Pinterest Marketing for Your Business
You’ve been working hard on your Pinterest marketing. You’ve created some great content, you’re starting to see an increase or worse – a decrease! – in your followers and your traffic … but how can you really know what’s going on with your Pinterest strategy?
How can you figure out what parts of your Pinterest plan are working and what needs tweaking?
Like any other social site, Pinterest has been adding new features and removing some of the things that we’ve used to monitor our Pinterest accounts. And like all the other Pinners, I was doing my best to keep up with the changes and shift my marketing strategy to work with these new features.
In my usual fashion, I started to run a couple of Pinterest experiments. At one point, I even shut down all my promoted pins just to see what would happen when I went purely organic.
As I was running my experiments, I discovered one of the best kept secrets about how to see what’s working with your Pinterest marketing plan, which boards are the best place to pin your content and how to see which pins were getting clicks back to your website.
How to Review Your Pinterest Plan
When was the last time that you clicked into your Pinterest Analytics? This is the best place to find all this crunchy Pinterest goodness that I’m going to share with you in the Pinterest Review Guide.
To find your analytics, you must have a business account. If you haven’t converted your personal account to a business one, go to the Pinterest Help section and look for the information to convert your account to a business account. It’s super easy and you won’t lose any of your pins or boards when you convert your account.
For those of you who already have a business account, just go to your profile page, click on the three dots and go to the Analytics links in the drop down list of options.
An overview page will open up and you’ll see three different sections. Take a few minutes to click around in each of the sections to get the full view of what’s going on with your Pinterest account.
To get more information about how to dig deep into your Pinterest Analytics to learn more about the people you’re reaching and how they’re finding your pins, download your FREE copy of the Pinterest Review Guide.
What Boards Should You Pin Your Content On?
One of the questions I get asked all the time in a Pinterest coaching session is, “How do I know where to pin my blog posts?”
Most of us have at least 25 boards of our own and have joined anywhere from 10 – 20 Group boards. Unless you want to do a manual repin count every time you pin your content somewhere, it can get pretty confusing trying to figure out which boards are actively sharing your pins.
With your Pinterest Analytics, we have not just one but TWO places where we can find this information! The first place is by clicking into Your Pinterest Profile section and then scrolling down to the Boards with the Top Impressions section.
Another option is to click into the Activity from your website section. You’ll find an area called Boards with the Top Impression section under your top pins.
The difference is that your Profile is giving you the numbers for the views your pins get on Pinterest. The Board section in the Activity from your website is showing you the views your pins DIRECTLY from your website are getting on Pinterest.
PLEASE NOTE: As I started to work through the process of using my Pinterest Analytics to review which boards are my top boards to pin, I noticed that there was a difference in the results between those who use a Pinterest scheduler and those who pin manually.
Because of the programming connected to a scheduler, this is directly affecting what is showing up in your results in your analytics. If you program your scheduler to pin to more of your personal boards then those will show up higher in your results due to the frequency of pinning from your scheduler.
To see which board { yours or a Group board } is driving the most traffic from Pinterest, take a look at the Board section in the Activity from your website section.
If you are using a scheduler, I recommend that you compare these numbers to what you’re seeing in your monthly scheduler reports. Look for patterns. Notice which boards show up in both your Pinterest Analytics and your scheduler reports.
When you see the same boards showing up in your Pinterest Analytics and your scheduler report, you can be sure that these are the best boards for you to pin your blog posts, online programs and downloadable ebooks and printables.
Your Top Pinterest Pins
What does it really mean when you hear someone talking about your Top Content?
When I reference the words ‘top content,’ I’m referring to the pins that you’ve shared on Pinterest that are getting the most repins and the most clicks to your website.
While the boards that you’re pinning to { this includes your boards and Group boards } are important in your review so you know WHERE to post, it’s really the content of your pins that Pinterest cares the most about when it comes to your ranking and how often your pins are being shown to other Pinners.
For those of you who don’t know about Pinterest’s ranking { or just need a reminder! }, this part of the Pinterest process is connected something called Smart Feed.
Let’s start from the beginning – what is Pinterest’s Smart Feed? Basically Pinterest assigns a score or a ranking to each pin that gets uploaded to the social site.
The Smart Feed ranking is based on these three factors:
- The quality of your pin’s image
- The quality of the source or website link that’s connected to the pin
- Interests you’re following
Then Pinterest uses the pin’s rankings combines it with your interests { the type of content you pin } and pops them into your home feed. The order of when the pins are uploaded to the site no longer makes a difference in what you see when you log on for your next pinning session.
Pinterest now shows you the images that rank highest in their Smart Feed three-factor criteria. And then they drop in a feature called Related Pins based on your interests and what content they believe you want to see in your home feed.
And this is what we see when we click on that red Pinterest app and start scrolling through the pins in our home feed.
As you’re looking at your analytics, I want you to think about this with regards to how you develop your pinning strategy: The top boards we pin to help active Pinners find us but it’s really our content that we share on Pinterest is how we grow our traffic.
How can you find out which pins are your top content?
The best place to start gathering this information is to go to the Activity from your website section, go to the CLICKS section and review your top pins that sent your site traffic in the last 30 days.
Impressions are good to look at and seeing your number of repins are totally cool BUT – we want people to come to our website. We want people to read our posts, check out our online programs and download our workbooks.
Chances are, you’re going to see duplicate images of the same pin listed in the Most Clicked list. To see where these pins with the highest click numbers came from, you can click on the pin, scroll down under the pin description and you’ll see the details about who pinned your pin and what board it was pinned to.
If you want to learn how to use the Most Clicked Pins information to see what’s connecting with other Pinners looking for your content, download your Free copy of the Pinterest Review Guide to walk through a quick exercise to connect with more customers:
Individual Pin Stats
Recently Pinterest added a new feature that allows us to view statistics on a specific pin called “Your Pin Stats.”
This feature is available only to Pinterest Business Accounts and to view your Individual Pin Stats, just click on the chart image on your pin { on desktop only! } and you’ll see the engagement numbers of your pin.
The Individual Pin Stats takes up to 36 hours before you can see your engagement information. Which means that it’ll at least a day before you can see how your pin is performing on the board it’s pinned to.
Also note that the number we’re seeing on our pins is no longer a total repin number but a combination of the pin’s impressions, clicks and saves.
Let’s start with the basic parts of the Pin Stats – the numbers!
The first line gives you a number about how many times this specific pin { not the repins of this pin } has appeared in the Pinterest feed. This number is your total impressions { eyes on your pin }.
The first number in the next line is something called Closeups – this is the number of times someone clicked on the pin to get a “closer look” at the pin, maybe to read the pin descriptions or see the full image.
The next number is Clicks — this is the MOST important number! — it shows the number of times that people have clicked on the pin to go to your website.
The last number is Saves – which is their word for repin. This is the number of times that a pinner has saved it to a board. When someone saves your Pin, your stats will reflect that save, but you won’t see any of the additional activity that new, saved version of the Pin gets.
I also ran a little experiment to see what would happen if I did a repin of one my viral pins. I repinned my own content, to my own board { not a group board } and basically what happened?
Every time you repin your content, your pin will start from zero. We are no longer seeing the aggregate repin number on our content. Each pin is its own new piece of content, no matter how many times you’ve repinned it to a group board.
What does this mean for your Pinterest Strategy?
It means we need to go back to the basics of pinning. It means that to ensure that your content gets added into Pinterest’s algorithm of what shows up in the search, you need to make sure that you’re repinning from your original image to your group boards and personal boards.
Those repins will grow on their own { especially if this is great content! } but you should focus on the original pin and get as many repins to that one as possible to reach more people on Pinterest.
Get your Pinterest Review Guide
You’ve been working hard on your Pinterest marketing but how do you know what’s working? Download your Free copy of the Pinterest Review Guide and get the steps to review the following information about your Pinterest strategy:
- Your Pinterest Followers
- Are they finding you on mobile or desktop or both?
- What boards should you pin your blog posts and promotions to?
- What pins are getting shared the most?
- How to understand the information in the Individual Pin Stats
- How to use your Google Analytics to track your Pinterest traffic
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