In order to get started using these two programs together, you’ll need to create an account with Google Analytics. After that, you need to sign into your Squarespace account and go to the webpage viewer/editor. Now you need to find the Google Analytics integration button and follow the prompts provided.
Being able to analyze the data associated with your web pages is essential to creating a successful website. Image courtesy of Searchenginejournal.
Google Analytics is a software that collects, analyzes, and displays the following data from anonymous users that visit your website--
Before you start using Google Analytics for your website you’re going to want to hide your account activity from the program. This will stop Google Analytics from registering your visits to the web pages with the data it collects. In order to do this, you’ll need to create an IP filter in Google Analytics and add your IP address to that filter. Support.Google.Com goes over the process step by step.
Google Analytics is often used alongside Squarespace to provide the website creator with data related to eCommerce stores. Location data can be any of the following-- city, state, country, or region. This data can be used to better understand what part of the world you ship products to the most. This can allow you to better organize how you deliver your products to your customers. For example, if your largest customer base is in China, you may want to negotiate deals with a shipping company that exclusively deals with shipping to China. Adding this company as a shipping option can improve the speed by which your customers receive their products. This process may not be worth it for countries you don’t sell much of your product to.
You can also use gender and age data to improve your business by knowing which gender and age group are purchasing your products the most. This information can help you better market your product to that gender or age group. Which will increase sales even further. You can also use this information to see which gender or age group you’re struggling to reach and work on marketing strategies that will get that demographic’s attention.
Finally, Google Analytics can provide valuable information related to how users are interacting with your site directly. Such as what pages on your site have the most entrance and exit activity. Here is an article that goes into more detail about entrances and exits in Google Analytics. The eCommerce data Google Analytics provides relates to things like the number of products sold, the number of individuals that make it to the order confirmation page, purchase totals, order ID numbers, and more.
Keep a close eye on those sales analytics! Image courtesy of Ubalt.
Google Analytics and Squarespace make for an excellent combination. Those familiar with Squarespace may be aware of the fact that Squarespace does have its own built-in analytics program as well. However, this built-in program only offers basic analytic information, it’s nowhere near as detailed as Google Analytics. Not to mention the fact that Google Analytics is open source, so if there are elements you don’t like about Google Analytics or features that you want to improve, you can change them or look online for someone who has already made the changes you’re looking for. If you only want basic analytic data about your site then feel free to use the built-in analytics program. When you’re ready to take your business to the next level, consider using Google Analytics alongside Squarespace.
