Last Updated on November 24, 2020 by scottkandh
I’ve been using Pinterest for about 6 months and of that time only the last 1 week or so has been using Pinterest Business (to help grow Pinterest). In an effort to learn how to look at the analytics for Pinterest I’ve put this information together to learn more about some of the terms I’ve seen on Pinterest pins (that are in the Business boards) such as impressions, saves, clicks, closeups, and engagement.
First off, I have to let you know that I’m normally not a numbers person. However, I seriously want to make the most of Pinterest so I’m forcing myself to become a numbers person (when it comes to Pinterest).
I’ve been blogging for close to 5 months, my Pinterest followers were nearly 700 Pinterest followers. I accidentally posted one or two images too close together and Pinterest flagged the account. To make a long story short, this allowed an opportunity to begin Pinterest anew and to take advantage of a new Pinterest Business account. On the first go-around, many boards didn’t get migrated to the Business account. There are a lot of advantages to using a Business account, that I’m just starting to learn about now.
Like I said I haven’t been blogging that long (compared to other bloggers). When I first started pinning, I was pinning anything and everything and I wasn’t paying close attention to good pins or bad pins.
I’m telling you all this because I don’t want you making some of the mistakes that I’ve already made (in the Pinterest arena).
Pinterest is my hobby. I’ve taken a small number of Pinterest courses but haven’t taken the high-end courses yet. It’s fund to learn how to do this on my own. Using Pinterest is a constant state of flux, the algorithm constantly changes, and you need to be able to adapt so that you don’t get marked as spam. Number one lesson – don’t pin repetitively!
What can Pinterest Analytics tell us?
There are five factors that Pinterest uses:
- Impressions
- Saves
- Link clicks
- Engagements and
- Closeups
Pinterest’s definitions were clear as mud (the part from here down to Pinterest Impressions). What I’ll do is to let you know what these truly mean and how you can use these factors to your advantage.
Review your Pin’s performance metrics with pin stats. See all the ways people interact with your pins across Pinterest to gain insight into how your Pins are performing. To understand your brand’s overall performance on Pinterest, check out Pinterest Analytics.
First off, to view your Pin stats, you’ll need to have a business account.
If you want to see stats for Pins created by others from your website, claim your website. Only you can see these stats.
To see your Pin stats
- Log into your Pinterest business account.
- Click your profile picture at the top of the screen to go to your profile.
- Click on a Pin to view your Pin stats. At the top of the screen, you’ll see the impressions, saves, and link clicks from the past 30 days.
- Click See more stats to see all metrics for your Pin.
From the dropdown menu, you can choose between different date range options to see data for the last 24 hours, last 7 days, last 30 days, or last 90 days.
You’ll also see the boards people are saving your Pin to, which you can use to see how people think about your Pins.
Review your Pin’s metrics and engagements. These real-time metrics are a good way to learn how your Pin is performing right after publishing. After 7 days, Pin stats will typically be updated daily.
Metric: Definition
Average play time: The average time your video pins are played.
This includes when your video is played
again in the same day.
Impressions: The number of times your pins were on screen
Saves: The number of times people saved your pin to a
board.
Clicks: The number of times people tapped on your pin
for a closer look.
Pinterest Impressions
I put Impressions in bold face, because next to Saves this is an important element to keep an eye on for your pins.
An Impression is the number of times that people have actually seen your pin. Your pin can be seen in a number of ways:
- through a home feed
- a category feeds
- or looking for a particular searched item
If you see an increase in the number of Impressions pat yourself on your back because you’re doing things right. Some of the characteristics behind an increase in the number of Impressions means that you are:
- Using good pin descriptions
- Using good keywords
- The pin is related to your content
- Good color and good images, etc.
If you need some assistance with designing pins, please take advantage of my Free offer for the PinArtwork Graphic Ease program (P.A.G.E.) which provides some valuable insights into designing viral pins.
Consequently, if your number of impressions isn’t increasing means that you need to change your focus to start using rich pin descriptions. One fundamental thing that I can’t impress enough upon is that Pinterest is a search engine, and you need to design your pin so that when people are searching for something that they can find “your” pin to get what they need.
Pinterest Saves
When someone saves a pin to one of their boards (commonly referred to as “pinning”) it’s referred to as Save.
There are a lot of factors that go into the design of making good pins, which I have looked at in great depth on my website (keyword for a search is “viral pins”).
If someone has taken the time to save one of your pins, it means that they like the pin for the image or the contents within the pin. As I mentioned earlier when I first started pinning, I was saving virtually any pin regardless if it looked good or not to build up a pinning library of materials. But to get Pinterest followers, the best course of action is to start saving just the pins that look good, so that they help your pinning ratio down the road for the next person to say Hey, I like this pin.
Pinterest Link Clicks
A Link click is just what it implies – someone has noticed your pin and they’ve navigated to “your” website.
There’s no way to tell what pin will take off and which one won’t – it’s a guessing game of trial and error.
A way for you to take advantage of this metric is to look at which pins are getting clicks and which ones aren’t and then (especially for the ones that are getting clicks) take notes to yourself why they are working and make the necessary adjustments for future pins to hopefully bring in improved results.
Pinterest Engagements
I’m going to spend truly little time on a term called engagement. It means that your pin was seen, and something was done with it (i.e. a view, click, or save).
The ultimate end goal is to change an impression to an engagement (so that it helps your blog’s traffic or builds your Pinterest board).
Pinterest Closeups
The closeup is the middle of the road type of pin between actually saving a pin or clicking on a pin (preferably one or the other). That way viewers can get a detailed look (solely) at “your” pin. Here’s a chance for the viewer to see more of the description from what’s in the contents of the blog before they visit your site. This is why you need to make maximum use of the 500 characters allowed for the description of a pin (for when the viewer reaches this point).
The Pinterest Analytics Views
When you click on the drop-down arrow of Analytics (3rd button from the left) you’ll see the different view options:
There are four Pinterest Analytics views:
- Overview
- Audience Insights
- Video
- Trends
Pinterest Analytics Overview Screen
When you log in to Pinterest Analytics Overview, this is the starting place for most of the information you are looking for.
What you’ll see are three main headings:
- Performance over time (a chart)
- Top Boards – three at a time
- Top Pins
- The default view option for Performance over time is Impressions and you can click on a lot of other various information (that’s peculiar to a particular board or pin).
- The one in the middle (Top Boards) is a great place to get useful information for your pins such as Impressions, Closeups, Saves, Engagements, and Link clicks.
This will be the first thing you see after you scroll down pass the chart, which is “your” top Pinterest boards. You’ll see three boards at a time, and you can scroll through them (from left to right). Hold your mouse over a board to see more information. You can sort the boards based on any Pinterest metric. - Pinterest Analytics Top Pins: Now, if you scroll down past the chart, and passed the top boards, you will see your top pins. This data is also included if you export your analytics data, with the URL to each pin.
Looking at your Top Pins is a great way to see what works, and what isn’t!
Pinterest Audience Insights
The second part of Pinterest Analytics is Pinterest Audience Insights.
Unfortunately, since my Pinterest account is relatively new (the other one got deactivated so I don’t have access to that information) there’s not enough data to display at this point in time. I’ll need to come back to it later.
Basically, this part tells you all about the people viewing your content to ensure you’re reaching the right audience or a new audience that you hadn’t even considered.
Categories and Interests – what’s your audience is looking at.
Demographics, including Age, Gender, Location, and Device.
Pinterest Analytics Audience Insights is all about creating targeted Pinterest ads and promotions. This feature allows you to run a targeted ad campaign to a specific group of people. Personally, I don’t recommend using Pinterest ads. By using good SEO on Pinterest and your blog you shouldn’t have to buy an ad, save your money!
Pinterest Trends
The Pinterest Trends can be very beneficial that it allows you to see the stuff that people are going to be looking for in the near future (dependent on the season that is approaching). For example, the trending object right now is looking for warm chocolate drinks for the upcoming winter season.
Pin Strategy to double the amount of Pin Impressions
A sure-fire way to increase pin impressions is pin at least 15 times per day. At the same time, it’ll help grow your Link clicks.
The amount of work that you put into Pinterest is equivocal to the amount of traffic that it’ll bring to your blog. If you didn’t catch that the first time, let me repeat that.
The amount of work that you put into Pinterest is equivocal to the amount of traffic that it’ll bring to your blog.
If you do one thing to improve your Pinterest impressions, it would be to pin every day and pin often. This is the one step that you should never skip.
Bear in mind, that you don’t need to pin all 15 pins in one sitting, the pins can be broken up so that maybe you do some in the morning, some in the midafternoon, and the remainder at night. Aim for being consistent and make it a habit.
By aiming to strive getting at least 15 pins per day consistently, you’ll notice the following:
- More impressions
- Increased Link clicks
- More blog pageviews
Pin to “All” of your Boards
Here’s a good tip that I picked up from one other blogger. At the end of each day, arrange your order to “last saved” and give your boards some loving. Especially if you have some Group Boards.
Make one new “fresh” pin for each of the last two boards. By doing this, you’ll ensure that every board gets new pins and more importantly you shouldn’t get flagged as spam by providing new material as opposed to repetitively pinning the same pin to multiple boards (don’t do it! – it’ll get you flagged in a heartbeat).
The idea behind this is that all of your boards are important and deserve to get attention. Too often I’ve seen Group Boards where there’s no other activity to the Group Board. Don’t let that happen to your boards, provide them with content and you should start to see your impressions go up.
You’re not going to like what I say next, but if you don’t like a particular board, maybe it’s time to get rid of it and be done without it. Don’t let a random board hang around and it’s not getting any love. There’s a lot of information out there on what you should do with a board once you decide to delete it. Once it’s been deleted it’s permanently gone, so a better alternative would be to mark it as archive. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone. From what I’ve gathered if you mark it as archive it will prevent a drop in your Pinterest views. Rule of thumb – research your material on this matter, and then decide what you’d like to do.
Scheduling pins through Tailwind
I’ve been using Tailwind for close to 5 months now and it helps immensely to keep my pinning consistent. Watch the Smart Guide carefully and don’t exceed the recommended guidelines so that you don’t get your account flagged for spam.
An important element of using Tailwind is to ensure that you shuffle your pins (I recommend shuffling them at least twice) and then make sure none of the pins after it’s shuffled a second time aren’t showing up back to back. If so, they can easily be rearranged by using drag and drop to a new scheduled time.
I spend about an hour per week to schedule all of my pins for about 1 ½ weeks out.
I place my own pins in my Group Board.
From within Tailwind I look for nice pins to add to other personal boards.
At the very least I always try to ensure that I always have at least two days of pins scheduled at any given time.
Group Boards
Pinterest announced (mid 2018) that group boards were not created for the way that “content creators” were using them.
They’re not for the promotion of your pins, they’re for collaborations of smaller groups of bloggers. As part of their on-going algorithm, Pinterest drastically reduces the distribution of spammy group boards.
Be very selective and only spend 10% of your time applying to Group Boards.
Manual Repinning
Pinterest doesn’t like it when people manually repin their own pins to other boards.
The most important thing to be aware of is this: Pinterest doesn’t want duplicate pins on the same board more than once every 3 months. If you get a warning that you’ve already pinned to a certain board, don’t do it again. Heed the advice.
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