Pinterest Analytics Drives ROI

After launching in 2010, Pinterest is the world’s fastest growing social media site with more than 48.7 million users globally. Pinterest allows users to pin and re-pin photos of items to boards and then share those images with their followers. Pinterest is an exciting social media platform because it has incredibly high engagement with the average session lasting 16 minutes and with more people choosing to associate with brands on Pinterest than Facebook.

Pinterest has proven to be an incredibly valuable social media tool with high return on investment; “For example, data from e-commerce consultant RichRelevance shows that Pinterest shoppers, on average, spend roughly $170 per browsing session, a huge increase over that of Facebook ($95) and Twitter ($70) users”. Pinterest is also important because “unlike Facebook, Pinterest allows search engines to crawl their site. Many boards are showing up in Google search results” which can help a company’s search engine optimization efforts.

Businesses can harness the power of Pinterest by using web metrics to monitor user behavior and evaluate ROI. Pinterest recently launched its own analytics tool—similar in user interface to Google Analytics—to help businesses understand what content is most engaging and how Pinterest is driving web traffic. Pinterest’s new Analytics Tools For Business will allow businesses to monitor:

• What pieces of content are being pinned directly from your website
• Unique visitors pinning content directly from your website
• Which of your pins on Pinterest are being repinned
• Unique visitors who are repinning your pins
• How many times your pins appear in search results across multiple platforms, including the desktop site, iOS, or Android
• How many unique visitors saw your pins on given dates
• How many users visited your website directly from Pinterest
• How many times users click on your website
• Whether your statistics are increasing or decreasing between periods

 

So why does this matter? Well, by monitoring what consumers are pinning and repining, businesses can begin to understand what content is most engaging and then adjust their website accordingly. Businesses know that Pinterest users are more profitable than consumers from other social channels, and they know that Pinterest users are more likely to action their pins into hard sales—“Pinterest shoppers, on average, spend roughly $170 per browsing session, a huge increase over that of Facebook ($95) and Twitter ($70) users”.

By understanding which images are being pinned, a business can tweak its strategy to help improve ROI. For instance, if a company notices that its products get pinned more frequently when the images are displayed in a certain spot on the website, or formatted a certain way, it can begin to adjust its other content to be more “pinnable”. Businesses can begin using the new Pinterest analytics tool by logging into and verifying the business account. The analytics tool will appear on the right hand side and businesses can customize how to use the tool. By offering analytics, Pinterest has added immense value to its website by showing businesses how to quantify the value of its Pinterest followers and show actionable ROI.