If you’ve ever wondered which of your share buttons actually gets clicked – and which ones are just taking up space – we have big news. The analytics dashboard inside Easy Social Share Buttons has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, and it’s now the most powerful tool in the plugin.
We’ve been listening to your feedback for a while. The old analytics gave you numbers, but not answers. You could see totals, but not why one network outperformed another, or whether your floating sidebar button was worth keeping. That ends today.
The new dashboard gives you seven specialized reports, real-time click tracking, device-level breakdowns, and — for the first time — an AI-style action plan that tells you exactly what to change and why. All of it runs entirely inside WordPress, with zero external services and full GDPR compliance.
Learn more about the internal analytics →
Why we rebuilt it completely
The old system tracked numbers. The new one tracks behavior. There’s a meaningful difference. Knowing that Facebook got 400 clicks last month is interesting. Knowing that Facebook gets clicked almost exclusively from your inline content block on desktop – and that your floating sidebar version is invisible to mobile users – is actionable.
That’s the shift we made. Every report in the new dashboard is built around a specific decision you might need to make: which network to feature, where to place your buttons, how to order them differently for phone users versus desktop users. The data tells the story, and the new Trends report writes you a plain-language action plan based on it.
Good to know
You can activate the analytics dashboard right now from Social Sharing → Analytics in your WordPress admin. Data collection starts the moment you enable it — historical data from before activation is not available, so the sooner you switch it on, the richer your dataset becomes.
Seven reports, each built around a question
Instead of one big data dump, the new dashboard separates your analytics into focused reports. Each one answers a specific question about your social sharing performance. And they all interconnect — spot something in one report, drill into the detail view in one click.
- Main dashboard — KPI cards, trend chart, and top 10 most-shared content. Your daily overview.
- Networks report — every social network compared by clicks, device split, best placement, and top content.
- Positions report — which share button placements earn clicks and which get ignored entirely.
- Content report — all posts and pages ranked by share activity, with per-network and per-position breakdowns.
- Device report — desktop vs mobile on a shared timeline, with network and position splits per device.
- Heatmap report — a network × position matrix that shows click intensity at a glance.
- Trends report & action plan — growth rates, decline signals, and specific recommendations for what to change right now.
The heatmap: see exactly where clicks happen
This is the report we’re most excited about, and the one that tends to surprise people the most when they first open it.
The heatmap plots every social network against every share button position on a single grid. Each cell shows the click count for that network-position combination, color-coded by intensity — light for low activity, dark for high. You can switch between all devices, desktop only, or mobile only with a single click.
In practice, what you’ll often discover is that one network performs brilliantly in your inline content area and almost nowhere else — while a different network gets its best engagement from your floating sidebar. Once you can see that clearly, you stop guessing and start moving things deliberately.
The Trends report gives you an action plan, not just data
Most analytics tools show you what happened and leave you to figure out what to do next. The Trends report takes a different approach.
At the top, you’ll see an intelligence summary: your fastest-growing network, any networks showing decline, and which positions are gaining traction. Below that is the action plan — a list of specific, prioritized recommendations generated from your actual data. Things like:
- Move Pinterest above Facebook in your button order on desktop
- Add a sticky bar position for mobile — currently zero coverage
- Remove Tumblr from content-bottom — 3 clicks in 30 days
- Reorder mobile buttons based on your mobile audience’s actual preferences
Each recommendation includes the reasoning behind it, so you understand the pattern — not just the instruction. And at the bottom of the report, you’ll find the recommended network order for your share buttons, calculated separately for desktop and mobile users.
Analytics right inside the post editor
You don’t have to leave the post editor to check how a piece of content is performing. A new metabox sits below every post and page in the block editor, showing that content’s share click data — broken down by network and position — for the last 30 days.
This is particularly useful for content teams. Writers and editors can see at a glance whether a published post is generating social engagement, which network is driving it, and where on the page people are clicking — without ever opening the main analytics dashboard.
Privacy safe — no personal data, ever
Before you ask: yes, this is fully GDPR compliant, and no, it doesn’t slow down your site.
The click tracker logs only four things per event: which network was clicked, which position it was in, which post or page it happened on, and whether the device was mobile or desktop. That’s it. No IP addresses, no browser fingerprinting, no user agent strings, no personal information of any kind. The device is recorded only as a generic “mobile” or “desktop” — no brand, no model, nothing else.
All data stays on your server, inside your WordPress database. There are no external analytics requests, no third-party scripts added to your front end, and zero impact on your page speed or Core Web Vitals scores. The dashboard only loads when you open it in your admin.
How to get started
If you’re already running Easy Social Share Buttons, you’re ready to go. There’s no separate installation and nothing to configure beyond activating the feature.
- Ensure you are running version 11.1 of Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress
- Go to Social Sharing → Analytics in your WordPress admin
- Enable analytics tracking if you haven’t already
- Start with the main dashboard — data appears in real time
- After a week, open the Trends report and follow the action plan
- Use the heatmap to validate any placement changes you make
The dashboard defaults to the last 30 days, but you can switch to today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 14 days, this year, all time, or any custom date range using the period selector in the top right corner. You can also reset or delete your data at any time from the plugin settings under the Advanced tab.