If you’ve ever shared a Canva design and wondered how people are interacting with it, this tutorial will show you how to use Canva’s analytics and insights to track engagement.
You’ll learn how to access analytics for both public view links and direct email shares, what types of data Canva provides (like average time spent on a design, number of pages viewed, and visitor activity), and where to find those details inside your Canva account.
Whether you’re sharing a presentation, proposal, pricing guide, or lead magnet, Canva’s analytics can help you see what’s getting viewed (and what’s being skipped) so you can make smarter decisions about how you share your designs.
Resources Mentioned
- Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
Transcript
Once you’ve shared a Canva design, whether that’s a presentation, proposal, guide, or something else, it can be incredibly helpful to understand how people are interacting with it. Canva offers built-in analytics that allow you to see exactly that, to help you understand what’s working and where people are engaging most.
It’s important to note upfront that Canva’s analytics features are only available on Canva Pro, Teams, Education, and Nonprofit plans. If you’re using the Free plan, you’ll still be able to share designs using public view links, but you won’t see any engagement or analytics data connected to those links.
So if you want to take advantage of this feature, you’ll need to be on one of Canva’s paid or supported plans, and at the end of this quick tutorial, I’ll tell you how you can try that out for free.
Where to Find Your Analytics
To access analytics, open the design you’ve shared and click on the analytics icon in the top menu.
If you granted direct access to the design to an individual through the “People with access” section, you’ll find their activity under the Visits section of Analytics.
If instead you created and shared a public view link for your design, you’ll want to check the Public view links section under the External traffic category.
Where you look will depend on how your viewer accessed the design.
What Canva Tracks in Analytics
So let’s take a closer look at the specific details that Canva tracks for you.
Visits
If you’ve shared your design by inviting someone directly via email in Canva, their engagement will appear in the Visits section. You’ll find data for:
- Total unique visitors which shows you the total number of individual people who have accessed the design.
- Total visits tells you how many times the design has been viewed overall, including repeat visits from the same person.
- Visitor details (when available) display the viewer’s name, role, and profile photo, along with how many times they’ve accessed the design, when they last visited, and how long they stayed during their most recent visit.
- Average time spent on design gives you the average amount of time that all visitors have spent viewing the design.
- Top performing pages highlights the pages that held visitors’ attention the longest, based on average view time.
- Average time spent per page breaks down how long, on average, people spent on each individual page of your design.
- Average pages visited shows the average number of pages each visitor viewed, out of the total number of pages in your design.
- Pages visited by percentage shows what percentage of total visitors reached each page, so you can spot where drop-offs may be happening, and
- Links on your design tracks how often any clickable links were clicked by viewers, like buttons, booking links, or external resources.
Analytics is especially helpful when you’ve shared a design like a client proposal, pricing guide, or presentation and want to know which parts your audience focused on and which sections they skipped over.
Note that if you’re sharing a single-page design, you’ll see a more limited set of analytics. You’ll still be able to view details like each visitor’s number of visits, when they last accessed the design, and how long they stayed, and you’ll also see the average time spent on the design. However, features like top-performing pages and average time spent per page won’t appear because those metrics only apply to multi-page designs.
Public View Links
If you’ve shared your design using a public view link, you’ll find the analytics in the Public view links section under External traffic. This area is structured very similarly to Visits, but there are a couple of differences to be aware of.
At the overview level, Canva shows you how many public view links you’ve created for that design, how many unique people have accessed it across all those links, and the total number of times it’s been viewed, including repeat visits.
When you look at each individual public view link, you’ll also see when it was last accessed, and a list of anonymous visitor sessions tied to that specific link, and then if you click into one of those public view links, you’ll see a very similar set of engagement data to what’s shown in Visits, though since public links don’t track names, Canva shows visit count, last viewed, and session length anonymously.
Unlike the Visits section, though, click data for links in your design does not appear to be tracked for public-view links. That means you won’t be able to see whether someone clicked a CTA or an external link unless they were directly invited to the design.
Why This Data Matters
So why does Canva analytics data matter? These insights can be surprisingly powerful. Let’s say you’ve created a service guide or pricing deck in Canva and shared it with a prospective client using a public view link. You’ll be able to see how many times they viewed it, how long they spent on it, and whether they made it all the way through or stopped partway. That kind of information can help you follow up more intentionally or make smart changes to the next version of your design.
If you’re sharing a presentation, you can use the analytics to determine which slides are getting the most attention. For example, if most viewers are spending time on your case study slide but skipping the introductory pages, that might tell you something about what your audience values most.
You can also create multiple public view links for the same design, which allows you to track engagement from different audiences separately. For instance, you might create one link for your email subscribers and a separate one for collaborators or affiliate partners. Canva will track analytics separately for each link, so you can compare how different groups are engaging with the same content.
If you’re already on a Canva Pro or supported plan, it’s well worth taking a few minutes to explore the Analytics tab after sharing important designs. And if you’re currently using Canva Free, this feature might be one reason to consider upgrading, or at least starting a free trial, so you can see what’s resonating and make more informed design decisions moving forward.
