Pinterest Analytics

Given the increasing need to demonstrate the commercial value of social media, Pinterest’s recent announcement of Pinterest Analytics, a rich set of statistics for users’ pins and pin activity, should prove a much-needed asset for the business community.

Available to any user with a verified website, the analytics include detail on the number of people who pinned content from your site, how many saw the pins and click throughs to your site from the pins together with your most popular pins.

With users currently totaling 10.5 million and rising, Pinterest offers a growing audience for the business community, in particular for clients in architecture and interiors, which are proving to be amongst the most popular areas on the platform.

To get started you will need to switch to Pinterest’s ‘new look’ which is currently still in beta, then verify your website and go to Analytics through a new drop down menu under your username. The analytics are split into four tabs, Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned and Most Clicked. Site Metrics divides into Pins, Repins, Impressions & Reach and Clicks & Visitors.

The Pins statistics shows how many times content was pinned per day, how many individuals undertook the pinning together with daily averages and percentage changes. Repins data is presented in a similar way along with daily averages and percentages. Impressions measures the number of times the pinned content appeared in searches and on members’ boards. An added feature is ‘Reach’, referring to the number of people to have seen the pins. In general, Reach will be lower than Impressions as a number of visitors will encounter the same pins on a number of occasions.

Clicks and Visitors measures the number of people clicking the pins and how many unique visits have been made to your website. The analytics can be organized by date range and exported as a CSV file.

Pinterest Analytics is a great tool, providing a data resource that will help business users plan, implement and measure this element of their social media activity. It does have shortcomings such as restrictions on the date tool that will only allow viewing up to the previous day’s activity, but it’s early days and no doubt there will be further developments.