Share Vercel Analytics with clients

Why not invite the client to your Vercel team?

Vercel Web Analytics lives inside your Vercel team. The only way to let someone see it in Vercel is to make them a member of that team, with their own Vercel account. That works for colleagues, but it’s a poor fit for a client:

• Team membership is about the team, not one site. A client who joins sees more than their own project unless you set up finer access controls.
• Most clients don’t want a Vercel account. They want to open a link and see how their site is doing.
• When the work ends, someone has to remember to remove them.

Lookout takes a different route: it reads your Web Analytics through Vercel’s API, and you send the client a read-only link to a board that holds only their sites.

How a share link works

1. Put the client’s sites on a board. A board is one dashboard, for example one per client. A site can be on several boards, so your own “All sites” board stays as it is.
2. Open Share on the board and turn on Public link. Only workspace owners can do this. Lookout makes a URL like lookoutstats.com/s/…, and you can copy it again any time while the link is on.
3. Send it. Anyone with the link sees a read-only copy of the board, without a Lookout or Vercel account.

The client sees the board the way you do, minus the controls: every site’s visitors, page views and pages per visit against the previous period, as a grid or a table, for the last 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. They can open a site for its detail view. They can’t edit the board, compare projects, open settings or see your other boards. The page has a small “Made with Lookout” footer, and the figures refresh every 15 minutes.

Options on each link

• Default range: which period the link opens on. The viewer can still switch.
• Link expires: never, or 7 or 30 days from when you set it. After that the link shows “This link has expired”.
• Require a password: at least 8 characters. Viewers enter it once and stay unlocked for 12 hours on that browser. Changing the password signs every viewer out. Wrong guesses are rate-limited.
• Include referrers & countries: on by default. Turn it off and Lookout doesn’t fetch or send referrer or country data to viewers at all, so it isn’t merely hidden on the page.
• Open in monitor mode: the copied URL ends with ?monitor=1 and opens the board full screen, rotating and refreshing on its own, for a client’s office screen. More on the TV dashboard.

A change to any option applies to the next request; you don’t need to send a new link.

Ending access

• Turn the link off. The URL shows “This link isn’t active” on the next request. Turn it on again and the same URL works.
• Reset link. Lookout makes a new URL. The old one stops working on the next request, and anyone unlocked with a password is signed out.
• Let it expire. Set an expiry when you send it, and the link closes on its own.
• Disconnect a Vercel team. Links of boards that contain that team’s sites are turned off as well.

What the link doesn’t reveal

A viewer gets the board’s name and its sites’ figures, nothing else: no Vercel token, no team name, no workspace details. Shared pages ask search engines not to index them and don’t send a referrer when someone clicks out. The link is the key, so treat it like a password: send it to the person who needs it, add a password for anything sensitive, and reset it if it ends up somewhere it shouldn’t.

Clients, or teammates?

Share links are for people outside your workspace who should see one board. People you work with every day, like account managers, are better as read-only workspace members: they see every tracked project and need no Vercel seat either. Agencies often use both; here’s how agencies use Lookout. You can see what a shared board looks like in the live demo, which shows the same dashboard with sample data.