Pinterest Releases Native Analytics

After more than a year of waiting for delivery, Pinterest has finally delivered on its promise to deliver native analytics to Pinterest users with verified URLs. (And Pinterest marketers rejoiced.) In an announcement posted to the company’s blog on March 12th, the Pinterest team shares the details.

The analytics build on recent shifts toward business accounts and the launch of a new Pinterest interface. It also begins to open the door toward more value for businesses, who have long been asking for faster and easier ways to understand how their customers are interacting with their content via the service.

Getting access to the Pinterest analytics for your content is easy, you’ll just need to take the following steps:

  • Visit Pinterest and look for the Analytics option in the drop down menu.

From there, you’ll be taken to the default analytics page. This page operates as your default analytics dashboard and gives you a quick and easy overview of the most obvious metrics. You’ll find:

  • Pin Activity: The number of pins and the number of people who pinned them.
  • Repin Activity: The number of repins and the number of people who repinned.
  • Display Activity: The number of impressions (times your pin appeared) and the reach (the number of people it appeared to.)
  • Traffic Activity: The number of clicks your pins received and the number of people who clicked on your pins.

 

The tool also allows for a reasonable amount of control over the date range of your data. It’s preset with buttons to allow you to view data from the past week, two week or month long time frame. It’s also supposed to allow you to select a custom date range from a calendar box, though my experiments with the site found this feature to be a little wonky.

Additional navigation options across the top of the Pinterest analytics tool bar allow you to dive in to see what your most recently pinned content is. This display simply shows what’s currently drawing interest from the Pinterest community.

It’s a great feature to have since the results returned by running a domain search on Pinterest are spotty at best and are no reflection of how data trends shift during any particular point in time. Being able to look at what’s popular now can be a great way to better understand how users might be digging into older content on your site and sharing it because it’s relevant to the current season, trends or interests of a user.

Information like that can help make your editorial team’s job a little easier by helping them know what topics are still generating interest and activity.

Another tabbed option is the ability to view the content from your site that is receiving the most repins. The value of this content goes without saying. Knowing what hits well in terms of exposure can provide immense value to your editorial and marketing teams, both in terms of style of image and content.

Finally, Pinterest offers up a “most clicked” category. This is your gold mine. This is the area that gives you at a glance option to exactly which pieces of content from your site not only attract interest and activity, but send traffic right in your front door.

Add in the ability to export the analytics data so you can mash it up or view it elsewhere and we’ve got a pretty nice starter option from Pinterest. This data will by no means give you the power and insight you’ll gather from properly integrating Pinterest tracking with Google Analytics or another software package, but it holds quite a bit of value in its own right.

Giving your marketing and editorial teams access to this data goes a long way toward helping them quickly understand what pieces of content are performing well and what types of content they might want to put emphasis on in the future. Looking at this data from the measurement perspective can also help narrow the measurement field by helping you know exactly where to dig deep within a stronger analytics package.

If you’re using or experimenting with Pinterest, this is most certainly a feature you’ll want to spend some time with.

About author:

Jennifer Evans Cario is the author of Pinterest Marketing: An Hour a Day, serves as Social Media Faculty Chair for Market Motive and is the founder and President of SugarSpun Marketing. Recognized as an industry leader in content driven social media strategies, Jennifer is known for using real language and a common sense approach that delivers solid results while still allowing her clients to fully understand and participate in the process. A popular speaker, Jen logs dozens of engagements each year at everything from marketing industry events to industry vertical trade shows to in-house corporate training events.

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