What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest? — Part 3

Published in

Inside Revenue

8 min readApr 18, 2018

The Advanced Guide

In our Intermediate guide to measuring your success on the Pinterest platform we discussed how you can measure your efforts on the platform to help you to hit your revenue targets. This article aids you in discovering how your efforts on the platform impact your overall bottom line. If you need a refresher on the topics discussed in this article, click here to read “What Is Measuring Success On Pinterest? — Part 2 (The Intermediate guide)”.

As with any social media marketing strategy, there are certain things one should be aware of in order to ensure that you are leveraging the platform for the best success results possible. It is for this reason that we have put together this article which will go over the things you should watch out for when measuring your success on Pinterest.

“Success is making those that believe in you look brilliant.” — Dharmesh Shah ( Founder/CTO At Hubspot) @dharmesh

What Should I Watch Out For For When Measuring Success On Pinterest?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Tips for Measuring Success With Conversion Tracking

#2 Making Better Use Of Pinterest Analytics

So let’s move along…

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#1 Tips for Measuring Success With Conversion Tracking

Pinterest is the perfect social media channel for accomplishing upper and mid-funnel brand objectives, but sometimes these are difficult to measure. Here are five tips to start thinking strategically about how Pinterest conversion tracking can help define your brand’s success.

1. Track Conversions

As with most social media platform efforts, you are not going to get a lot of immediate or direct sales from Pinterest, however, the conversion data you collect can provide you with valuable insights that can fuel your market research. Conversion tracking will help you understand your customers’ preferences, what they’re interested in, what types of imagery or messaging catches their eyes, and the sentiment that appeals to them.

2. Set The Right Tracking Window

As Pinterest is mainly used for inspiration and product discovery, it would not make sense for your brand to have the same conversion window for the platform as you would with Facebook, email outreach or direct selling. As such, you should set a longer conversion window for this platform. Pinterest allows you to set a conversion window of up to 60 days, meaning Pinterest will take credit for conversions of someone who has clicked or viewed your Pin for up to 60 days. Remember, your customers are likely to hit many touch points between viewing a Promoted Pin and making a conversion — interpret the data accordingly.

3. Use Multi-Device Conversion Tracking

Because Pinterest has the ability to track users who are logged in, you can collect data across devices. This data could be used to help shape your multi-device strategy beyond Pinterest.

4. Understand Post-Click And View-Through Conversions

Pinterest allows brands to track page visits, signups, and checkout actions after a user has clicked to your site from Pinterest — all types of post-click conversions. You can also track the above actions after someone has re-pinned, viewed a close-up of your pin, or viewed your pin within a Pinterest feed, which are essentially view-through conversions. Take note of which conversion type you are looking at to make comparisons to data from other channels like display or search.

5. Use Third-Party Tracking URL’s

To keep all data in one place, and to understand Pinterest’s true influence compared to other touchpoints in your customer journey, implement third-party tracking such as Google Analytics using a tracking URL. Determine which tracking parameters to include in the URL based on your goals.

For example, if you’re looking to understand which demographic is most engaged, include a variable to specify the targeting groups you use to promote your pins. If you want to understand which messaging and imagery speaks to your audience, include a creative variable.

#2 Making Better Use Of Pinterest Analytics

KPIs are the lifelines of social media analytics. The competitive analysis of those KPIs is also of prime importance to social media marketers. The fact is that most of the companies spend a lot of time and resources in identifying and analyzing the right KPIs from social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+.

Optimizing time, effort, cost, and actionable points are the prerequisites of any successful social campaign.

It is not enough to understand the basic analytics of a social platform, even a site such as Pinterest. In order to effectively analyse your performance on the platform, you need to become more advanced in the aspects of your Pinterest reporting. There are a number of third-party tools you can use to gain a deeper understanding of your performance.

In addition to the basic metrics we have already mentioned, it is crucial to gain familiarity with the following metrics:

Total Followers
Followers Change and Followers Change Rate
Following Change and Following Change Rate
Boards Table
Boards Change
Pins Table
Pins Change
Virality Score
Engagement Score
Image analytics

Video Taken From Pinterest For Business’ Official YouTube Channel

Generate Validity and Engagement Score
Validity Score and Engagement Score are two important metrics worth considering for any social marketer. Pinleague another popular Pinterest Analytics suite helps users to monitor Board level performance via Virality score and Engagement score. Pinterest Analytics suite helps users to monitor Board level performance via Virality score and Engagement score.

- Virality Score: # of Repins/ # of Pins (Higher the score the better the virality of Pins and the overall pinning performance)
- Engagement Score: # of Repins/ # of Pins/ # of Followers (Higher the score, the more engaging the Pins are and the chance of pin to lead conversion)

The tool also extracts valuable data from Pinterest like Brand Mentions, Engagement, ROI and competitor tracking. Such derived metrics help you gauge your existing Pinterest activities, and understand what to improve and where to improve. Once you know how your Pinterest content moves through the Pinterest-sphere you will be motivated to create better quality pins. Pinterest like Brand Mentions, Engagement, ROI and competitor tracking. These help you gauge your existing Pinterest activities, and understand what to improve and where to improve.

Analyze followers And Their Changes At Various Levels
Regular and real-time statistics about your Pinterest followers at a Board or Pin level are always helpful to marketers. The data keeps you aware of the growth or loss of followers with time and leaves you with the right questions — which Pinterest followers at a Board or Pin level are always helpful to marketers. The data keeps you aware of the growth or loss of followers with time and leaves you with the right questions — which KPIs need more attention, what led to the change in follower count, how to repeat the growth strategy or avoid the reasons for failure.

Access Boards With Changing Trends
Board specific analysis helps you measure the popularity and success metrics of your pins on a topic level. You can check which boards and their pins are more successful and why they are. Comparative analysis of the competitors’ Pinterest Boards is also possible with such tools.

Such data tells you how many new Boards to be added in a week or month, how many pins each Board should have new on a weekly basis. Pinterest Boards is also possible with such tools. Such data tells you how many new Boards to be added in a week or month, how many pins each Board should have new on a weekly basis.

Analyze Pins With Precision
Analyzing pin is the most crucial and difficult step to improving overall Pinterest performance. The tool derived data tells you how many Likes, Comments, and Repins each of your Pins earns for a certain period of time. The daily Pinning activity report includes the number of pins submitted in a day and the Pins’ descriptions.

Such ready-to-use reports help you analyze your visual content at a micro level and measure audience interaction at Pin level. Pinterest performance. The tool derived data tells you how many Likes, Comments, and Repins each of your Pins earns for a certain period of time. The daily Pinning activity report includes the number of pins submitted in a day and the Pins’ descriptions. Such ready-to-use reports help you analyze your visual content at a micro level and measure audience interaction at Pin level.

Pinterest Data With Comparative Graphs
Popular tools like Quintly, Pinleague not only allow you to manage your own Pinterest account, but also track competitors’ Pinterest activities. A graphical Trend Chart showing comparative figures of Boards, Pins, Followers for multiple accounts at a single place is quite useful for content strategists. Using Quintly, marketers can also compare Pinterest activities with Instagram or other social networks and then define which network turns out to be the best.

Analyze Images For Better Social Signaling
Tools like Curalate, mostly used by large businesses, goes one step ahead by unlocking the power of pictures getting shared through Pinterest. Their proprietary image-recognition algorithms identify images that are more desirable to your audience. This visual social media analytics tool scans through the imageries pixel by pixel and track ROI from product pictures.

You can connect Curalate’s visual analytics with products’ referral revenue and thus measure ROI of your visuals getting shared through Pinterest and other image sharing websites. Their proprietary image-recognition algorithms identify images that are more desirable to your audience. This visual social media analytics tool scans through the imageries pixel by pixel and track ROI from product pictures. You can connect Curalate’s visual analytics with products’ referral revenue and thus measure ROI of your visuals getting shared through Pinterest and other image-sharing websites.

Success Story Taken From Pinterest For Business’ Official YouTube Channel

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Measuring your success on Pinterest is vital to any marketer’s job. Knowing which social media platforms work for you and where to focus your energy is crucial to knowing your marketing strategy and building it to move forward.

We are working to bring you guides on how to use Pinterest to further enhance your marketing strategy, so come back and visit our publication, Inside Revenue, for the release of these articles and more.