Pinterest Analytics: How to Measure Your Pin Results
Pinterest is a powerful inspirational social media and search engine platform, with over 498 million monthly active users. The platform’s concentration on style inspiration, motivated shoppers, and unbranded searches open endless opportunities for brands. By tapping into Pinterest analytics, businesses can analyze their audience’s search intents, behaviors, and traffic journeys to curate content.
This guide walks you through important metrics for your Pinterest strategy and how you can apply this to your content mix.
What is Pinterest Analytics?
Pinterest offers free analytics for businesses, content creators, and marketers to understand the impact of their pins. To access the platform’s native analytics, you must have a Business account. This unlocks advertising tools, Pinterest Academy, and a Business Hub dashboard.
Under Analyze Performance, Pinterest provides an overview of analytics, audience insights, conversion insights, and trends. This provides a comprehensive look into your content results and opportunities for growth.
Source: Pinterest Business Hub Dashboard
16 Important Pinterest Metrics to Track
What analytics matter most on Pinterest and what do they imply? While containing similar metrics to other networks, like pin impressions, engagement, and saves, brands can track outbound clicks to analyze buyer journeys and website traffic.
Here is a complete list of Pinterest metrics to measure the success of your Pinterest strategy and content:
Pin impressions
Definition: The number of times your Pins were on screen.
Like other networks, impressions measure the number of times your content appears on screen, in a user’s feed, search results, or different category feed. You can analyze this by individual pin, board, or overall content.
The higher the number of impressions, the more reach your content has expanded. This could mean the algorithm prioritized your content because of search intent or high-quality content. See which pins or boards receive the most impressions to identify content patterns.
Pin clicks
Definition: The total number of clicks on your Pin or ad so it opens in closeup.
It’s one thing to view a pin while scrolling, but another to click on individual content. This signals that the users were interested in learning more or were attracted by a visually appealing pin. When clicking on the pin, the description also opens, which can tell more about the product or your brand story.
To increase Pin clicks, consider adding keywords to your Pin title and description to catch your audience’s attention. You can also use bold imaging to attract the user’s attention visually.
Pin click rate
Definition: The total number of clicks from your Pin or ad content on or off Pinterest, divided by the total number of times your Pin or ads were on screen.
Considering this metric tracks your clicks from on or off Pinterest, you can measure the impact of your pin or ad across multiple platforms and feeds. This is important in driving user engagement and click-throughs.
Saves
Definition: The number of times your Pins were saved to a board.
A Pin save means the user will refer to your content in the future, wants to buy the featured product, or cares about the post. Analyze which pins receive the most saves to understand why this would highly resonate with your audience.
If this content aligns with your strategy, incorporate similar posts in the future. This can leverage your brand as a go-to reference.
Save rate
Definition: The total saves of your Pins decided by the total number of times your Pins were on screen.
Saves are crucial because they indicate that someone will use your content for future reference or share it with a friend. If someone views your content and saves it, this confirms the algorithm is doing its job – putting relevant content in front of the right users.
Engagement
Definition: The total number of engagements on your Pins, including clicks, saves, and outbound clicks.
Engagement is an important metric across any social media platform. Engagements on Pinterest consist of clicks and saves, two essential metrics to understand how your content resonates.
This metric takes impressions a step further, implying user interest. Identify highly engaged Pins and boards to recreate similar content.
Engagement rate
Definition: The total engagements with your Pins divided by the total number of times your Pins were seen.
If your content has a high number of impressions but low engagement, this means your followers aren’t active with your profile. While followers are not as important on Pinterest, engagement is key to identifying content vigor and interest.
How can you increase your engagement rate? We recommend tracking this monthly to understand which pins receive the most engagement and replicate these strategies.
Outbound clicks
Definition: The number of clicks to the destination URL associated with the Pin.
Outbound clicks should not be confused with Pin clicks. While Pin clicks indicate that a user has enlarged the content, Outbound clicks lead a user to an external website, landing page, shop, etc.
Outbound clicks take users another level down the funnel, associating the content with a brand. This can increase brand awareness and encourage the user to learn more about your products or services.
Outbound click rate
Definition: The total number of clicks to the destination URL divided by the total number of times your Pins were on screen.
This metric divides outbound clicks by impressions, revealing the effectiveness of your content in guiding people to the URL. To increase the outbound click rate, consider teasing the audience with information, so they navigate to your website to learn more.
Consider adding a call to action in your description or Pin title to give users a clear action item. Finally, analyze which pins have the highest outbound click rates to create more of this content.
Total audience
Definition: The number of Pinners who have seen or engaged with your Pins.
This measures the number of unique users who have seen or interacted with your Pins. This metric can be compared to your audience reach, indicating how many users your content extends to.
Engaged audience
Definition: The number of Pinners who have engaged with your Pins.
This metric considers your total audience and identifies how many people have commented, saved, reacted to, or clicked on your Pin. If you’re looking to grow an active audience, this metric is important to know how many active users you reach.
Video views
Definition: The amount of views for at least 2 seconds with 50% of video in view.
If you publish video content on Pinterest, capturing the audience’s attention in the first few seconds is crucial. The more video views, the more engaged and watch time you have achieved.
Views also consider users who have watched the video multiple times. Identify videos with the most views, and note key moments. This can help create more dynamic, engaging content.
Average video play time
Definition: The average time someone spent playing the video and static image cards included in your Pin.
The goal of creating video content is to retain users until the end. This metric indicates how long users stay on your video before scrolling to the next. To increase the average video play time, consider using hooks to attract your audience, and drive the conversation to encourage them to stay until the end.
Top pins
Definition: The top-performing content pieces by engagement, impressions, outbound clicks, and saves.
Analyzing the top-performing content is key for perpetuating an effective strategy. In Pinterest analytics, filter your top Pins by metric to understand which posts receive more engagement, impressions, clicks, outbound clicks, and saves.
Source: Pinterest Analytics
Top boards
Definition: The top-performing Pinterest boards by engagement, impressions, outbound clicks, and saves.
Like top pins, analyze your boards by metric to understand which board categories receive the most engagement, drive the most traffic, or are the most saved. This will inspire you to improve your boards or create new ones with these results in mind.
Audience insights
Definition: Your total or engaged audience’s demographics including categories and interests, age ranges, gender split, locations, and device preferences.
These insights are key to connecting with users on a deeper level. By understanding what they search for on the platform, where they live, and what their lives are like, you can humanize your ideal clients.
Pinterest lets you filter audience insights by total and engaged audiences to understand your audience potential versus those active with your content.
How to Access Native Pinterest Analytics
As mentioned above, you must have a Pinterest Business account to access the platform’s native analytics. When logging into the network, navigate to the Business Hub for an overview of your options.
There are four sections in Pinterest analytics: Overview, Conversion insights, Audience insights, and Pinterest Trends. Let’s review each one in detail.
Overview
Click Analytics overview to access the analytics dashboard. This will open with the Overall performance by default.
At the top, select the date range and content type. Click More filters to narrow results by real-time data, audience filters, and content filters.
Source: Pinterest Analytics
Next, analyze your performance over time by metric. You can also split this data by content type, device, source, age, and gender.
Source: Pinterest Analytics
Finally, review your top-performing pins and boards by metric. You can analyze by impressions, engagements, pin clicks, outbound clicks, and saves.
Conversion insights
To unlock Conversion insights, you must create a Pinterest ads account, install the Pinterest tag, and claim your website domain. After doing this, you can measure your conversions by revenue, add-to-carts, checkouts, and more.
Source: Pinterest Analytics
Audience insights
Audience insights are divided into: Your account’s audience insights, All Pinterest users, and audience comparison.
When analyzing your account’s audience insights, measure your total audience or engaged audience. From here, view your audience’s categories and interests, age and gender distributions, top locations, and device preferences. Click Export CSV to download and save this information for your strategy.
The next tab, All Pinterest users, provides global insights on everyone who has seen or engaged with any Pins. This offers key awareness of who is active on the platform and what they enjoy consuming the most. You can filter these audiences by total and engaged.
Source: Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is a marketing resource to see what keywords, topics, and ideas are popular. Filter searches by region, trend type (top monthly trends, top yearly trends, growing trends, seasonal trends), period, interests, keywords, age, and gender to find trending topics in your niche. This tool is gold for finding new content ideas related to your target audience.
Want to see what’s trending this month on Pinterest?
Metricool, A Pinterest Analytics Tool
Pinterest offers comprehensive data and analytics to improve your strategies and content on the platform. However, many of us manage multiple platforms or clients, which means jumping between tabs to find each network’s native insights.
As a marketer, social media manager, or content creator, you need an all-in-one social media management tool that offers analytics, content planning, advertising, and inbox management.
Metricool users can connect to 9+ social media channels and schedule up to 50 pieces of content a month for free. Also, no need to pay for analytics add-ons. Analytics are available for all channels, in all plans.
What is included in Metricool’s Pinterest analytics?
Community
When entering Metricool’s Analytics dashboard, click the Pinterest tab to analyze your account’s results. Select the period, up to 3 months for free accounts, and unlimited historical data for Premium accounts.
At the top, review your community growth, not just followers. Dive into your:
- Follower balance
- Daily followers
- Followers per pin
- Daily pins
- Pins per week
Measure which days you gained and lost followers, compared to which days you posted on the platform. Understand how many Pins you posted in the period, with arrows indicating if this has increased or decreased since the previous period.
Pins
We know that followers on Pinterest aren’t as important as Pin performance. The next section dives into your impressions, engagement, and interactions to measure the effectiveness of your content.
In this section, analyze:
- Total number of impressions
- Engagement rate
- Total number of interactions
- Total number of Pin clicks
- Total number of Outbound clicks
- Total number of saves
Compare these metrics on a timeline to identify peaks, compared to the days you posted content. Again, arrows will indicate if these metrics have increased or decreased since the previous period.
List of Pins
Finally, view your top-performing pins in the period. This shows the Pin’s metrics, including impressions, saves, Pin clicks, Outbound clicks, video views, and average watch time.
This list shows the top 5 pieces of content by default, however, expand this list to see your full content rankings. Click on each metric to filter the results by metric.
Custom Pinterest reports with Metricool
While you can download Pinterest metrics in Metricool as a CSV, you can automate monthly reports to analyze your Pinterest, and other connected channels, in one social media report.
Metricool’s Reporting feature is only available for Premium plans, allowing you to gather all social media data into a comprehensive monthly report. If you still create monthly reports manually, you know the time and effort it takes to extract data and create a clean, branded report.
However, with Metricool’s reports, customize the brand logo, report colors, featured networks, and metric results. Then, download the report as a PDF or PPT to send to your clients or team members.
But wait, there’s even more. Automatically send monthly reports by selecting the day, email addresses, and e-mail text. This way, every month, the recipients will receive your monthly social media report, without even lifting a finger! 🪄
