I have been creating websites and blogs using WordPress for the last few years. Since I recently was trying to make a switch to Square space and took a Square space trial.
Since with all first my websites first thing I do as soon as I design them is, to connect google analytics with them. Since I was new to square space, I was stuck with the question ‘How to add google analytics to Squarespace?’.
It took me some time to figure out things about integrating Google analytics, so I am writing this article as a mini guide to integrate Google Analytics with Square space website. So let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful web analytics applications available by Google, which gives you many insights about your website.
If you integrate it with your website. Google Analytics gives you so many helpful metrics and reports covering all aspects. It can monitor the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies, onsite content, user experience, behavioral search, and device functionality.main purpose is tracking data, storing it, and generating reports about your website.
With all this data made available by Google Analytics, you can analyze your traffic data and user behavior aspects that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.
How to integrate Google Analytics with Squarespace
Squarespace is an excellent platform for bloggers, and one of the best things about it is that it allows you to integrate 3rd party libraries easily. Though Square space has its analytics module, it still has direct support for integrating Google analytics directly.
You can easily integrate Google Analytics with Squarespace using Squarespace’s built-in integration module.
You can use the following steps to integrate Google analytics with your Squarespace website.
- Register with Google Analytics
Since you want to use Google analytics, like any other app, the first step is to register with Google analytics. To start, you’ll need a Google Analytics account. So first signup for Google Analytics on this link.
Once your signup is complete, we can move to the second step.
Find your API key
To integrate Google Analytics with your website, you will need your API key. You can find your API key by following the steps mentioned below.
Copy your tracking ID for the next step, as we will need this tracking ID for the next step.
- Add your key to the Square space.
In the Home Menu, click Settings, and then go to Advanced.
On the next screen you will see an option to put your Google Analytics key. So add your key to Google Analytics account number and save it.
It may take up to 24 hours for site statistics to populate in Google Analytics.
To track conversions for your eCommerce store, Squarespace sends the following information to Google Analytics for every received order:
- Order ID
- Your store name
- Purchase total (includes shipping)
- Customer’s city, region, and country
- Product name
- SKU
However, please note that this will conform to Google Analytics tracking that is several generations old.
Also, this is just page view tracking though. You won’t be tracking any events this way.
To track conversions for your eCommerce store, Squarespace sends the following information to Google Analytics for every received order:
Using Google Tag Manager to Add Google Analytics in Squarespace
Google Tag Manager makes it easier to manage this mess of tags by letting you define the rules of when certain tags should fire.
It allows various tag configuration with Google analytics tags like Measure events, to understand user activity across multiple domains and Dynamic remarketing.
GTM is not supported directly in Squarespace. You have to take your GTM header code. To integrate Google tag manager with your Squarespace website, you need to follow the below steps.
- If you already have configured Google analytics with your Squarespace website, first, we need to remove it, so there are no conflicts with Google tag manager. To remove it just remove your google analytics Id from Home Menu > Settings >Advanced> External API keys> Google analytics account number
- Create your Google tag manager account.
Forest step to integrate the Google manager account should be to create a Google tag manager account first. So just first go to Google tag manager https://tagmanager.google.com/ and create an account. - Go to Admin > Install Google Tag Manager On the next screen, you should see a popup with snippets of code that you will need for the next step.
- On your Square space home page. Go to the Homepage and then go to Settings > Advanced > Code Injection and put your code for header and footer code in it.
Google tag manager is now connected to your website, and now we need to connect your Google analytics with Google tag manager.
- Create a new tag configuration in your Google tag manager and Select “Google Analytics – Universal Analytics” for tag type.
On the next screen, it will ask you to create you a new variable, Create a variable for Google Analytics settings, it will ask you to enter a Tracking ID, so copy your Google Analytics ID into this and save it.
Squarespace Google Analytics eCommerce tracking.
Squarespace does support eCommerce tracking through Google Analytics. For enabling Ecommerece monitoring, you need to enable e-commerce analytics in your Google analytics view.
So first, go to your Google Analytics view. Go to Advanced > ECommerce settings in view.
On the next screen, there should be a toggle button for enabling/disabling e-commerce analytics. Enable your eCommerce setting.
After enabling your ECommerce, save your settings, and your e-commerce analytics is set up.
It will track your page views and e-commerce data. If you want to analyze behavioral data, you can use Google Tag Manager to set up Facebook pixels and other tools and track that data for your e-commerce store.
Square space Analytics vs. Google Analytics
Square space has built-in analytics with it, but it has plenty of options available in it. But when it’s about analytics, Google Analytics tops the chart. The good thing about Squarespace Analytics is that it is simple to use and gives you the right matrics data to analyze your traffic.
On the contrary, Google analytics packs so many other metrics, but then it has a steep curve to make sense of all this data and find essential metrics data.
One significant disadvantage of Square analytics is that it does not allow you to export your data, so you will have to manage your records by taking screenshots and managing that data yourself. Google Analytics does not have any such constraint in exporting data, and you can easily export your data records in excel format.
Google analytics is a powerful tool with multiple benefits, and its anyways free. So even if you are not planning to do extensive analytics on your search data, still configure Google analytics and let it collect all this data for you.
So whenever you feel need to understand your traffic, all this collected data by Google Analytics will help you a lot.
I hope, this article has helped you with configuring Google analytics with your Squarespace website. If you have queries/feedback, please leave it in comment section below.