Pinterest analytics tools help you track key metrics around how people are interacting with your brand on Pinterest. Having this data allows you to refine and improve your Pinterest marketing efforts. Analytics can also provide you with invaluable audience insights, which you can use to further optimize your strategy.
Here’s our guide to using Pinterest analytics, including a carefully curated selection of tools to measure success.
Here are six key benefits of using Pinterest analytics to measure success on the platform.
Like any social network, you can’t just jump in and start posting willy-nilly. You need a realistic Pinterest strategy, complete with the goals you want to achieve. These goals underpin (no pun intended) your whole strategy. They determine what audience you target, what content you post, and what form that content will take and tone it will use. (Here’s our post on setting smart social media goals for more on that.)
Pinterest analytics lets you measure whether or not you are achieving your goals on Pinterest, and helps you demonstrate how Pinterest contributes to your overall social media return on investment (ROI).
One of the main benefits of social media is how public it is, which makes it easy to see what your competition is up to. You can use Pinterest analytics to dive deeper and quickly identify your main competitors on the network by seeing which other brands your audience engages with.
By then reviewing these competitors’ Pins, you can see which content your audience likes and responds to, and use those insights to build up a more complete picture of your audience that will help you to compete for clicks and eyeballs.
Your Pinterest strategy should always be aligned with your overall social media marketing plan. Pinterest analytics let you gather insights you can use to improve your website based on how people interact with the Save button (formerly the Pin it button). You can also track which content from your website is shared on Pinterest by people using the Save button to add your content to Pinterest.
A common goal of any social media campaign is to drive traffic to your main website. Pinterest analytics can tell you exactly how much referral traffic you are gaining through Pinterest. This can help strengthen your case for using the network or when asking for more marketing budget or resources, as well as highlighting where you need to make improvements to drive more traffic.
Your success on Pinterest, as with all social media networks, largely depends on creating high-quality content that your audience wants. Pinterest analytics let you understand how people interact with your Pins, which enables you to duplicate successful content, cut what isn’t working, and further optimize what is.
Pinterest analytics also provide insights that can help you to not only refine your strategy, but also better understand your customers in general.
With Pinterest, you can access detailed demographic data about your audience to help you understand who they are and what interests them.
The unique visual nature of Pinterest—and how it’s as much about discovering new things as searching for something specific—lets you build up a more complete picture of who your customers are in general. That helps Pinterest more than pull its weight as part of your social media strategy, and contribute to your overall business goals in a meaningful—and highly visual—way.
The next section will show you how to put this into action and track your Pinterest analytics.
Pinterest analytics let you track and measure specific things to determine how your Pins are performing and ultimately impacting your bottom line. There are three main areas to focus on:
While there are overlaps, the different metrics you can track for each of the Pinterest analytics sections are outlined below.
This is how the content of your actual Pinterest Boards and Pins is performing.
What it measures: The number of times your Pin showed up in the Home Feed, search results, and category areas. The more content you pin, the more impressions you’ll get.
Why it matters: An impression is a view of your content. It gives you an idea of how many people your content is reaching and lets you assess its effectiveness by tracking how many people then click on it.
What it measures: The number of times your Pin has been saved to somebody else’s board.
Why it matters: Sharing is caring. The ultimate measure of how good your content is if someone considers it worthy of sharing with their followers, which also helps you attract new followers. And, by identifying your most repinned content you can gain insights into your audience’s likes and needs, and use your findings to optimize what you create and share going forward.
What it measures: The number of times someone clicks through to your website via a Pin (also see Pinterest website analytics below).
Why it matters: Clicks are a serious measure of social ROI. When someone clicks through to your website from your pinned content it means you’ve grabbed their attention to the extent that they want to get to know you better.
What it measures: Top Pins from the last 30 days, Pins with high repins, Pins with high clicks, your best Pins of all time, etc. You’ll get a breakdown of average daily impressions, average daily viewers, average monthly viewers, and the average monthly engaged viewers you reach.
Why it matters: This lets you identify your best-performing content every month, allowing you to continually refine your Pinterest content strategy.
Pinterest analytics around your audience tell you who follows, connects, and engages with you on the platform.
What it measures: Pinterest analytics audience insights include:
Why it matters: If you don’t know who you are talking to on Pinterest you may as well pack up and go home. And the more you know about your audience’s interests the easier it is to create content they will like and share.
Find out what content people are most likely to Pin or save from your website, and how that content performs on Pinterest.
What it measures: The number of times a Pin from your profile has appeared on home feeds, category feeds, and searches.
Why it matters: Tells you how much reach your content has and gives you an idea of how big your potential audience is.
What it measures: The number of times people have saved, or pinned, content from your website, using a Save button, to one of their own Pinterest Boards.
Why it matters: Saving is another measure of the quality and shareability of your content. Every time someone saves your content to Pinterest, you increase your reach on the platform—leading to more impressions and clicks. Pinterest illustrates this with the example of AllRecipes.com: “Three months after AllRecipes.com added the Save button, they found that people had saved more than 50,000 of their recipes to Pinterest, resulting in 130 million total impressions.”
What it measures: The number of times someone clicks through to your website via a Pin.
Why it matters: Clicks from Pins through to your website show that people are interested in your content and business. It’s the action that proves your content has done its job.
After you decide which metrics matter most to your business, the next step is to begin collecting and analyzing them. Here’s a rundown of some of the top Pinterest analytics tools.
Pinterest Analytics is Pinterest’s free analytics tool. You can access it by creating a Pinterest business account.
The tool allows you to see what Pins and Boards get the most likes, comments, and repins. You can easily gather new data about your audience, including who they are, what they like, and what devices they use to save your content to Pinterest.
Pinterest Analytics also shows how the Save button is performing on your website—and whether it’s directing referral traffic or not.
You also get helpful tips along with your analytics through the Pinterest Analytics dashboard. Another feature is the ability to call up a quick snapshot of the key Pinterest metrics relating to any of your Pins by clicking the stats icon on a Pin.
Tailwind Pinterest Analytics is powered by the Official Pinterest Business Insights API, and accessible through the Tailwind for Pinterest app in Hootsuite. Tailwind does much more than analytics. The Tailwind for Pinterest app allows you to create new Pins, schedule drafts for later, or Pin to multiple boards at once—all from within your Hootsuite dashboard.
It also provides a comprehensive suite of Pinterest analytics tools that enable you to:
ViralWoot offers a range of Pinterest tools, including Pinterest analytics. ViralWoot’s Pinterest Analytics integration lets you see what works for your brand (or not) by enabling you to track a range of metrics and provides guidance and suggestions for improving performance. The tool also lets you track your overall presence, virality, reach, and top-performing content to give you your “Pinfluence Score.”
Curalate dives deeper into what makes popular Pinterest images so popular so you can optimize your Pinterest content strategy.
It uses image-recognition algorithms to identify images your audience most wants to see, tracking the results as it goes and analyzing products as well as Pins. As their website explains, “Our image recognition technology surfaces which of your products are resonating on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook—so you can give your fans more of what they want.”
These Pinterest analytics tools can help you take a regular temperature check of your Pinterest activity. What’s being repinned? What traffic is my Pins generating? What content on my website is being saved to Pinterest?
Just as importantly, Pinterest analytics also helps you get closer to your customers and better understand their interests.
This article was originally published at Blog.hootsuite.com, by author Rob Mathison.
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