Pinterest Launches Analytics For Business Accounts

Pinterest is still taking a slow-play approach to advertising, but it clearly recognizes the value of commerce and the businesses that use its network to reach customers.

Today, the San Francisco-based company is releasing an updated version of Pinterest Analytics and making it available globally, in all 31 of the languages Pinterest supports. The service is free, available to anyone who has a — also free — Pinterest for Business account.

The new analytics product was announced in June and tested since then with a beta group of fewer than 100 businesses. Pinterest is also testing a self-service advertising platform with a more exclusive group, but isn’t saying when it plans to make Promoted Pins more widely available.

However, the company is very keen on promoting business’ organic relationships with the Pinterest user base, a group more than 50 million strong (comScore’s June figures pegged the network at 57.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. alone).

“We have hundreds of thousands of businesses everyday on Pinterest who are trying to reach more people and connect both with their existing user base and to new potential customers,” Pinterest Product Manager Jason Costa told Marketing Land in  a phone interview. “We are releasing this analytics product in the spirit of helping them get a closer understanding of how their publishing strategy is going on Pinterest, who is their audience and what does that audience profile look like.”

Pinterest Analytics is divided into three sections.

Profile, which measures how well a business or brand is doing on its own Pinterest account, featuring:

• impressions, repins and clicks on Pins and Boards that a business has created.
• the top 50 Pins created in the last month, which can be sorted by impressions, repins or clicks.
• an All Time button that shows the highest performing Pins the account has created ever.

Audience, which provides aggregate details about unique viewers, featuring:

• age, gender, language and location demographics of those users.
• interest data, showing the Pinterest categories and topics that an account’s audience has shown interest in and what other Pinterest accounts they follow.

Domain, which shows Pinterest activity for a business’ domain, featuring:

• performance data on Pins, regardless of author, that point back to a website.
• the ability to break down the data by app (iPhone, iPad, Android phone, tablet, etc.) used to interact with the content. (This breakdown is also available on the Profile tab.).
• an All Time button that shows the Pins pointing at a domain that have generated the most social engagement and highest Pinterest search quality.
• performance numbers for PinIt buttons on a site, including real-time data (in rolling seven-day aggregate totals) for clicks on the buttons and how much referral traffic those clicks are generating.

All of the data can be downloaded in CSV format for deeper analysis and much of it is retroactively available. Domain tab data is accessible back until November 2012; Profile data to Feb. 1 of this year, and Audience data to May 25.

And the few businesses with Pinterest advertising accounts, will be able to compare results for organic and Promoted Pins.

Pinterest is betting that its improved analytics offering will strengthen its popularity among marketers seeking business intelligence from Pinterest users. Costa cited as an example Vineyard Vines, a Massachusetts-based online apparel company, which resurrected an out-of-stock belt after noticing high referral traffic on the belt’s product page. That information didn’t come from Pinterest Analytics, but finding similar insights will now be easier.

“Those are the types of things that I’m hoping that analytics is going to be able to drive home for a lot of these businesses,” Costa said. “So that they can understand what’s resonating with their users and how they can convert more of them into customers.”

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.