Analytics is the PRO part of the plugin that tells you whether any of this worked. It is optional, it is off by default, and off means off: no script on the page, no request made, nothing recorded. This page explains what it collects, how to turn it on, and every report it gives you.
Cookies, first, because it is the thing people ask #
Analytics sets no cookies and writes nothing to a visitor’s device.
A reader is identified by a one-way hash of a truncated IP address together with their browser string, computed on the server and thrown away immediately. It is not reversible, it is not stored as an address, and it cannot be used to recognise the same person on another site or on another visit.
The practical consequences:
- There is no banner to add and no consent to ask for.
- There is no tracking script for an ad blocker to block, because the measurement happens on your own server.
- There is nothing to clean up afterwards.
Crawlers and logged-in editors are excluded by default, so your own visits and Googlebot do not inflate the numbers.
Turning it on #
Go to Profile Cards → Analytics. There are two tabs, Settings and Reports.
The master switch #
One switch, labelled Analytics, with the badge showing On or Off. The number next to the tab shows how many cards are being counted.
The first time you turn it on, the plugin creates two tables of its own and then waits. Nothing is counted until you switch on individual cards further down the same page — a site-wide switch with a per-card switch underneath it, so you can measure one card and not another.
NoteThe plugin’s own summary of the position: Counts how many times each card is looked at and which of its buttons are pressed. Nothing else about a reader is stored.
What is collected #
| Setting | Options | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Keep the detail for | A number of days, default 90 | How long the individual visit records are kept. The day-by-day, hour-of-day and day-of-week figures are counted from those records, so those reports cover this window. The rolled-up daily totals behind the other charts are kept for good, which is why shortening this never leaves a report with a hole in it. |
| Record where readers came from | Always, Link in bio pages only, Never | Where readers arrived from. Only worth doing for a card that has a web address of its own — somebody arriving at that address from Instagram is worth knowing about. A card sitting inside somebody else’s post has no address to arrive through, so there is nothing to record. |
| Do not count crawlers | On by default | Google and the other search engines read every page to find out what is on it. That is not a reader. |
| Do not count anyone who is logged in | Off by default | Your own visits, and those of anyone else who can edit the site. A dashboard that counts you is one you cannot read as a number of readers. |
Per card #
Below the global settings, each card has its own switches:
- Counted — whether this card is measured at all.
- Views and Clicks — which of the two are counted, so you can count presses without counting glances if that is what you want.
- Record where readers came from — overrides the global setting for this card.
The reports #
The Reports tab. Pick a card from the dropdown at the top, or leave it on All the cards being counted to see the site as a whole.
The range #
Eight buttons: Today, Yesterday, This week, This month, This year, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, and Pick dates for anything else.
The four tiles #
| Tile | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Views | How many times the card was looked at. |
| Clicks | How many buttons were pressed, across all of them. |
| Referrers | How many different sites readers came from. |
| Click rate | Clicks divided by views. This is the number to watch: it is the card doing its job. |
Below them, the day-by-day line chart with views and clicks over the range.
Hour of the day #
Side-by-side bars for every hour. The point of this one is not the total, it is the shape: it tells you when your readers are actually there, so you know when to post an announcement or when a new booking link is likely to be pressed.
It can be expanded to All 24 hours.
Day of the week #
The same idea by weekday, expandable to All 7 days. Useful for deciding whether a card belongs in a Friday post.
Referrers #
The place readers came from, in three parts.
Type #
A ring chart grouping every arrival into one of six kinds:
| Direct | The address was typed or bookmarked. |
| Search engines | Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and the rest. |
| Social media | Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, TikTok and the rest. |
| AI answers | ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other answer engines. This is a group of its own because it behaves nothing like a search engine: the reader arrives already convinced, and the address in their bar is not your site. |
| Websites | Any other site linking to you, including your own. |
| Campaign | Arrivals through a link with a utm_source on it. Counted separately rather than under whatever the browser was willing to say. |
Devices #
A ring chart splitting readers into Phone, Computer and Tablet. If your card is three-quarters phones, that is an argument for the Icon button style rather than full-width buttons.
Where from #
The individual sites behind the groups, most-visited first, each with its kind and its number of views. This is the table to look at when you are trying to work out whether posting a link somewhere actually did anything.
Campaigns #
This one is for you rather than for a visitor. Add a utm_source to the end of any link you share, and readers who arrive through it are counted here instead of being filed under whatever the browser reported.
Fill in Source, Medium and optionally Campaign, press the button, and copy the Link to share it builds. For example:
So you can tell the difference between the people who came from the link in your Instagram bio and the ones who came from a newsletter, without guessing.
Which buttons get pressed #
Every button on the card is measured separately, whether it is a social link, a custom block, the Save contact button or the share button. That is the report that makes the card editable rather than decorative: it tells you that nobody presses the Behance link, that the email button gets twice everything else, and that the video people press is the one you have moved to the top.
Deleting what has been collected #
The Delete collected data panel at the bottom of the Analytics screen stays reachable whatever your plan, including the free version. That is deliberate: somebody whose subscription has lapsed must still be able to remove their own visitors’ data.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Delete all collected data | Every view and every click, across every card. Your cards are not touched. |
| Turn analytics off and delete its tables | The same, plus analytics switched off and the tables themselves removed. |
Neither can be undone. There are also per-card delete buttons for clearing one card without clearing the rest.
Performance #
Analytics adds one small request per page view, only on pages where a counted card is actually present, and only while it is switched on. With it off, nothing is loaded at all.
The plugin’s CSS and JavaScript are only loaded on a page that really has a card on it, so a site with the plugin active but no card placed anywhere loads nothing from it. A link in bio page can go further still and load only its own assets, leaving the rest of the theme’s out — see Loading method.