What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest? — Part 1

Published in

Inside Revenue

7 min readApr 12, 2018

The Beginner’s Guide

Pinterest is a powerful marketing tool that many brands are using as a way of reaching a newer customer base in order to increase brand recognition, and reach their social media marketing goals. In our article series, “What Can I Do With Pinterest?”, we took you through the various ways in which your brand could leverage the platform to achieve marketing and revenue success.

If you missed these articles, you can begin by reading the first in the series, “What Can I Do With Pinterest? — Part 1 (The Beginner‘s Guide)”.

“Let’s change the way we look at what happens to us.” — Art Sobczac (30 Years Of Experience In Phone Sales And prospecting) @ArtSobczak

In this article series, I will take you through what it means to measure your success on the platform by taking you through what it is, why you should care about it, how it can impact your bottom line and more.

In this article I will cover:
#1 What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest?
#2 Why Should I Care About Measuring Success On Pinterest?
#3 How Can Measuring Success On Pinterest Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?
#4 What Should I Watch Out For When Measuring Success On Pinterest?

Let’s dive in…

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#1 What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest?

Since the dawn of the social media age, marketers have been faced with the conundrum on how their efforts will be measured in terms of their success. In the early years of social marketing, all eyes were focused on the number of likes or followers a brand had. But, what do these numbers mean in terms of the bottom line?

While traditionally thought of as just another soap box, Pinterest has developed into a powerful marketing tool that presents marketers with a new set of opportunities, leading to even more questions.

Video Taken From Pinterest For Business’ Official YouTube Channel

While Google Analytics is still the go-to analytics platform for nearly all marketers, each social media platform has its own unique metrics for success measurement. Special attention should be paid to Pinterest Analytics over and above your traditional reporting methods.

There are 6 key benefits of adopting Pinterest Analytics into your current reporting strategy:

1. Meeting Your Pinterest Goals

In order to achieve your overall marketing goals, as with any other social media platform, you need to have a Pinterest specific strategy formulated before embarking on your marketing efforts. This strategy will allow you to identify the specific metrics you need to be measuring to track your performance on the platform, in a way that speaks to your overall goals. Pinterest Analytics can help you measure whether or not you are meeting these goals, while helping you to analyse how the platform contributes to your overall social media ROI.

2. Monitoring The Competition

The public nature of the social platform, allows marketers to gain insights on how their marketing efforts are performing versus those of their competitors. Pinterest Analytics allow brands to not only identify their competition on the platform quickly and easily, but to also analyse which other brands their target audiences are interacting with. By reviewing your competitors’ Pins, you are able to compare how your content is performing in comparison to your competition.This helps you to gain a deeper understanding of how effective your overall content strategy is.

3. Gaining Actionable Website Insights

If you have the “pin It” or “Save” button installed on your brand’s website, Pinterest Analytics allows you to gain insights on how you can improve your site based on how people interact with this button, tracking what content from your website is shared on Pinterest by your audience.

4. Tracking Referral Traffic

As with all social media sites, the tracking of website traffic is crucial in your overall marketing strategy. Pinterest Analytics will allow you to see how much traffic you are driving to your brand’s site from the platform, helping you to identify the amount of resources you should be allocating to your efforts on the social media giant, while helping you identify room for improvement.

5. Better Content Creation

Pinterest, like sites such as Facebook and Twitter, base their success on the content shared on the platform, whether in paid or organic formats. By monitoring how your audience interacts with your content on the platform, Pinterest Analytics can aid you in your content development and optimization strategies for the future — helping you identify what works and what does not.

6. Understanding Your Audience

An understanding of your audience is crucial on any social site, as each platform attracts a different type of audience — meaning that your brand will not only need to know what type of content works best for the audience on that specific platform, but how the demographics on that platform can aid you in developing your overall marketing strategy for success. Pinterest Analytics provides in-depth demographic data about your audience that will help you understand where your market lies, and what interests them.

#2 Why Should I Care About Measuring Success On Pinterest?

When it comes to Pinterest versus more traditional platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has an advantage— it is known to drive higher traffic to websites with organic posts than almost any other social media platform.

When it comes to measuring your Pinterest success, there’s are two main areas that marketers focus on, that helps them to understand the need for monitoring their efforts on the platform, namely Pinterest Performance, and Contribution.

Pinterest Performance

By analyzing how your brand’s Pinterest account is performing on the platform, engagement insights, follower growth and overall reach metrics allow marketers to gain insights on the effectiveness in their efforts in terms of increasing their brand recognition, which is one of the main goals for any brand carrying out a social media marketing strategy.

Pinterest Contribution
While performance on the platform itself is a key insight to have, its contribution to a brand’s overall marketing strategy is important in the monitoring and allocation of marketing resources in relation to overall marketing ROI. And as every marketer knows, performance on any platform is mute if it does not contribute to a positive ROI. None of your marketing efforts should live in a silo. Understanding Pinterest’s part in your marketing can illustrate how many visitors, leads, and ultimately, customers, Pinterest is driving for your business, and how it impacts your bottom line.

We find that Pinterest followers tend to be seven times more engaged than Facebook followers. Based on that number, if you have to decide whether to spend a dollar to get more Facebook followers or a dollar to get more Pinterest followers — if you’re going to get 7X more engagement with Pinterest followers, it’s pretty easy to see that measuring your success on the platform is crucial. Without understanding how your efforts on Pinterest lend themselves to your overall marketing strategies and resource investments, your continued presence on the platform will become mute. The success or failure of your performance on the platform will determine your need for key marketing shifts that will drive revenue.

See how brands like Lowe’s used Pinterest to increase brand awareness, engagement and in-store purchases by viewing their success story here.

#3 How Can Measuring Success On Pinterest Help Me hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

The goal of any marketing strategy is to drive a positive impact on the brand’s bottom line. It is for this reason that what marketers do on the platform, as well as how they measure their efforts are of extreme importance to the measuring of success or failure in the field. For instance, if you are not measuring your efforts correctly on Pinterest, you may be skewing the results of your efforts and will therefore not be able to accurately measure the impact your strategy is having on your bottom line.

In our article, “What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest? — Part 2 (The intermediate Guide)”, we will take you through the following topics to aid you in your journey of hitting your company’s revenue targets by marketing on Pinterest:

Understanding The Important Terms
8 Must Track Metrics On Pinterest Analytics
Metrics For Measuring Paid Ad Campaigns

#4 What Should I Watch Out For when Measuring Success On Pinterest?

As with any social media platform, and any online marketing effort, marketers have banded together to advise others on the best practices and common issued to be aware of when embarking on their journeys to social success for their brands.

In our article, “What Is Measuring Success on Pinterest? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, we have combed the web, and have analysed our extensive knowledge of social media marketing to compile the need to know lists that we feel will have the most impact on your Pinterest success for your convenience.

Video Taken From Pinterest For Business’ Official YouTube Channel

“Figure out early on who will be involved in making the decision and the best way to involve all of them.” — Alice Heiman (The Entrepreneurs’ Sales Coach) @aliceheiman

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In our next article, “What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, we will cover how measuring your efforts on Pinterest can help you hit your company’s revenue targets.