by 
Is your business using Pinterest to reach your audience with one-of-a-kind visuals?
Are you measuring your Pinterest marketing effectively?
It’s crucial that any business understands whether their time spent on a social network is generating results.
Why Pinterest Analytics?
Consistently measuring your activity on Pinterest can also help your business identify what types of content resonate best on this channel and with your specific audience.
The number of followers your account has is important to note, but it’s certainly not the final indicator of a successful Pinterest strategy.
To gain access to your Pinterest account’s analytics, verify your website and then from the Settings drop-down menu at the top right-hand corner, you’ll be able to check your stats by clicking Analytics.
At any time from the top left-hand corner, toggle data between any time interval of your choosing from the calendar or quickly sort through to activity from yesterday, 7 days or 14 days. This is similar to the functionality the Google Analytics interface.
The Pinterest analytics dashboard is broken up into four main tabs. The tabs are Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned and Most Clicked. Each tab’s data can be exported into a simple Excel spreadsheet for further analysis by clicking the Export tab.
Here’s an introductory video from Pinterest giving an overview of the new analytics dashboard.
.
Let’s dive in and discuss which six Pinterest metrics are the most important to measure, how to use Pinterest’s analytics tool to find them and why these metrics are actionable.
#1: Pins From Your Website
When looking at the Site Metrics tab of the analytics dashboard, you’ll be able to view many of the top metrics worth reviewing about your account’s performance.
One of the most important metrics to consider listed at the very top is the Pins Created From Your Website’s Content. This pin metric informs you of the daily average number of pins from your verified website.
The Pin metric can help your business determine whether the visual content on your website is interesting enough for your web visitors to pin to your boards.
Curious About How to Use AI?
We recently launched a new show that help marketers, creators, and entrepreneurs understand the business applications of AI.
It's hosted by Michael Stelzner and explores this exciting new frontier in easy-to-understand terms.
Pull up your favorite podcast app and search for AI Explored. (Look for the cover art shown to the right.)
Or click the button below for more information.
If your content isn’t getting pinned as much as you had anticipated, the Pin metric can show you that it may be time to add more visual content to your website, beautiful headers on your blog posts or the Pin It button close to all of your visuals based on the amount of pins your website is or isn’t generating.
Be sure to look at the percentage of change over a specific time period of your choosing to understand if there’s been rise or fall in pins generated from your website to ascertain if a certain day or week saw more pins or fewer pins.
If you’ve seen a rise of pins on a particular date, you can correlate this to the addition of visual content on your website and you should look to include similar content of this nature in the future to encourage more pins.
If you’ve seen a fall in pins on a particular date and you’ve recently added more visual content to your website, then it may indicate that this newly added visual content may not be resonating with your Pinterest audience and it’s time to go back to the drawing board. It’s safe to give newly added content two weeks to begin to gain traction on Pinterest before reviewing your analytics.
#2: Repins From Your Website
Repins are the fuel for engagement on Pinterest. When a Pinterest user sees a visual in their feed from one of the accounts they are following, they can choose to repin it to their boards, which also adds it to their followers’ feeds. This action can help your content quickly get in front of new Pinterest users who may not be following your account.
Monitoring the Repin metric will help give your business the daily average number of pins from your website that were repinned. This metric is also found on the Site Metrics tab when you first log into the analytics dashboard, right below the Pin metric.
The number of repins the pins generated from your website help your business further determine whether your visual content is resonating with your Pinterest audience, but this time with the following of the pinners who originally pinned your content. Repins give your content the chance to be seen by users not following you who could potentially share your content or follow your boards.
Comparing the Pin metric to the Repin metric can be extremely helpful in determining whether the visual content on your website is not only of interest to your existing customers and website visitors, but to new broader audiences that may not have heard of your business and offering.
It’s important to get your content from your website pinned on Pinterest, but the next indicator of success is getting those images repinned onto more boards to grow your audience with new followers and potential customers.
#3: Determine Your Reach
Determining the reach of your website’s content on Pinterest—the daily average number of people who saw your pins on Pinterest—is the next step to gauge the effectiveness of your content once it has been pinned and repinned.
To calculate the reach of your content, scroll down below Pins and Repins to the section with Impressions and Reach.
Reach lets your business have an understanding of the success of your content when it is pinned and repinned. It’s more valuable, in terms of getting more exposure, if someone who’s pinning or repinning your content has 400,000 followers as opposed to 40.
Reach lets your business know how many people actually saw your content via your pins and repins, giving a better understanding of the true influence of your recent pins and repins.
The importance of the Reach metric lies in understanding how large an audience your content reached for both branding purposes and as a comparison to how much traffic your content did or didn’t drive to your website.
#4: Number of Visitors and Visits to Your Website
Understanding how much of your audience on Pinterest was driven to your website is a powerful metric for determining the overall success of your presence. Pinterest can drive greater visibility, more customers and sales to your website over time.
The number of visitors and visits to your website from Pinterest can be determined by scrolling to the bottom of the Site Metrics tab by looking at the graph for Clicks (which informs you of visits to your website) and visitors (which informs you of the total number of people who visited your website).
Some of your pins will drive engagement on Pinterest, while other pins will drive traffic to your website and others will drive both types of activity. Comparing Clicks to the Repin metric will give your business an understanding of what types of action your different visual content helps drive with your audience.
It’s important to strive for engagement both off and on Pinterest. Clicks help your business see if there’s an increase or decrease in the traffic driven by your content.
Ready to Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy?
Get expert training and an unbeatable conference experience when you attend Social Media Marketing World—from your friends at Social Media Examiner.
Broaden your reach, skyrocket your engagement, and grow your sales. Become the marketing hero your company or clients need!
🔥 As a valued reader, you can save 50% on an All-Access or Virtual ticket if you act now. Sale Ends Friday! 🔥
GET THE DETAILS
The Visits metric helps guide your content creation efforts to better balance both content that drives engagement on Pinterest and traffic to your website. Pins that drive traffic to your website may include visually stimulating imagery, a call to action, long-form visuals or how-to’s.
The number of visitors to your website from Pinterest gives a high-level overview of the number of people behind the number of page views. There are differences of opinion on whether you should aim for more views than viewers and vice versa, but ideally your business should be getting a healthy number of both.
You want your visitors to view many pages on your website from Pinterest because the more time they spend on your website, the more likely they will become a customer.
And you also want the number of visitors to your website from Pinterest to increase because then you’re reaching both new and returning visitors.
New visitors are always valuable because you are expanding your reach to new audiences on Pinterest and thus to potentially new customers. Returning visitors via Pinterest are also important because you are continually engaging them successfully on Pinterest, giving them a reason to return to your website.
#5: Most Repinned Content
When it comes to your strategy for developing Pinterest content, it’s vital to create visuals that encourage your followers to repin them to their boards and in front of their following.
The Most Repinned metric is important for understanding what content is being repinned the most, therefore showing your business what is resonating with your audience the most on Pinterest.
To access the Most Repinned report, simply click the Most Repinned tab in the analytics dashboard and then select the timeframe of your choosing.
As opposed to the graphs displayed in the Site Metrics tab, the Most Repinned tab shows the actual pins that were repinned the most for a particular date range. If exported into Excel, the spreadsheet highlights your most repinned pins using their URLs as a frame of reference.
When looking at the Most Repinned report, try to identify any patterns in the content getting the most repins. This will help inform your content creation needs for the future, letting your business focus on creating content that will definitely resonate on Pinterest.
You may notice that visuals featuring quotes, food, wedding suggestions, bright colors, how-to’s, long-form visuals, original content, high-resolution photos, etc., are common trends present throughout the content getting the most traction on Pinterest for your account.
When you identify the types of content getting the most repins from your account and website that resonate, you can better inform your future content creation efforts to focus on the most successful categories.
Remember, it’s always helpful to experiment with your social channels to see what does and doesn’t work, so make sure to constantly try new things and use this report to ascertain your success.
#6: Most Clicked Content
One way to understand how Pinterest drives traffic to your website is to take into account the data available in the Most Clicked Content report. To access which pins from your website and account are driving the most traffic to your web properties, click on the Most Clicked tab on the top navigation of the analytics dashboard.
Much like the Most Repinned tab, the Most Clicked tab displays the pins from a select date range, but in this case filtered by which content drives the most traffic to your website. Understanding what content on Pinterest drives the most traffic to your website is very important because it’s a step closer to understanding the potential to generate revenue.
A study conducted by Convertro showed that Pinterest as of April 2012 was responsible for 17.4% of all social media revenue for ecommerce sites over both Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, consider focusing on driving your Pinterest traffic to your website if Pinterest is a good fit for your business. This may prove to be more beneficial than generating traffic from other major social networks in terms of the amount of revenue your business may be able to generate.
With this in mind, take the time to see which pins drive traffic to your website and look to create similar visual content in the future. This metric can also be used to determine if the Pin It button on your website is driving your web visitors to pin particular images to their boards on Pinterest.
If you’ve added a Pin It button to visual content on your website and this same content often appears in the Most Clicked or Most Repinned reports, then the Pin It button is helping drive engagement on Pinterest and could drive potential revenue to your website.
Bonus Insights
It’s also possible to measure the visits, revenue and number of orders generated from your Pinterest traffic through third-party web analytics software like Google Analytics.
The Pinterest analytics tool will give you insights into how much traffic was driven to your website. But Google Analytics, which is also free, can give you insights into what revenue that traffic helped generate for your business.
The addition of a third-party tool can bring the measurement of your Pinterest marketing full circle.
To access this report and understand the traffic, orders and revenue driven from Pinterest in Google Analytics, and any other referral source for that matter, start by clicking on Traffic Sources under Standard Reports. From there, click on the Sources drop-down menu and visit the Referrals report.
From the Referrals report, you’ll see the top referral sources from the specific date range listed from the top traffic-driving sources in descending order. Go to the search bar in the middle of the screen, type out “Pinterest” and then search. This is where you can search any particular referral source and have the report focus solely on that channel.
Once you’ve pulled up your Pinterest traffic, click on Pinterest.com to specifically see the insights about that website. From this report, you’ll be able to learn more about the visits, average time on site, bounce rate and more from your Pinterest traffic.
To see what revenue Pinterest drives, simply click on Ecommerce at the top left-hand side of your website under the Explorer menu next to Site Usage and Goal Set 1.
There are many other third-party tools on the market to effectively measure your marketing efforts on Pinterest. Some of these tools are free like Pinpuff, PinReach and Repinly, while others are paid measurement solutions like Curalate, Piqora and Reachli.
What do you think? What metrics are you focusing on when it comes to your Pinterest campaigns? Are you actively using the Pinterest analytics tool or are you more keen on using third-party tools? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Discover Proven Marketing Strategies and Tips
Want to go even deeper with your marketing? Check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast! Publishing weekly since 2012, the Social Media Marketing Podcast helps you navigate the constantly changing marketing jungle, with expert interviews from marketing pros.
But don’t let the name fool you. This show is about a lot more than just social media marketing. With over 600 episodes and millions of downloads each year, this show has been a trusted source for marketers for well over a decade.
