Pinterest Web Analytics- A Pintroduction

by Startacus Admin

Here at Startacus, we’ll never give up championing the importance of including social media in the marketing strategy of your start-up venture... it’s like really...really important.

You seasoned social media masters out there are no-doubt well versed in using web analytics to gain insight into how customers are interacting with your online content. But for those of you who stare slightly bemused at the mention of such things, we’ve compiled a short introduction to the basic uses of Pinterest’s new offering to the field of social media - Pinterest Web Analytics.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo-sharing website that gives users the opportunity to create their own image collections based around a central theme or categorisation. Many businesses are finding it to be a valuable tool in their marketing strategy as these collections serve as something of a virtual storefront, allowing customers to browse a wide selection of products with ease and visit their website if they so choose. A study by Converto in 2012 found that Pinterest was responsible for 17.4% of e-commerce sites' revenue from social media which is markedly more than facebook or Twitter- so it's fair to say that having a firm grip of your company’s Pinterest presence has the potential to create huge benefits. Check out our article Pinterest for Business for lots more info on the benefits of using pinterest.

What is Pinterest Analytics?

In a nutshell, Pinterest's new analytics tool allows you to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your company’s Pinterest presence, giving you the ability to identify patterns of activity and decide how best to use the site. At the most basic level, account owners are able to see how many people have pinned content from their website and gauge the volume of traffic which has been driven in their direction. This info is presented chronologically which makes it easy to recognize peaks/troughs that you can then correlate with specific events on your website to analyse what is creating most interest amongst your target market.

Why is Pinterest Analytics Useful?

Arguably the most useful business aspect of Pinterest is the potential it creates for your visual content to be seen by an enormous number of people through pins being created from your website and repinned from your Pinterest account. There is a nifty feature of the analytics tool that allows you to see not only the level of pinning and repinning taking place but also the combined number of followers that your content has potentially reached- this will give you a clear view of the daily/weekly/monthly exposure of your content.

If you want to understand how Pinterest drives traffic to your website you need only take a look at your personalized “clicked content” report which will instantly identify which of your pins are generating enough intrigue to warrant a visit to your website. From this you can analyse patterns in what visual content is proving most effective and use this information to streamline your future content and trim back that which is failing to deliver.

At this stage the existing analytic tool doesn’t allow you to access data on the revenue and number of orders generated by traffic from Pinterest. But luckily this information can be easily obtained from other web analytic software such as Google Analytics which also allows you to view these figures represented as a percentage of your overall activity- seriously clever stuff!

All sound a bit complicated and fiddly?

It’s really not!  The world has waited a long time for Pinterest to come up with its own analytics tool and thankfully they have delivered a system which is straightforward, user friendly and above all gives easy and instant access to how effectively you are using the site.

If you like this post you might like our previous Pinterest post Tips for using Pinterest for Business...

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• #pinterest
• #social media
• #analytics

Published on: 5th September 2013