Social media can be an effective tool to drive traffic to your website, increase sales or help meet other digital marketing goals. Over the past decade, Pinterest has been one of the most popular platforms for businesses that are trying to broaden their reach. The use of analytic tools allows you to learn more about which posts work, which don’t and how you make the most of your time and effort on the site.
Table of Contents
- How to Gain Access to Pinterest Analytics
- Visibility Is Critical
- What it all means
- Top Pins and Top Boards Explained
- How to Measure Engagement
- How to Improve Your Odds of Success on Pinterest
- Success Often Breeds More Success
- Make Use of A/B Testing
- Don’t Worry Too Much About Follower Size
- Identify People Who You Might Want to Work With
How to Gain Access to Pinterest Analytics
To gain access to Pinterest’s suite of analytics tools, you’ll need to create a business account. If you already have a personal account, you can choose to convert it to a business account. However, it’s generally better to have separate accounts to ensure that you are providing relevant material to your audience. For instance, if you are running a flower shop, you don’t want to force a potential customer to sift through baby pictures just to get to flower arrangements.
Visibility Is Critical
The first metric that you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with is the number of impressions that your posts get. What are impressions on Pinterest? You credit for an impression each time that your pin is seen by another site user, and this is true whether the view was organic or purchased as part of an advertising campaign. Generally speaking, the more Pinterest impressions that your posts get, the more likely that others will share or otherwise engage with it.
What it all means
Pinterest Business Account provides valuable insights into how content is performing on the platform, helping users to refine their strategies and understand their audience better. Each metric offered within Pinterest Analytics gives a different perspective on the reach, engagement, and effectiveness of the individual pins.
The analytics tab gives you an at-a-glance view of your pin performance, top Pins and top boards, and specific metrics and filters (e.g., date range). These metrics are broken down below:
Impressions
- What it is: Impressions measure the total number of times people see a pin in the Home feed, category feeds, search results, or on Pinterest boards. This metric indicates the visibility of your content on Pinterest.
- Why it matters: High impressions mean your content is widely visible, increasing the chances of engagement (e.g., video views). It’s essential for understanding the reach of your Pinterest pins.
Engagements
- What it is: Engagements on Pinterest include all interactions Pinterest users have with your pins, such as saves, closeups, link clicks, video pins and carousel card swipes.
- Why it matters: This Pinterest metric helps you understand how compelling and interesting your content is to your audience. Higher engagement rates typically indicate content that resonates well with viewers.
Outbound Clicks
- What it is: Outbound clicks track how many times users clicked through a pin to visit the linked website outside of Pinterest.
- Why it matters: It’s a critical metric for assessing the effectiveness of Pinterest as a traffic driver to your website. High outbound clicks suggest your content successfully encourages viewers to take action, encourages conversions, and engage further with your brand or products. You can combine Pinterest analytics with Google Analytics to monitor conversions.
Saves
- What it is: Saves (formerly known as repins) indicate how many times users saved your pin to one of their boards.
- Why it matters: Saves extend the life and visibility of your pins beyond initial impressions. They signify that people find your content valuable enough to bookmark and share with others, which can amplify reach and engagement over time.
Total Audience
- What it is: Total Audience refers to the total number of unique viewers who saw your pins during a given period.
- Why it matters: This metric gives an overview of how large your potential audience is on Pinterest. Understanding the size and trends of your audience can help in tailoring content to broader or more specific groups, depending on your goals.
Engaged Audience
- What it is: Engaged Audience represents the subset of your Total Audience that interacted with your content through saves, pin clicks, or other forms of engagement.
- Why it matters: Knowing how many viewers are actively engaging with your content, as opposed to just seeing it, provides audience insights into the quality and relevance of your pins. A high engaged audience indicates strong content resonance and effectiveness in prompting user interaction.
Each of these metrics offers insights into different aspects of your Pinterest performance, from broad visibility to specific actions taken by viewers. By analyzing these metrics, you can identify what types of content perform best, when to post, and how to adjust your Pinterest strategy for maximum impact and engagement.
Top Pins and Top Boards Explained
In Pinterest Analytics, “Top Boards” and “Top Pins” are metrics that provide insights into how your content is performing on Pinterest. Both metrics are crucial for understanding user engagement and optimizing your Pinterest strategy. Let’s dive into what each term means:
Top Boards
“Top Boards” refers to the Pinterest boards that generate the most engagement from your audience. Engagement can include actions such as repins, click rate and views. This metric is essential for understanding which boards are attracting the most attention and engaging users effectively. By analyzing your top boards, you can gain insights into:
- Content Preferences: What types of content your audience prefers.
- Trends: Current trends or themes that are resonating with your audience.
- Performance Over Time: How the engagement on specific boards changes over time, helping you to adapt your content strategy accordingly.
Improving your boards based on this data can help increase visibility and engagement across your Pinterest account.
Top Pins
“Top Pins” refers to the individual pins that have received the most engagement from users. This metric shows which of your pins are most popular in terms of repins, click-through rates, and views. Understanding your top pins is crucial for several reasons:
- Content Strategy: Identifies what types of content perform best, allowing you to tailor future pins to match these successful elements.
- User Insights: Provides insights into your audience’s preferences, helping you understand what drives engagement.
- Optimization Opportunities: Highlights successful pins that could be further optimized or promoted through paid advertising to maximize their reach and engagement.
By focusing on your top pins, you can refine your content creation and promotional strategies to better align with what your audience wants to see.
How to Use These Insights
- Content Creation: Tailor your content strategy based on the insights gained from your top boards and pins. Focus on creating more content that aligns with these successful themes or formats.
- Promotion Strategy: Consider using Pinterest’s paid promotion options to further boost the visibility of your top-performing pins.
- Board Organization: Rearrange your boards, highlighting your top boards to make them more accessible to new and existing followers.
- Seasonal or Trend Analysis: Use changes in your top boards and pins to identify seasonal trends or shifts in user interests, adapting your content strategy accordingly.
In summary, “Top Boards” and “Top Pins” in Pinterest Analytics are powerful metrics that offer deep insights into audience engagement and content performance. By leveraging these insights, brands and content creators can optimize their Pinterest strategy to better connect with their audience and achieve their marketing objectives.
How to Measure Engagement
While you want to have as many impressions on your pins as possible, it’s only the first step in accomplishing your marketing goals. Ideally, you will get some sort of engagement on your pins as well. Examples of engagement include comments on your posts, shares and saves. Outbound clicks are another example of engagement that can help to indicate that a particular piece of content is doing well.
In addition to overall engagement figures, Pinterest also allows you to keep track of engagement as a percentage of your overall following. This helps you better understand who is most interested in your content and provide some insight into why they are engaging while others aren’t. It can also help you get a better sense of how many of your followers are humans as opposed to bots, which may skew your numbers and have a negative impact on ad campaigns.
How to Improve Your Odds of Success on Pinterest
There are a number of steps that you can take in an effort to increase visibility and engagement. For instance, it’s typically a good idea to post content at the same time each day or week. Doing so allows your audience to anticipate when your new posts will come out and make it a point to view them.
You can also draw new viewers by posting during peak times. Generally speaking, posting on weekdays is preferable to posting on weekends while it’s often best to post between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on any day that you choose to upload new content.
Increasing engagement can be as simple as posting a call-to-action (CTA) on a given post. For example, you could ask your viewers to post a comment telling you what you think about your latest pin or to click a link to your website for more information.
Success Often Breeds More Success
Engagement on your posts is important primarily because you can’t meet your goals if people aren’t interested in what they see. However, engagement is also important because Pinterest’s algorithm determines the overall quality of your content based on what gets clicked, shared or saved the most.
Essentially, if your content is getting positive reactions from your audience, it will be made visible to site viewers as a whole. This means that you can expand your reach without having to put in any extra effort.
If you are paying for views, clicks or other actions, getting greater exposure for free reduces your overall marketing costs. Ultimately, you are able to reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA) or whatever other metric you’re using to judge the success of a given campaign.
Make Use of A/B Testing
The concept of A/B testing has been around for decades and is a relatively straightforward way to determine which content strategies work best. You start with a control piece of content and measure its impression and engagement rate. Then, you post another piece of content that is different from the first piece in some meaningful way. For example, you might change the font of the text used in a given post or use a different CTA.
You might also use A/B testing to determine which type of content is best for your audience. In some cases, you may find that videos work better than pictures when it comes to increasing your visibility or engagement. Alternatively, you may find that one type of content is simply better than others as it relates to getting people to take the types of actions that you’re hoping they’ll take.
Don’t Worry Too Much About Follower Size
You may have considered using analytic tools to create strategies designed to increase your follower size. Although there is nothing wrong with trying to increase your audience, it may not be the best use of your time, money and pinterest marketing efforts.
This is because the site’s algorithm will largely determine who sees your content. Therefore, whether you have 100 followers or 1,000 followers, you have similar odds of a piece of content going viral or meeting your other goals.
Of course, it’s still good to have a tangible following because those people are almost guaranteed to see your posts when they go up. Furthermore, a small base of energized brand ambassadors can help to ensure that your content is seen and shared to some degree.
Overall though, creating quality content is the best way to increase impressions and the chances of having your content liked, saved and shared. It also increases the likelihood that you’ll drive clicks to your website or meet your other key metrics.
Identify People Who You Might Want to Work With
In addition to helping you learn more about your audience, you may be able to use analytic tools to discover other users who you might want to follow. You can also discover users who you might want to collaborate with or otherwise work with to meet your marketing goals.
For example, you might discover someone in your niche who generates millions of pin impressions per post or who is good at optimizing content for clicks. It may also be beneficial to work with someone who may be adjacent to your niche who may have some influence over your target market.
Let’s say that you run a dog grooming business, and you’ve recently discovered a user who runs an animal shelter in your area. After analyzing the numbers, you might decide that you want to work with this person to promote your business. In such a scenario, you could reach out offering free grooming services for the shelter in exchange for exposure.
Each party wins in this arrangement because you get to come across as someone who cares for the community. You also get extra exposure without spending a lot of time or money. The other party wins because the rescue gets additional resources to help keep their animals in good health and to get them ready for a potential adoption.
When used properly, Pinterest can be a powerful tool to help you meet your content marketing goals. The folks at SEO North would be more than happy to help you make with Pinterest Marketing Strategy or other marketing tools as part of a comprehensive road map to success. You can contact us today to learn more about our services or to get started with your own SEO plan.
Published on: 2024-03-25
Updated on: 2024-11-06
