Measure your site's traffic and engagement.

The Traffic panel in analytics shows a summary of traffic and engagement on your site. This panel's data helps you track your audience’s growth over time by focusing on three key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring your site’s traffic:

• Visits - the number of single browsing sessions by individual visitors to your site.
• Pageviews - how many actual page requests your site received.
• Unique visitors - an estimate of the total number of visitors that reached your site.

The Traffic panel is available in all plans.

Review the Traffic panel

1. Open the Analytics panel and click Traffic.
2. Click the date range drop-down menu at the top of the panel to filter results by time frame. Data is available starting from January 2014.
3. Click Unique visitors, Visits, or Pageviews to filter data by that KPI. Depending on the date range selected, a percent change comparison may show under each KPI.
4. Click ! icons to review details for traffic alerts.

Note: In the Squarespace app, this card is called Traffic overview.

Unique visitors

Note: Previously called Audience size

Unique visitors is an estimate of the total number of actual visitors that reached your site in the selected time period. We track this number with a browser cookie created when someone first visits your site. This cookie lasts for two years. Unique visitors is a good measure of your loyal audience and readership.

Every time a visitor clears their cookies or opens your site from a different browser, analytics counts their first new visit toward unique visitors.

Note: In rare cases, unique visitors, which is typically lower than visits, might be greater than visits when viewing shorter date ranges. This could happen because only the first pageview of a new browsing session counts toward a visit. For example, if a visitor goes to your site right before midnight, that visit might count toward the next day’s unique visitors, but not visits.

Visits

A visit is a single browsing session, and can encompass multiple pageviews.

We track visits with a browser cookie that expires after 30 minutes. Any hits from a single user within that 30-minute browsing session count as one visit. This means that one person can register multiple visits a day if they close their browser and return to your site at least 30 minutes later.

We end all browsing sessions at midnight. If a late-night visit crosses that midnight boundary, we will end it at midnight and register a second visit for the next day.

Visits are a good measure of attention on your site because they correlate with a single browsing session and are often used in marketing applications.

Pageviews

Pageviews tracks how many actual page requests your site received in the selected time period. All full page loads count toward total pageviews, including views to pages in the Not linked section, collection item pages, and password-protected pages (after a visitor enters the password). Requests for specific image URLs or other scripts and visits to custom or default 404 pages aren't included in this number.

Index page pageviews

Views to pages in an index (version 7.0 only) are counted in two different ways:

• Viewing a sub-page accessed from the main index page counts as a view for the index page, not the individual sub-page.
• Viewing a sub-page directly from its unique URL counts as a view for the individual sub-page, not the Index.

If you'd like to get more views on a certain page, change the way that you share your index page.

Line graph

The line graph near the top of the panel shows trends over time for the selected KPI and time. Hover over any point on the graph for a specific date.

Click the Daily drop-down menu to change the time scale. Time scale options depend on the number of available data points.

Tip: In the Squarespace app, the graph in the Traffic overview card also shows comparison data for the previous time frame.

Bar and pie charts (visits only)

When viewing the visits KPI, the charts below the line graph show visits by device type, source, browsers, and operating system.

• By device type - Visits by device: mobile, computer, and tablet. This is useful for seeing a breakdown of mobile vs. computer traffic.
• By source - Visits by top traffic sources, or where visitors came from before landing on your site
• By browser - Visits by top browsers, like Chrome or Firefox
• By operating system - Visits by operating system

Tip: In the Squarespace app, device type data has its own card. Tap Analytics, then tap Device type to find the graph that represents the total visits from the top device types in the time frame you’ve set. The bottom half shows all device types in that time frame as total visits and percentages.

How the "Do Not Track" option in Chrome affects analytics

Chrome browser settings has a "Do Not Track" option. This option is turned off by default.

If visitors to your site have enabled this option, every page they view is tracked as a new visitor. The View count will be accurate, but each page they visit registers separately for unique visitors and visit data. This may make some related numbers (such as direct) appear inflated.