Tracking Your Pinterest Traffic: What You Need to Know

Measurement is an essential part of the marketing process, providing needed information to allow you to optimize your efforts for the best possible ROI. Your social media accounts are no exemption.

We’ve talked about the importance, and ease, of keeping tabs on what is happening on your business Pinterest account. Now, let’s step back and investigate how Pinterest interacts with the rest of your marketing efforts.

There are two primary areas we want to look at: traffic that arrives at your website from your Pinterest account and pins, and website visitors who share links to your website on Pinterest.

First, how is your own Pinterest account translating into results for your business?

Setting up proper analytics tools, in addition to Pinterest’s own metrics, can help you track the connection. There are five key overall engagement metrics you to review from both a broader business perspective and how Pinterest is supporting the goals. (Click to tweet)

The first step, however, is utilizing tracking tokens that allows your analytics system to provide the information you need. If you are using HubSpot already, you are in luck— HubSpot’s analytics and social media tools automatically add these tokens and track the following five metrics for you.

(Not a HubSpot user? Request a demo and let us show you how easy it is to use closed-loop marketing.)

If you aren’t using HubSpot, you can manually create a token, which should be added to the end of any link you share on Pinterest. The token tells your analytics software which channel your visit, lead or customer came from (such as social) and which specific social source the person came from (e.g. Pinterest).

The tracking token looks like this:

/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=pinterest

With tokens in place, you can track these five metrics:

• Visits

• Contacts/leads

• Visits-to-contacts rate

• Customers

• Contacts-to-customers rate

Visits: This is self-explanatory — how many visitors come from Pinterest to your website?

Contacts or leads: This is the number of new people who have shown interest in your company by converting on a form on your website. That conversion may have been by downloading an ebook, accessing a coupon, or subscribing to your blog. They are potential customers.

Visits-to-contacts rate: This looks at the rate at which visitors become contacts. While raw visit numbers are important, the conversion rate can tell you whether your Pinterest strategy is successfully matching your company with the people who are seeking what you offer.

Customers: This requires following a person’s path from Pinterest to your website, where they are converted in a contact or lead and ultimately closed as a customer. This number is the true measure of your Pinterest marketing ROI.

Contacts-to-customers rate: This metric can help you identify problems in sales’ ability to close your Pinterest contacts as customers. Do these leads need to be addressed differently?

All of these metrics are based on your own Pinterest material, items you have pinned with a tracking token included that link back to your website. But what about when other people visit your website and pin links to their own boards?

That is where Pinterest’s own analytics come back into play, with their website analytics. In order to access these, you do need to have your website verified — see how to do that here.

Pinterest’s website analytics allow you to do see how content from your website is performing on Pinterest, including all pins that link back to your website, not just those from your own profile. The analytics can show you impressions, repins and clicks.

Seeing the top things other people have pinned from your website can provide insight into what you may want to pin on your own boards, along with showing you what parts of your website are currently attracting the most interest.

Seeing what boards other people are pinning your website on can provide insight into your audience and customers, what they are thinking, and how they think about your products.

Pinterest also has an “original pins” report that shows how many unique pins are created from your website each day. In order to maximize the impact, consider how easy it is for website visitors to pin from your site. Using a Pin It button that is easily found can increase the chances of visitors pinning your content, sharing it so their followers will see it as well.

And, since nearly three-fourths of Pinterest usage takes place on a mobile device, be sure your mobile site has the Pin It button as well.

If you do use the Pin It button, Pinterest’s analytics will generate a special 7-day report with a snapshot view of how many impressions pins from your website received, how many times they were repinned, and how many times those repins led to clicks back to your website.

Of course, analytics are only useful if you take what you learn and put it back to work. Use what you know about the current performance of your Pinterest account, along with the best practices outlined in Optimize & Measure Your Pinterest Business Account and generate even better results next year.

This was Part 2 of our look at using Pinterest’s analytics tool; if you missed Part 1, check it out here.