You sent the client a review link on Monday. It is Thursday, nothing has changed, and you do not know whether they read it or whether it is sitting unopened under forty other emails. The analytics page on a published review answers the first question so you stop guessing about the second.
Every review you own, when you are signed in, carries an analytics page showing two things: how many times the link has been visited, and roughly where those visits came from. That is the whole feature. It is not a read receipt tied to a named person, and it will not tell you which stakeholder clicked. But it tells you enough to act.
What the visit count actually counts
The number is visits to the shared review, not unique people and not named accounts. If your client opens the link, closes the tab, and opens it again from their phone that afternoon, that is two visits from one person. A visit count of zero means nobody has opened the link yet. A count climbing past your expected audience usually means the link got forwarded, which is often fine and occasionally a signal the review is being passed around a team.
Treat the count as a floor, not a headcount. It confirms the link works and that someone reached it. For a deeper walk through reading these numbers in context, see reading the visit counts on a published review.
Reading visitor geography without over-reading it
Alongside the count, you get the geography of the visits: the countries or regions the opens came from. This is coarse by design. It will not pin a visitor to a street, and it can be thrown off by VPNs and corporate networks that route traffic through another city.
Where it earns its place is sanity-checking who opened the link. You sent a staging review to a developer in Berlin and the only visit shows up from your own city. That is a hint the developer has not opened it yet and someone on your side clicked instead. Two opens from the right region, and you can stop chasing. For more on what this map can and cannot tell you, there is a full breakdown of what visitor geography on a review tells you.
When the count is zero and the deadline is close
The useful case is the stakeholder who has not opened anything. Visit count zero, deadline tomorrow. Before you send a nagging follow-up, rule out the boring reasons the link never got through.
- Check the link itself. Open your own
/r/<slug>link in a private window. If it loads for you, it loads for them. - Give them the read-only view. If the recipient just needs to read, the
/s/<slug>page strips out the editing furniture. Some people bounce off anything that looks like a tool they have to learn. - Confirm it opens on their device. A review link works on a phone with no app and no password, which matters when your reviewer only checks email on their phone. Here is how to send a link that opens on a phone.
- Resend with the point up front. Say what you need and by when in the first line of the message, not the third paragraph.
If the count is still zero after that, the problem is attention, not access, and now you can say so plainly in your follow-up instead of wondering.
When the count is high but nothing moved
The opposite problem: twelve visits, no comments, no changes shipped. People opened the review and did nothing with it. That is usually a content problem, not an analytics one. A review that is hard to act on gets read and abandoned. The fix lives in how each item is written, not in the open count.
People with the link can comment on any individual item, and you can mark each comment resolved as you work through them. If visits are high and comments are zero, the review may be clear but the receiver may not know you wanted a response. Ask for one directly. If you are collecting sign-off from several people, a thread of resolved comments is better evidence of engagement than a raw visit number, because it names who said what.
Who sees the analytics, and for how long
The analytics page is for the signed-in owner only. The people reading your review do not see visit counts or geography; they see the review. That keeps it a private planning tool rather than something that changes what you share.
One timing note worth knowing. After seven days a review goes read-only for its owner, which stops editing and exports, though the shared link keeps working and comments keep coming in. If you are relying on the analytics to time a follow-up and you also expect to edit the review after feedback, a Pro plan at five dollars a month keeps everything editable with no cutoff and reopens a read-only review instantly. The analytics itself stays with the review either way.
None of this requires setup. The analytics page is already attached to any review you publish and sign in to own. If you have not run one yet, start a review and send the link, then watch the count. The whole flow, capture to shareable link to who opened it, runs in a browser tab, which is the point of Cobalt Capture.