Squarespace Analytics vs Google Analytics vs Plausible
When I first launched my Squarespace website, I connected it to Google Analytics and didn’t pay much attention to the data until I started to blog and get more traffic to my website. I started analyzing my website traffic every month and noticed that my Squarespace Analytics stats were MUCH higher than what Google Analytics reported. Being a data nerd, the huge difference drove me crazy, so I decided to explore some other analytics tools on a quest to understand how many people were actually visiting my website!
Here are the key takeaways from my Squarespace website analytics research:
Squarespace Analytics is a free, built-in, easy to use tool that provides all of the data most website owners would want about their traffic – BUT my own data was inaccurately inflated for a few years so I couldn’t use it! (Squarespace has since fixed the issue and my data is accurate.)
Google Analytics (also free) CAN provide more comprehensive website analytics than Squarespace (more than most people need) but it’s complicated to use (even for a tech savvy person) AND drastically UNDER counts the visits to my website.
Plausible Analytics is a privacy-friendly tool that is accurate, gives me more information than Squarespace about my website visitors, and is even easier to use! It’s not free, but if you are a data nerd (or your Squarespace data is wonky) it might be worth the investment!
Fathom Analytics is another privacy-friendly analytics tool that I checked out, but I preferred Plausible’s UI so I didn’t do a deep dive on Fathom.
Keep reading to get more details about my experience with each of these website analytics tools.
Squarespace Analytics is Pretty Good (When it’s Accurate)
Squarespace has a great, built-in tool that provides all of the key data most people want to see about their website traffic. For any time period you can see:
How many visitors your website had
What pages were visited
Where in the world your visitors came from
What other platforms/pages referred people to your website (search engines, social media, etc.)
What buttons and forms people click/submit on your website (with a Core plan or higher)
Sales analytics (if you sell on Squarespace)
Here is what the Squarespace Analytics dashboard looks like. (Click the image to expand it.)
You can connect Squarespace analytics to Google Search Console and see what search terms led people to your website, right in Squarespace.
Squarespace also has an activity log that records detailed data for each page view to your website for the past 7 days (or 50 views). You can see the date, time, IP address, referrer, browser, and operating system for each page view. (Note: The activity log is not compliant with many privacy laws so use it at your own risk.)
If you want an easy to use, free tool to track analytics on your Squarespace website, Squarespace Analytics will likely work fine for you!
How Do You Know if your Squarespace Analytics is Accurate?
If your website visits in Squarespace Analytics are MUCH higher than your page views, something is wrong. You can’t technically have more visits than page views. (Every visitor visits at least one page!) No analytics tool is 100% accurate, so if your visits are a little higher than page views, no reason for alarm. But if you see a BIG difference in visits and page views, reach out to Squarespace support! (Squarespace was showing that I had over a thousand website visits but only a few hundred page views. Many months after I submitted a ticket to Squarespace support, my data was revised and now it looks good.)
If you use the SQSP Themes Sidebar Plugin* on your blog, it might be duplicating page views in Squarespace Analytics. I noticed duplicate visits to my blog in the Activity Log and through some testing determined it was my sidebar plugin. The developer was extremely helpful and sent a fix that got it straightened out. I expect a plug-in update will roll out when he has time to test it, but if you are having the same issue on your blog, create support ticket at SQSP Themes and they will get you the fix.
Squarespace uses cookies to get accurate visit and unique visitor data. If people decline cookies on your website, every view counts as a separate visit, even if its from the same visitor. This is going to be true for ANY analytics tool so it’s not a drawback to using Squarespace!
Squarespace does not exclude all bots from its analytics. When I checked specific IP addresses for a few weeks (using my favorite bot checker) I noticed a handful of bots slipped through and were included in my page views. The goal is to exclude them all, but no analytics tool is perfect at identifying those pesky bots!
Why I Don’t Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is known for being a powerful analytics tool. It tracks all of the same data Squarespace tracks (and more) but some of the data is captured differently so it’s not all apples to apples. If you know how to use it, Google Analytics can provide more detailed data about your visitor behavior, track the impact of advertising and marketing campaigns on your site traffic, and track multiple websites in one place. (Which is probably more than you need if you don’t have a big, complex business.)
Here is what the Google Analytics dashboard looks like. (Click the image to expand it.)
I personally find it frustrating to get the basic data I want out of Google Analytics. There are lots of separate panels and it’s not easy to navigate. If you are JUST looking for basic website traffic analytics for your Squarespace website, I would not bother with Google Analytics. Especially since…
Google Analytics is missing 75% of my website traffic, which makes it useless to me. I believe this is because the newest version of Google Analytics (GA4) will not track visits of people who have not accepted cookies and because Google is more likely to be blocked by ad blockers and privacy-friendly browsers. Whatever the reason, the data is not accurate!
How do I know Google Analytics is not accurate? I found lots of visits that showed up in both the Squarespace Activity Log and in Plausible that were missing in Google Analytics. If two tools say someone visited my site, I believe it!
And what is Google doing with your data? Nothing in life is free. Google gives you free analytics because they use your data for things like advertising and market research. Some of these things may be helpful to you but they all help Google make money. Money isn’t bad, but how much money (and data) do you want Google to have?
Data Compliance and Website Analytics
Squarespace Analytics and Google Analytics both uses cookies, so it’s especially important to set up your Squarespace Cookie Banner and have a robust privacy policy (I use Termageddon*) on your Squarespace website if you are using either of these tools! (There are other reasons you likely need a cookie banner, even if you use a cookie-free analytics tool like Plausible. I explain why in my cookie banner post.)
Why I Love Plausible Analytics
Plausible Analytics is an open-source, privacy-friendly website analytics platform. It does not use cookies to track website visits. Plausible generates a random string of letters and numbers to identify website visitors instead of capturing IP addresses, so their visitor data is anonymous. It can track where visitors are located geographically and the source that directed them to the website. With privacy becoming more and more important in today’s world, this is a huge plus for Plausible.
Plausible does not sell your data and only makes money from subscriptions. Plausible has a small team of 10 people focused on delivering great privacy-friendly analytics. It doesn’t even advertise its product or pay affiliates to market for the company. They have grown to earn $1M annually from just word of mouth and their own blog. You can read more about Plausible here.
The data in Plausible is accurate! When I did my comparison of Squarespace Analytics to Plausible, I found that Plausible did exclude all of the bots that Squarespace missed, but I also found a few visits that Plausible missed that were reported in Squarespace. So neither tool is 100% perfect, but I find them both to be pretty accurate and WAY better than Google!
The Plausible user interface is simple and user-friendly. The Plausible dashboard shows all your stats on one beautifully designed screen with a summary graph at the top and detailed reports below that break down the most important details you want to see. It’s just a little scroll to see everything on the same page and simple clicks to drill down to get more details. Even easier than Squarespace! (I also happen to be a big fan of purple.)
Here is what the Plausible dashboard looks like.
All of the data in the Plausible dashboard is interconnected. You can click on any data point in a report, and everything on the page is filtered to reflect only the data for that metric. For example, I can click on a blog post and the whole dashboard updates to show only the data from views to that post. I can see:
What time people visited that post
How long people stayed on that specific page
Where in the world people were who visited that post
How people found that post (which search engine, social media platform, etc) search terms people used to find that post through Google (if you connect to Google Search Console)
It’s not possible to tie this data together in Squarespace analytics because it’s all reported separately. I can see how many people visited my website from Spain, but I can’t see what pages they visited or how they found my website. It might be possible to create reports that do this in Google Analytics, but I haven’t had the patience to figure that out.
Here is a short video tour of the Plausible dashboard in action!
Plausible can track clicks on external links on your website. This is very easy to do in Plausible by just making a small tweak to the code snippet you install on your website. (Tracking these clicks does count towards your billable monthly pageviews.) Squarespace will track clicks on buttons and forms, but it can’t track on external links (text that is linked to another website).
There are also lots of other things you can track in Plausible like 404 “not found” errors or file downloads. You can set goals for views to specific pages and you can track marketing funnels (user flow through specific pages that lead to an action). (These are some of the things people use Google Analytics for today, but maybe they don’t have to!)
Plausible is “lighter” than Google Analytics. Plausible is installed on your website using a small code snippet in your website header code injection. (FYI - You do need at least a core plan in Squarespace to use Plausible so you can use that code injection.) Plausible’s code is much lighter than the code Google uses, so it has much less impact on your website speed (this is good for SEO and just in general) and its better for the environment!
One minor downside of Plausible, unique visitor data is less robust. Because Plausible re-sets the random string of letters it uses to anonymize visitors once a day, it cannot tell identify the same user can visits on different days or different devices. Squarespace and Google Analytics are theoretically be better at tracking unique visitors over time IF people accept cookies on your website. If not, none of the tools will get that right.
You can exclude your own website visits in Plausible by entering your IP address in your site settings panel. I recently got a new laptop that uses dynamic IPs which made this a bit more complex, but I followed the instructions in this article and was able to exclude my own website visits directly in Google Chrome.
You can exclude your own visits from Squarespace, only if you access your website through the admin panel. You can exclude a static IP from Google Analytics but I couldn’t find a way to exclude the dynamic IP (I didn’t try very hard, so there may be a way!)
Plausible is not free (because it does not make money off your data) but if your traffic is below 10K pageviews per month, it’s only $9/month or $90/year (plus tax). If you are concerned about privacy or you are a data nerd like me and want accurate, easy website analytics, it might be worth checking out! You can view Plausible’s full pricing here.
Plausible Analytics vs Fathom Analytics
I did explore Fathom Analytics, another popular privacy-friendly website analytics tool. The data in Plausible and Fathom was exactly the same, but I preferred the Plausible user interface, so I didn’t dig into Fathom functionality very much.
Plausible is also a little bit less expensive than Fathom for a website like mine, with less than 10K pageviews per month. When you get above 10K pageviews per month, Plausible is a little bit more expensive than Fathom. But if you have that much traffic to your website, you can probably afford it!
I also really like that Plausible does not pay affiliates to promote their product. Fathom DOES pay affiliates, so I could make a little bit of money telling you to use their product, but I always tell it like it is, and I prefer Plausible (and I am not being paid to say that!)
The Net-Net
If Squarespace Analytics had been accurate for my website all along, I would have stuck with it and been perfectly happy with the data it provides. Squarespace Analytics is free, easy to use, and provides all of the key info you will likely want to see about your website traffic.
I have left Google Analytics for good because the data is not right and it’s frustrating to use!
Now that I have started using Plausible, I love the beautiful UI and the more granular data I can get with a mouse click (or two) and I am not sure I can give it up. I also really like that Plausible is privacy-friendly and is not beholden to anyone but their customers and the programmers who work on the tool. Even though my Squarespace data is accurate now, I will likely keep playing for Plausible.
If I have made you curious about Plausible, you can sign up for a free 30 day trial and check it out yourself!
