How to properly examine your Pinterest Analytics

Last Updated on January 18, 2021 by scottkandh

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

I’ve been looking at my Pinterest analytics and they are all over the map. The picture below shows my Pinterest Impressions for the last 90 days.  I’m tired of looking at my Pinterest impressions and seeing this yo-yo effect of going up and down so I’m going to buckle down and take a new approach of looking at my Pinterest Analytics.  This blog post looks at where to put your focus on improving Pinterest Analytics.  NOTE:  I started at a flat zero because my old Pinterest account was suspended.  I had to restart all over again and I vowed I wouldn’t let that happen again.  So, I got Pinterest savvy to prevent my new account from getting flagged. 

“This post contains affiliate links, which means I will make a commission at no extra cost to you should you click through and make a purchase.“

I read a blog post entitled:  What to when your Pinterest views start to decrease – that helped me to put things into proper perspective as to where we should be putting our focus on Pinterest Analytics and thus where to place the emphasis on properly examining your Pinterest analytics. 

In the past, I haven’t spent too much time researching how to analyze Pinterest.  I probably read this a long time ago.  Matter of fact, one of her Pinterest courses (EllDuclos from Boss Girl Bloggers) was one of the very first Pinterest classes that I participated in taking.  More than likely I gleaned over the subject matter and was looking at beginning to start a blog and not focusing on analyzing the blog. 

Since I’ve been going by the seat of my pins and not knowing where to look, I intuitively took a wild stab that the most important thing to look at is your Pinterest Impressions.  I couldn’t have been farther from the truth.  Your Pinterest Impressions are not an indicator of the MOST important element that you should be paying attention to. 

Ell pointed out that:  “Pinterest monthly views go up and down all the time and sometimes it’s out of our control. BUT, I want to give some tips on what you can do to bring those views back up when they start to drop.”

This post is going to examine what to do when you notice that your views are starting to drop; however, before we examine together what do when your Pinterest views are dropping we’re going we’re going to look at some things that you need to keep in the back of your mind regarding the nuances of Pinterest.

How does the average user utilize Pinterest?

“There are over 200 billion pins saved on Pinterest (Pinterest, 2019). With a total of 300 million Pinterest users, that’s an average of 667 pins per pinner.

Of the 200 billion pins, two-thirds are brand- or product-related pins and recipe-related pins constitute 1.7 billion.

99 percent of pins on Pinterest contain an image – not a surprising Pinterest statistic, considering the visual nature of the platform. However, that’s not to say that all visual elements are equally as popular as just 0.3 percent of all pins have videos.

With more than 14 million articles pinned each day, it’s clear you’ll need a good Pinterest marketing tactic to make sure your pins rise up and stand out from the crowd.

That being said, it might interest you to know that the highest engagement on Pinterest happens on Mondays and Saturdays.”

Pinterest Fun Facts

• There are over 175 billion ideas on Pinterest.
• 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest.
• 72% of pinners use Pinterest to decide what to buy offline.
• Six out of every 10 millennials use Pinterest to discover new products.
• Over 5% of all referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest.
• Two-thirds of pins represent brands and products.
• Food & Drink & Technology are the most popular categories for men.
• An average Pins made by an Active Female user is 158.

What do people usually look for on Pinterest?

• Top Categories in the US are: Art, Art Supplies & Hobbies.
• Recipes: There are more than 1.7 billion recipe Pins.
• Shopping: Every day nearly 2 million people pin and 50% of people make a purchase after seeing a promoted pin.   People are looking for gift ideas. 
• Articles: More than 14 million articles are Pinned each day.
• The average time spent on Pinterest per visit is 14.2 minutes.
• 85% of users look to start new projects – Do it yourself projects
• 47% of the users are using it as a platform for discovering and shopping for products.
• Average number of monthly searches on Pinterest is 2 billion.

Pinterest’s platform is seasonal.  What does that mean?  It means that most of the activity in Pinterest happens around the holiday periods between July and December.  The most prominent holidays on Pinterest are:

• Christmas
• Thanksgiving
• Valentine’s Day
• Fourth of July and
• Easter

What’s the analytic that benefits your blog to grow the most?

“As always, pay most attention to your clicks because at the end of the day, that’s the analytic that benefits your blog the most! You want people to click through to your pins to grow your blog traffic”

If you are blogging, I highly recommend that you use Tailwind, and you’ll notice growth.  Tailwind affords more growth to you than Pinterest Group Boards. 

What to do when your monthly Pinterest views are dropping?

1. Look at your Pinterest analytics.

You need to do a two-tag approach of looking to see:

a. Which Pinterest Boards are bringing the most clicks and

b. You also need to see which Pinterest pins are bringing the most clicks. 

What does this do?  It tells you what content of yours is getting the most attention and it’s a prompt for you to where should be paying your attention for future pins.

Your analytics are going to help you the MOST when it comes to getting those views back up. One of my favorite analytics is looking to see which boards are bringing me the most clicks and which pins are bringing me the most clicks.These 2 things are going to tell me what content is getting the most attention and which boards I should be pinning my popular content to!

Let’s take a look into my Top 3 boards and most clicked pins and at the moment.  Remember, we’re going to be concentrating on the clicks. 

Link clicks show how many times users clicked through to your website from your linked Pins, which is great for measuring your return on investment (ROI).

Most Link clicks – Top Boards from the last 90 days

As I mentioned earlier, I thought that the #1 indicator should be focused on Impressions.  This was my Top 3 boards for Impressions, and it differs slightly from the Link clicks.  Therefore, my attention for the time being should be more focused on the Star Trek Next Generation pins that I’m doing and less focused on the Motivational Quotes and Inspiration pins. 

Therefore, from this view (above) I’ve been able to deduce that my priorities thus far  for creating fresh new pins should be in this order (Note:  I’m skipping Blogmas Ideas because I didn’t successfully complete that challenge during December and the holidays are over for the most part until July rolls around again): 

1. Add more pins to Blogtober posts
2. Star Trek – TOS & TNG pins
3. Norman Rockwell Painting pins
4. Motivational Quotes and Inspiration pins

Most clicked Pins from the last 30 days

I’m getting clicks from other pins; however, they aren’t pins that I created from my own posts.  It’ll be interesting when I do my yearly review to see if I’m able to turn this around and get some of my own pins into my top Link Click pins. 

Most Impressions – Top Pins from the last 30 days. 

I’m glad that since I’ve been placing emphasis on looking at my Impressions, I’ve been able to change the trend so that unlike my Link Clicks above, that there are three pins that are within the Top Impressions (see below). 

At this venture, I would suggest that you do the same (if you want to measure your improvement) and take a snapshot of your Link Clicks (last 30 days) and your Top Impressions (last 30 days) so that you can look at them in the future to see how you’ve grown. 

As you can tell, (from the snapshot below) my most popular pin is “lassoing the moon” from Blogtober Day 26 – Top 10 “Creative photos from Pinterest.  As of yet, I haven’t figured out a way for me to add other creative photo’s from Pinterest to this post.  I’m hesitant to add a lot more photos because of the title.  When I created this title, I had no idea that this would be so popular of a pin that it has surpassed 100,000 Pinterest Impressions. 

2. Re-create viral pins.

If you’re luckily enough to have a viral pin.  Create a new pin for the same blog post to continue bringing blog traffic.  I only have one viral pin and I haven’t been able to figure out the secret to making that second viral pin.  But when I do, I’ll be sure to share it with you all. 

3. Create fresh pins weekly.

Pinterest demands fresh new pins.  What used to work in the past doesn’t work anymore.  What I’m alluding to is you don’t want to pin the same pin to more than one board.  Leave it at one and only board.  Don’t use Tailwind’s smart loop feature, because as I pointed out you need to be concentrating on making fresh new pins.  One of the principal other reasons for not pinning the same pin to multiple boards is that it can often get your Pinterest account get flagged for spam.  Don’t get into that bad habit.  Develop a good habit of sharing your pins to the most relevant board and sticking to your guns no matter how hard it seems to grow your Pinterest traffic. 

Switching up the text alone won’t do the trick.  The key thing is to switch up the image as much as possible to have that fresh new pin.  If at all possible, try to make at least 2 – 3 fresh new pins daily so that you are always circulating fresh new pins for your blog posts and won’t be construed as being spammy.   If you try to beat the system, sooner or later Pinterest will change the Algorithm and by then it might be too late for your account to get reinstated.  Please don’t take that chance.  Create new content. 

4. Pin with the season.

Coordinate your pins with the Holiday season.  Start gathering your holiday pins about 1 – 1 ½ months out before the Holiday arrives.   Why?  Because the number of Pinterest users during the holidays will spike.  Take advantage of that spike ahead of time to plan your pins. 

If you’d like to set up a seasonal planning calendar, visit this blog post:  How to create a seasonal planning calendar for Pinterest to explode your blog.

5. Add a new Pinterest board every two to three weeks.

Creating new boards can get new eyes on your content.  Be sure to add keywords to your board title and description and pin related + relevant content to the board and add at least 10 related pins to any new board.

6. Ask yourself:  How is your pin design?

You want your pins designed that you’ll be able to attract someone viewing your Pinterest pin.

The image and the text used should coincide with one another.

Take the time to analyze your headline so that it’s clickable.  A good tool to use is Headline Analyzer that will increase the likelihood of your pin getting clicked (provided that you use the headline in your pin).

Personally, I create all of my pins in Canva.  But your not limited to Canva for images.  There are a lot of other places to find free stock images

20 Recommended Free Stock Image websites for your blog

Want to take your pin design to the next level?  Subscribe to my blog and you’ll be provided with a workbook (PinArtwork Graphic Ease) to help make viral pins.

7. Make sure you’re active on Pinterest.

Pinterest rewards you by being active on their platform.

Pinterest will always reward you for being active on their platform!

One of the easiest ways to stay active (other than “manually” pinning from within Pinterest) is to use Tailwind to schedule your pins.  By keeping a smaller number of pins on a daily basis ( I have my schedule set for 7 daily pins), it’ll be easier to find pins to fill up a whole’s week’s of pins in one sitting.  Don’t let your Tailwind schedule run out of pins in the queue. 

Tailwind is a great program that will allow you to put pins on your Pinterest board while you sleep (providing that you’ve scheduled them).  I use this program to forecast my pins about a week in advance.  The main thing to remember is to follow the Smart Guide built within Tailwind and if it suggest that you are going outside of the Pinterest established guidelines, tailor back your suggested number of pins so that you don’t get flagged for spam.  To learn the basics of Tailwind with it’s new Communities check out my post Ultimate Guide for using the improved Tailwind. 

This post: Ultimate Guide for using the improved Tailwind explains how to use the new version of Tailwind – Tailwind has changed from using Tribes to using Communities. The reason that you want to use Tailwind is it’s a scheduling program that you can forecast your pins to have them pin unattended.

8. Test out new time slots on Tailwind.

Tailwind will suggest which times are BEST for you to pin.

How do you determine the BEST scheduling Tailwind times?  You don’t need to do anything other than telling Tailwind how often you want to post per day. 

“We will regenerate new optimized Timeslots for General Queue using your Pinterest data to determine when your audience is most likely to be engaged. Just tell us how often you want to post.”

What you need to know is that those “suggested” time slots are the times that your audience is most active on Pinterest to help grow your blog. 

9. Test out how many pins you pin on a daily basis.

On average day, I usually tend to pin 10 – 15 fresh new pins per day.  My goal is a lot higher than that, but I’ve learned it’s a lot harder on some days to reach my personal goal so I’m happy if churn out an average of 10 – 15 pins per day.  This has been my “magic” number, and you need to find your “magic” number.  The actual number that I pin per day is a lot larger because I have a great fondness for Pinterest.  And I pin an awful lot of pins manually on Pinterest. 

Play around with your magic number! Everyone has a different magic number. If you find your Pinterest views are decreasing, maybe switch up how many pins you are pinning daily to see if it helps!  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve changed up the number of pins that I do in one week from the next. 

10. What I have learned overall about monthly Pinterest views:

• Don’t fret about your monthly Pinterest views.  Place your emphasis on the number of Link clicks that you get.
• Your Pinterest views will go up and down constantly and if you take even a little break away from Pinterest then they can drop dramatically.
• Remember that what one person has tried and worked them may not work for someone else. 
• For the best Pinterest strategy, you’ll always need to be making tweaks.
• Things to focus on for your blog traffic are growing your e-mail, market on social media, and learn how to effectively use your SEO.