How To With Pinterest Analytics

Are you using Pinterest yet? Discovered new Pinterest Analytics yet?

If not, you should give it a whirl — especially if your target audience includes women who make up a full 80% of Pinterest users. Last month, Pinterest became an even more awesome social media tool by introducing analytics.

Pinterest Analytics

OK, so Pinterest analytics aren’t really new, but the team introduced enhanced analytics last month.

According to Mashable (read the article linked above), businesses across the globe now have access to:

• # of users who engage with your brand’s pins
• where they’re from
• their interests based on activity on Pinterest
• offsite data from websites with the Pin It button

Obviously, Pinterest needed to boost its bare-bones analytics dashboard in the face of new analytics options at Twitter and Instagram if it wanted to compete with its bigger cousins for advertising dollars. I lean heavily toward Facebook advertising with clients just because I not only have better analytics to support the ROI of these efforts but because of enhanced targeting. At least with better analytics, Pinterest joins my list of preferred digital advertising options presented to clients.

How to use Pinterest Analytics

Set-up

You’ll need a business account on Pinterest to use Pinterest Analytics. It’s easy to set up a new business account or you can convert your existing account to a business account (see arrow).

Then, as with many social media analytics tools, you’ll need to install a JAVA snippet that tracks what’s happening on your website.

It used to take a little knowledge to install the tracking code in the head section of your website, but now, you simply add it using the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin — if you’re using WordPress. Otherwise, give it to your developer to install. If you don’t know what you’re doing, going into the coding can create long-term problems for your website performance, so don’t monkey around and, if you do, make a clean backup ahead of time.

Of course, adding the tracking code only gives limited information about how your visitors use the Pin It button, which is all that was available until last month. Now, you also get information about how Pinterest users engage with your PinBoards.

Pinterest Analytics Dashboard

Your Pinterest Analytics Dashboard contains several elements providing insights to help optimize your Pinterest marketing campaigns.

• An overview of your profile
• Insights into your audience
• Performance from your website
• And, finally, Top Pin impressions

The profile, audience, and website sections (see left) each contain a MORE button (on the right) that provides deeper insights.

Profile – gives you impressions, repins, and clicks from your Pinterest boards as tabs.

Audience – This section gives you insights regarding country (and city), language, and gender. In the interests tab, you get something like the image below — not sure why folks using my PinBoards are interested in thigh tattoos, but it’s definitely something worth considering.

Website performance – selecting MORE gives you information about impressions, repins, and clicks using the Pin It button on your website.

Top Pin Impressions – this is really insightful information about how much various pins perform. Notice the arrow points to the top-performing posts — which is the one generating the most clicks and repins (behaviors) not simply the highest number of impressions (simply displaying the pin).

How to use Pinterest Analytics

Having all this data is great, but doing something with it is what counts!

So, how do you use Pinterest Analytics to increase your ROI?

Good question — and the right one. Data doesn’t increase ROI, it’s what you do with it that does.

Know your audience

What’s important to them?

Who are they?

Where do they live?

It’s important to know your audience in any marketing campaign. Knowing your audience gives insights into which images are likely to perform better (in general, folks buy from folks who look like them), when to pin (although pinning is less time-sensitive, it’s good to pin when folks are checking out Pinterest rather than sleeping), and what product likely appeal to them (based on hypothetical lifestyle).

The interest information comes in handy in lots of ways. For instance, remember the weird result that my community is interested in thigh tattoos. As a social media agency, I don’t have a lot to say about thigh tattoos, but I can use images containing thigh tattoos in my posts to stimulate interest. Or, I can construct a post using a thigh tattoo as a simile for something business-related.

Knowing your audience should also suggest other marketing tactics for success, such as changing your product lineup to align more closely with your audience. For instance, if your audience is older women in urban areas, maybe you use that information to develop or buy products that fit that lifestyle, such as stylish bags to bring home groceries.

Pin performance

You get pin performance data from your website, your profile, and across your PinBoards. Use this information to guide future Pins. For instance, test out several product images then settle on the one generating the best performance on Pinterest — ie. most clicks, most Re-Pins.

If you’ve set up your Google Analytics with goal completions and funnels, you can segment performance based on source to even determine which Pin image converts best.

Your turn

Questions?

Comments?

I’m here to help. Just post them in the section below.

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