Tracking the success of your Squarespace website
SETTING UP A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT.
We need to be keeping our fingers on the pulse to help our businesses grow.
Without knowing what’s working and what we need to refine/pivot/adjust, we’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks (i.e. you’re wasting lots of time and energy just pumping out content, ignoring your website and not looking at the results).
Hands up if you’ve never even considered working out what the most popular part of your website is, or if you’ve never been intrigued -even just a little bit- as to what terms people type into Google to find you?…
Looking at the successes and the failures of our social campaigns and website design, copywriting and lead magnets is absolutely vital if we want to develop our products and services along with market trends and demand.
So setting up a Google Analytics account is almost a no-brainer.
If you’re using Squarespace, there is a Squarespace Analytics tab, but getting your Google Analytics account attached instead will give you a much deeper insight into what’s going on behind the scenes, customer trends, the blog post that’s bringing you the most traffic, and you can even align it with Facebook ads and other digital events, to see how they’re performing.
1. LINKING YOUR SQUARESPACE WEBSITE TO GOOGLE ANALYTICS.
You must have a paid-for site and live subscription in order to be able to track information about your website users.
Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics account, on your dashboard (i.e. the Google Analytics home page you arrive on once you’ve logged in), head to the menu at bottom left of the screen.
Click the cogwheel.
Then look to the ‘Property’ column, click ‘Tracking Info’, and then ‘Tracking Code’.
You need the tracking ID, which is usually two letters, followed by 9 numbers and one final digit.
Now head into your Squarespace account…
In the home menu, click the ‘Settings’ button (see image to the left), and look to the bottom to find the ‘Advanced’ option.
Click on ‘External API Keys’, and then copy and paste in your Google Analytics tracking code into the gap that says ‘Google Analytics Account Number’ (see below).
Don’t forget to click ‘Save’.
(No need to panic if you don’t see results instantly - it can take up to 24 hours to connect. Also, Google Analytics won’t be able to back-date data: it’ll only start collecting data about your website users from the point where you attached your website to your Google Analytics account).
Nice one. You’re all done! That was easy, eh.
2. You’ll also need a cookies policy.
If you’re storing or collecting data about others, there are legal requirements to prove you’re using their info safely and responsibly.
This is different to storing people’s data on an email list (as you’re collecting and storing more detailed data about your users), not just saving their email address to send them promo stuff later down the line.
These little bits of tech that collect data about the website user and their route through your website are called ‘cookies’.
To get started, you’ll need to add a cookies pop-up, informing people that your website is collecting data about their session on your website (i.e. all those things that feed Google Analytics to show you people’s behaviour on your site and demographic info about the user).
To add this cookies pop-up on Squarespace, head to the ‘Settings’ tab in your home menu, then click ‘Cookies & Visitor Data’.
You’ll want to ‘Enable Cookie Banner’, so that people are notified when they land on your website that you’re using cookies.
It also gives people the option to turn cookies off whilst using your website. You must always give people the option to turn off cookies, if they don’t want their data stored or used by you.
Then scroll down to the section about “Squarespace Analytics’: I’d recommend clicking ‘Disable Squarespace Analytics Cookies’ (meaning that your visitors can have the option of not having cookies work whilst they’re on your website).
3. Making your website legally compliant
You can buy cookie policy templates online, but I’ve been lucky enough to work with a solicitor who creates cookie policy + privacy policy templates specifically for coaches and creatives.
She’s called Natasha Minchella + she’s got a website protection bundle all for under £100 GBP, which includes:
Website terms of use template
How to protect your intellectual property (IP)
GDPR-compliant privacy policy template
Cookies policy template
Consent for using personal data template
Plus instructions how to personalise all of them, for the nuanced brand you’ve built up + now want to keep safe.
You can get Natasha’s templates here.
NOW GO GET CRACKING.
*Disclaimer* I am not a solicitor and I am not providing you with any legal advice. The templates I use are licensed to me by Natasha Minchella and I have used all reasonable endeavours to ensure that this is a reliable source.
