Sharing Intelligence® – FAQ

Sharing Intelligence® (formerly Social Analytics) gives you a quick overview of how people share and engage with your content using ShareThis tools.

The dashboard is divided into three main views:

  • Overview – See overall sharing activity, top social channels, top shared content, and referral traffic.
  • Audience – Understand which devices people use and where in the world your top shared content is being engaged with.
  • Insights – Discover the categories and keywords your audience cares about most, and check your site’s privacy compliance status.

Note: You may still see “Social Analytics” or “Analytics” referenced in older documentation. It refers to the same dashboard, now called Sharing Intelligence®.

Overview

The Overview tab answers: “How much social activity is my content getting, and where is it happening?”

It includes:

  • Sharing Activity: A bar chart that shows how much sharing activity per network your content has received over the last 30 days.
  • Popular Channels: A donut chart showing which social networks (for example, Facebook, X/Twitter, email, WordPress, YouTube) drive the most events on your site over the last 30 days.
  • Top Shared Content: A ranked list of URLs that generated the most sharing activity. Use this list to see which pieces of content resonate most with your audience and deserve additional promotion or similar follow-up content.
  • Referral Traffic: A list of pages that receive the most visits from social networks. This helps you see which URLs, landing pages, or articles successfully bring people back to your site.

Audience

The Audience tab helps you understand who is engaging with your shared content and how they access it.

It includes:

  • Device Type: A donut chart showing the share of activity by device type (for example, Personal computer, Smartphone, Tablet). Use this to decide how much to prioritize mobile vs. desktop experiences on your site.
  • Top Shared Content – Location: A world map highlighting the countries where your top shared content is being engaged with most. This can inform localization, language strategy, and time-zone-aware publishing.

Insights

The Insights tab goes beyond basic counts to show what your audience is interested in and how well your site aligns with privacy best practices.

It includes:

  • Categories: A bar chart labeled “Categories your audience is most likely to be interested.”
    Each bar represents a content category (for example, Business I.T., Marketing and Advertising, Information and Network Security). The score (0–1) indicates how relevant that category is for people who engage with your content.
  • Keywords: A bar chart labeled “Keywords that appeared the most for audience members.”
    This shows which terms are most associated with your audience’s browsing and sharing behavior. These insights can help inform your SEO and content strategy.
  • Privacy Compliance: A section that checks for key privacy elements on your site and surfaces them as simple cards:
    • Privacy Policy: Confirms if a privacy policy page is present and provides a link when detected.
    • CMP (Consent Management Platform): Indicates whether a CMP is installed.
    • Cookie Banner: Confirms if a cookie banner is present.This view helps you quickly understand whether your site appears to meet basic privacy expectations for visitors.

Known Limitations

Tracking parameters & dynamic URLs
If the URL that gets shared or clicked is modified with tracking parameters or generated dynamically, some social activity for those links may not appear exactly as you expect in Sharing Intelligence®.

Examples include:

  • Campaign tags (e.g., ?utm_source=…, ?campaign=…)
  • Click IDs or session IDs (e.g., ?gclid=…, ?fbclid=…)
  • Affiliate or referral parameters (e.g., ?ref=…)
  • URLs that change on each load (for example, dynamic IDs in the query string or fragment)

In these cases, the URL we record for the share or visit can differ from your “clean” or canonical URL. This can split metrics across multiple URL variants, and/or make it harder to attribute visits to a specific social network.

We’re continually evaluating improvements to how we handle tracking parameters and dynamic URLs, but for now you may see differences between other analytics tools and Sharing Intelligence® when links use heavily tagged or dynamic URLs.

FAQs

What is “Sharing Activity”?

Sharing Activity is the total number of share events generated by your ShareThis tools over the last 30 days. A share event happens when someone clicks one of your ShareThis share buttons on your site.

On the Overview tab, Sharing Activity is shown as a stacked bar chart over time:

  • Each bar represents the total number of shares for that day.
  • The bar is broken down by channel (for example, Facebook, Blogger, email, etc.).
  • Hovering over a bar shows how many shares came from each channel.
What are Shares?

A Share is counted whenever someone clicks one of the ShareThis share buttons on your pages.

Shares are:

  • Tracked by network (for example, Facebook, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest).
  • Displayed in the Sharing Intelligence® dashboard as part of Sharing Activity, Popular Channels, and Top Shared Content.

We also capture sharing events when visitors highlight and copy a snippet of content on your page, even if they do not click a visible share button.

What is Referral Traffic?

Referral Traffic measures visits to your site that occur after someone clicks a link to your content on a social network or other sharing channel.

In Sharing Intelligence®, Referral Traffic appears in the Referral Traffic panel on the Overview tab as a ranked list of top pages for the selected date range. For each page you’ll see:

  • The page titles that received the most visits from social networks
  • The number of events (referral visits) for each page

This makes it easy to see which pages benefit the most from social sharing so you can:

  • Identify high-performing pages and articles
  • Decide which content to promote further or replicate

Note: In older versions of our analytics this metric was labeled Social Referral; it now appears as Referral Traffic in the dashboard.

Why are the share counts on my site larger than the “Shares” in Sharing Intelligence®?
  • The share counts on your site (shown in the buttons) are usually a lifetime total for that URL. Once a share happens, it stays in that count.
  • The Shares metric in Sharing Intelligence® only includes share events recorded in the last 30 days.

Because the dashboard uses a shorter time window it’s normal for the on-page share counts to be higher than the Shares value in Sharing Intelligence®.

How often are statistics updated?

We update share and referral statistics once per day. If you don’t see same-day activity yet, check back the following day after the nightly refresh. New data typically becomes available for the previous day around 12:30 AM UTC.

Do I need specific tools installed to access Sharing Intelligence®?

Yes. To see data in the Sharing Intelligence® dashboard, you need to:

  • Add the ShareThis installation script to the <head> of your site template so it loads on every page you want to track.
  • Activate at least one ShareThis share button tool in the Platform.
  • Allow up to 24 hours for data to start appearing in the dashboard.

Keep in mind:

  • Sticky Share Buttons will appear automatically on pages once the installation script is in the <head> and you’ve enabled Sticky Share Buttons in the Platform. No additional placement code is required.
  • Inline Share Buttons do require you to add the inline “placement” code wherever you want the buttons to appear on your pages.

If you’re still using our legacy share buttons, we recommend migrating to the latest ShareThis share buttons to unlock all analytics features in Sharing Intelligence®.

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