Comparing Google & Squarespace Analytics

If you feel overwhelmed by website analytics, you’re not alone. We regularly receive questions from our clients about the differences in the various analytics platforms. This article compares Google Analytics, as the largest analytics platform, to Squarespace Analytics, a popular website builder (and one upon which we’ve focused). We recommend that you use both platforms to derive actionable insights from website traffic.

Google Analytics Properties

Google is phasing out the Universal Analytics (UA) property in 2023, so we recommend connecting your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property to your website hosting platform. According to Google, GA4 is a new kind of property with distinct advantages over UA properties:

• “Privacy-focused and durable for the future;

• Intelligent, using machine learning to unearth insights about the customer journey across platforms and devices; and

• Enhanced, seamless integrations with Google's advertising platforms to optimize campaign performance and drive greater marketing ROI [Return on Investment].”

Different Calculation Methods

The data appearing appearing in both Squarespace and Google Analytics should be similar, at least in trending patterns, but Squarespace and Google calculate traffic results differently. Note that Google Analytics data will lag that of your website host - in this case, Squarespace Analytics - until you set-up the connection between your website host and your established Google Analytics property.

1. Traffic Referrals: Squarespace defines a site referral as a visitor’s last click. According to Squarespace, Google “has a similar tracking method with some exceptions. As a result of these differences, direct traffic numbers in Squarespace Analytics might be greater than what you’ll see in Google Analytics.”

2. Internal Traffic: Squarespace also excludes your site visits while you're logged into your account. Google will show you real-time visits to your website, but you can set-up a filter to exclude your IP address to avoid counting your visits. (Visit Google’s documentation to learn how to filter out certain IP addresses in GA4 properties.)

3. Non-Human Traffic: According to Squarespace, the company and Google have “different measures for filtering non-human traffic like crawlers and bots.”

4. Visitor Activity: Squarespace analytics report full site visitor activity, whereas Google Analytics may estimate numbers based on a sampling of visitors. (You can learn more about Google’s rounding numbers based on sample data in their documentation.)

5. E-commerce: According to Squarespace, some users have reported that Google Analytics occasionally misses ecommerce orders.

6. Location: Google and Squarespace have similar, but different, methods for tracking I.P. addresses used for location. As a result, you’ll notice differences in the reporting of geographic locations when you compare both platform reports over the same time period.

Although Google Analytics is more complex and offers more measurements, Squarespace Analytics tracks two data points that Google does not:

1. Number of RSS subscribers to a blog on your site; and

2. Specific I.P. addresses of visitors to your site. (Google has decided that it will not track this information.)

Summary

I absolutely recommend using both platforms, Google Analytics and Squarespace, as two points of comparison on website traffic trends, etc. The Squarespace mobile application is also very user friendly and allows you to set-up timely traffic alerts and view statistics while on the go.

In addition to Google Analytics, I also use Google Search Console, which should be linked to the GA4 property. This is particularly useful for actionable alerts of an error on a page. It also provides additional details of search terms driving traffic to your site, pages visited, etc.

Because calculation methods that produce the same types of analytics data vary by platform, there is no one “true” answer. The more insights (and dimensions measured) you have, the better your insights - and the more actionable they become.

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ELEVATE NEXT is a digital marketing and business management consulting company that develops a customized SEO strategy and implements analytics tracking for its clients. Subscribe to ELEVATED NEWS to stay up-to-date on the latest website design and optimization articles or contact us with your thoughts and comments. We would love to hear them!

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