Use Pinterest’s Analytics to Fine Tune Social Media Strategies

With more than 100 million active users and 5 million pins saved on the image-centric social media network every day, you likely already understand the potential Pinterest has for reaching prospective customers, if you use it correctly. (Click to Tweet)

Once you’ve covered the basics, such as optimizing your account settings and establishing goals and schedules for including Pinterest in your social media strategy, it’s time to see whether your strategies for using Pinterest are working.

Luckily, Pinterest provides a wealth of analytics right within its site for business accounts. Let’s look at what numbers you can get from Pinterest’s own analytics reports and how they can guide your future pinning efforts.

Pinterest has been collecting profile repin and click data since Feb. 1, 2014, so if you were already established with a Pinterest business account at that time, you have nearly two years of data to comb through and absorb. (Click to Tweet)

Here are a few of the data points to keep tabs on through your Pinterest analytics:

• Average daily impressions (how many times your pins showed up in the home feed, search results or category feeds)

• Average daily viewers (how many users see your pins)

• Pins with the most impressions

• Pins with the most repins (other Pinterest users pinning your pins to their boards)

• Pins with the most clicks

• Boards with the most pins, impressions and repins

Reviewing the above metrics from the last 30 days gives you a snapshot of what your Pinterest followers and others are doing now, and which types of content and topics are most popular. Perhaps you notice that pins of recipes get the most repins, and that your most popular board is a holiday entertaining board. Those would be cues to generate or share more holiday entertaining recipes in order to continue giving users what they are looking for.

You can also go beyond the last 30 days and see what pins have historically done well by reviewing your “all-time” Pinterest analytics. Since content and pins may find new life long after the original posting date, taking this long-range view will help you identify top performance factors such as search ranking also.

Among the metrics included in your all-time report:

• All-time most repinned pins

• Best in search (pins that rank highly in search when someone searches for relevant terms)

• Power pins (all-time high engagement, including a combination of likes, comments and more)

Reviewing these all-time stats, going back nearly two years (if your account has been open that long) gives you a broader view beyond a 30-days snapshot, which could be influenced by seasonal activity, depending on your industry.

By comparing what your top performing pins have in common (Are they all “how-to” instructions or infographics? Do they share a common topic?), you can refine your Pinterest strategy to include more of the pins your visitors are looking for and interacting with.

Pinterest also provides insight into who is viewing, repinning and commenting on your pins. The network’s audience analytics include demographic details such as country, language, metro (for the United States only) and gender. The metrics also give a glimpse into what categories your followers interact with most, the boards to which your followers have added your pins and other businesses your audience engages with. Seeing how your audience organizes the pins they find on your boards is a great way to understand their perception of your brand and content, and to see what problems your content is solving for them.

While knowing what is happening on your Pinterest account is important, you should also be tracking how Pinterest contributes to your overall marketing objectives. I’ll tackle that in a second part of this discussion Thursday, detailing how to use tracking tokens to track website traffic referred to your site by Pinterest, plus how to measure when other people pin from your website.

There are more tips on making the most of your Pinterest presence in our ebook, How to Optimize and Measure Your Pinterest Business Account. Download it now.