S1E14 30 Possible Reasons Why Your Pinterest Traffic Just Dropped

Summary

Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators Episode Summary: S1E14 - 30 Possible Reasons Why Your Pinterest Traffic Just Dropped

In episode S1E14 of Pin Talk, hosts Tony Hill and Carly Campbell delve into the myriad factors that could be causing a decline in your Pinterest traffic. This episode is part one of a two-part series, addressing the first 10 of the 30 potential reasons. The discussion is comprehensive, offering practical insights, real-world examples, and actionable strategies to help bloggers and content creators navigate traffic fluctuations on Pinterest.

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1. Seasonality

[09:20 - 15:05]

One of the primary reasons for traffic drops is seasonality. Pinterest users' interests fluctuate with seasons, holidays, and events, affecting how content is prioritized in feeds.

• Carly emphasizes: “Seasonally, your Pinterest traffic will be affected. Even if you are not blogging seasonally, you will see it go down and up and down and up.” [10:00]

• Tony adds: Encourages creators to embrace seasonal shifts and consider integrating seasonal content to maintain engagement. [11:16]

Key Takeaway: Understand and anticipate seasonal trends. Incorporate seasonal themes into your content strategy to align with Pinterest's content prioritization.

2. Algorithm Updates or Shuffles

[15:23 - 21:20]

Pinterest frequently updates its algorithms or shuffles content based on user engagement and platform objectives. These changes can unpredictably impact traffic.

• Tony explains: “Algorithm updates can lead to some people seeing their traffic go up and some go down.” [16:53]

• Carly cautions: “Be cautious assigning a traffic fluctuation to an algorithm update. Seasonal shuffles are often misconstrued as updates.” [20:08]

Key Takeaway: Monitor engagement metrics like outbound click rates and stay adaptable. Recognize the difference between algorithm updates and seasonal shifts to adjust strategies appropriately.

3. Changes in Search Suggestions and Guided Search

[21:45 - 38:43]

Pinterest's search suggestions and guided searches are dynamic, often changing based on trending topics and user behavior, which can alter the visibility of your pins.

• Tony shares: Utilizes the Pin Clicks tool to track changes in search suggestions, noting their frequent fluctuations. [27:12]

• Carly provides an example: When high-volume keywords like "postpartum" lost guided search prominence, necessitating content pivoting. [29:01]

Key Takeaway: Continuously track and adapt to changes in search suggestions. Utilize tools like Pin Clicks to stay informed about keyword trends and adjust your content to maintain visibility.

4. New Competition and Pins

[38:43 - 55:54]

An influx of new content creators and pins increases competition, potentially diluting your content's reach and engagement.

• Tony discusses: The necessity of differentiating your content amidst growing competition, recommending strategies from the "Blue Ocean Strategy" to find unique angles. [46:10]

• Carly highlights: Not all competition is detrimental; quality competition can inspire creativity and innovation. [50:39]

Key Takeaway: Focus on unique, high-quality content to stand out. Analyze competitors to identify gaps and opportunities for differentiation.

5. Spammers Taking Over

[55:54 - 60:12]

Spam activity, including the proliferation of low-quality or misleading pins, can adversely affect the user experience and, consequently, your traffic.

• Carly observes: Pinterest is actively working to reduce spam, which generally improves platform quality over time. [55:54]

• Tony notes: While spam is less common, encountering it can be frustrating but is typically addressed by Pinterest's cleanup efforts. [56:02]

Key Takeaway: Continue producing authentic, high-quality content. Trust that Pinterest's efforts to minimize spam will enhance the overall platform environment.

6. New Shoppable Pins or Shopping Pins Taking Over

[60:08 - 66:09]

The rise of shoppable pins prioritizes product-focused content, potentially overshadowing informational or inspirational pins that bloggers often create.

• Carly explains: Shoppable pins can crowd out informational content, making it harder for non-product-focused blogs to gain visibility. [62:24]

• Tony remarks: Pinterest is integrating more shopping features, which can create additional layers between users and blog content. [65:03]

Key Takeaway: Diversify your content to include shoppable elements if possible, or strategically target keywords that remain informational to maintain traffic.

7. New Shopping Features Taking Over

[66:09 - 73:10]

Enhanced shopping experiences, such as "Explore Featured Boards," push product-centric content further into users' feeds, impacting traditional bloggers.

• Carly advises: Focus on non-shopping keywords or adapt your content to include product elements if targeting sectors like home decor. [67:39]

• Tony adds: Using tools like Pin Clicks to analyze board performance can help diagnose impacts from these features. [68:46]

Key Takeaway: Stay informed about new shopping features and adjust your content strategy accordingly. Utilize analytics tools to track how these changes affect your traffic.

8. Shadowban

[73:17 - 77:55]

A shadowban occurs when Pinterest limits the visibility of your content without explicit notification, often mistaken for other issues like algorithm changes or seasonality.

• Carly references: Previous episodes discussing shadowbans and emphasizes distinguishing them from normal traffic fluctuations. [73:17]

• Tony concurs: Many traffic drops attributed to shadowbans might actually stem from other factors discussed in the episode. [74:00]

Key Takeaway: Before concluding a shadowban, rule out other common causes such as seasonality, algorithm changes, or increased competition. Refer to detailed resources or episodes dedicated to shadowbans for thorough understanding.

9. Bug or Glitch

[77:55 - 86:48]

Technical issues within Pinterest can cause sudden and temporary drops in traffic, often rectified swiftly by platform updates.

• Carly mentions: Traffic drops due to glitches are usually short-lived and resolve within 48 hours. [74:35]

• Tony agrees: Reporting glitches to Pinterest can help in swift resolution, though some issues may persist longer. [75:19]

Key Takeaway: Allow time for potential bugs or glitches to be resolved before making drastic changes to your strategy. Report persistent issues to Pinterest support to aid in their troubleshooting efforts.

10. Covering Too Narrow of Topics

[86:48 - 87:17]

Over-niching can limit your audience reach, making your content less discoverable to a broader user base.

• Carly explains: Niching down excessively confines you to a very narrow audience, reducing overall visibility. [84:21]

• Tony adds: Utilizing tools like Keyword Explorer and Pin Clicks can help identify broader, high-volume keywords to expand your content's reach. [81:08]

Key Takeaway: Strike a balance between niche-specific and broader content. Avoid over-niching to ensure your pins remain discoverable to a wider audience, enhancing traffic potential.

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Conclusion

Tony and Carly provide a thorough exploration of the top 10 reasons behind Pinterest traffic drops, emphasizing the importance of understanding platform dynamics, staying adaptable, and utilizing available tools to diagnose and address issues. They encourage creators to remain proactive, leveraging strategies like seasonal content integration, diversified keyword targeting, and continuous content quality improvement to sustain and grow Pinterest traffic.

Notable Quotes:

• Tony Hill: “Listen to this podcast, hopefully what you'll get from it is just some reassurance of like, what you're going through may be actually be normal.” [02:27]

• Carly Campbell: “Sometimes we don't think about the application of it on our own accounts. That's a big deal.” [08:41]

• Tony Hill: “Pinterest is in the business of leading people to content. And if Pinterest thinks that this content's more seasonally relevant… they're going to fill those spaces with seasonal content.” [10:00]

• Carly Campbell: “If you cover too narrow of topics… you're not allowed to play in the pool.” [80:33]

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Additional Resources:

For the full list of 30 reasons, bonus insights, and a free PDF resource, visit pintalkpodcast.com/drop. Subscribe to receive immediate access and further enhance your Pinterest strategy.

Transcript

[Tony Hill]

Hey, Tony, here real quick. So this is a special two part episode. We're going to cover 30 reasons why your Pinterest traffic may have dropped. And the first 10 reasons are on this public episode you're about to listen to. And the rest are on a special free bonus episode. So to get the free bonus episode and get a free PDF that lists all 30 of these reasons, head to pentalkpodcast.com drop. That way you can easily follow along with us as we talk through each one. And be sure to stick around to hear reason number 10, because Carly says it's the most important. All right, onto the episode. Hey, welcome to pintalk, the go to podcast for all things Pinterest for bloggers and content creators. I'm Tony Hill and with me is my co host, Carly Campbell. So what are we talking about today, Carly?

[Carly Campbell]

We are going to talk about 30 reasons why your Pinterest traffic will always have drops.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, 30 is, it's a big number. It's one I've been brainstorming and you've been helping me out with that for a little bit. And there might be more than 30, but these are the 30 we can think of. Spent quite a bit of time thinking through just all the possibilities of why traffic drops. Like, we just have a lot of people in your community, in my community and other communities who experience traffic drops, which makes me wonder like, okay, is there a problem with those communities and the strategy or this stuff's not. It's just like a normal thing?

[Carly Campbell]

Yes.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, it's just a normal thing and.

[Carly Campbell]

It happens to every account. Eventually nothing goes up and up and up forever.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, that's right. So listening to this podcast, hopefully what you'll get from it is just some, I don't know, maybe reassurance of like, what you're going through may be actually be normal. But, um, there are some, some cases where it's not normal and you're gonna have to make some changes. And we actually addressed some of that in the previous episode on Shadow Bands and whatnot. But we're gonna be talking about a lot of things are just normal, everyday stuff that's going on with Pinterest and the platform and how that can make your traffic drop. So just learning some ways that that could really just kind of explain what you're going through. And in some cases you can do something about it, in other cases you can't. But just knowing sometimes is just half of, like wrestling through just your mindset and emotions of what you're going through. Seeing your traffic Drop can kind of be reassuring.

[Carly Campbell]

And I would say that in my years of experience on Pinterest, the majority of the reasons that we see drops, there's usually a follow up action that you can take. And I've found that there's very few times when the answer is just like, there's nothing you can do whatsoever. There's no fixing it. Usually if you're willing to put in the effort, sometimes some accounts have dropped forever, but even then, if you can identify that, you know, this is something that's affecting me forever, then, then the action to take is, oh, decide what to do now.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I'm looking at this list and yeah, so far I'm looking at each one and yes, there's some sort of action you can take. Although there's one that I see, it's number 15, which we're gonna reveal that as a bonus. That one I don't know, like if there's really anything you can do about. But no, okay, there's finally one on the list. But it will help and explain why you may be seeing less traffic. Okay, so to start this, here's the thing, I will get people posting like in my community, screenshots of their traffic drops, or sometimes they're just asking like, hey, my traffic dropped, what's going on? And it's like the first thing I need is context because I have no idea what their account is. They're not sharing the account most of the time. And oftentimes they'll share screenshots. But it only, it's just one screenshot or so and it only tells a little bit of the story. But it seems like there's to me a certain level of information that I need, but also the reality is also the account itself. So, and this isn't necessarily like on our list, I don't think. And that is when someone is telling me that their account is dropped. And if I could take a look or you know, give some advice, like I'm asking questions first and some of those questions are like, okay, how many put total pins do you have? How old is your account? Like when did you first start pinning? How many pins are you doing every day? How many unique URLs are you doing? What's your average number of unique know impressions each day? Because a lot of times those numbers are just so small that the drop that we're seeing is just really not that significant. If they're getting like a hundred clicks a day and all of a sudden they're going down to 20 clicks, or you know, 50, like lose half their traffic. Yeah. Overnight. I mean, yes, like percentage wise, that's a big number. But really we're just dealing with a hundred clicks a day. That is such a small amount that that fluctuation can look worse than what it really is. Now, if someone were to come to me and says, I'm averaging like 10,000 clicks a day and it's cut in half over a period of a week, okay, that's pretty significant change, and that I would treat the account very differently than I would with someone who's just getting a hundred clicks a day.

[Carly Campbell]

Well, I agree with that, but I take it a step further and I want to know how long that 10,000 clicks a day has been established. If it's been established for. For four days, five days a week, and it falls down to 5,000, then I tell them that that's normal. If they've been getting 10,000 clicks a day for six months or a year or sometimes worse, sometimes five years, and all of a sudden it's been cut in half, then I think, like, okay, there's a problem, but. But it is not a problem if your traffic's, you know, slowly growing and you maintain 10,000 clicks for a week or two weeks and it falls off to nothing. Especially if the majority of that 10,000 clicks is coming from one keyword corner or one or two pins.

[Tony Hill]

Right, exactly. So there are times where I just want to say, like, hey, your account is just so new, it's so small. Honestly, like, don't worry about it. Come to me. Like, if, you know, the other three plus months have gone by, you've pinned another 500 plus or thousand pens, that's a different story. Like, what's your minimum? Where, like, you would seriously, either yourself or you would have that account owner really spend some time investigating what's going on.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, I really like, I like the thousand pins mark, but I also want to see that thousand pins in a certain period of time. These days, if that thousand pins has been pinned out over the course of three years, to me, they don't count anymore. Or, you know, only the most recent 200 or 300 count.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

And then we're not at a thousand pins again. So I think that I want to see a person getting to a ,thousand pins within six months. If you only have a thousand pins, the account has to be relatively new. If you're coming in with a thousand pins and the account is old, then we are starting at a different place. And so I don't have any specific benchmark uh, recently, somebody came to me and asked me to look at their account, and they had 15,000 pins. We might even have talked about this on one of the most recent episodes. The thousands and thousands and thousands of pins and, like, 50,000 impressions. And I was just like, well, the vast majority of your pins are getting less than five impressions. There's a problem. But when you only have 200 pins and it's taking you a year to put them out, and you're only getting 50,000 impressions, it's maybe not a problem with Pinterest. It's a problem with one of these other things that we're going to talk about.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And then to another point you kind of touched on. And that is it could have been just a handful of pins that was carrying the majority of their clicks, right?

[Carly Campbell]

Oh, absolutely. See that all the time.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, yeah. And that's where I've. I think I talked about. I've. I've got a tool that I've built. I got a Google sheet where you can take exports out of your Pinterest analytics from two different time periods, like before and after a drop. Right. And it will compare the two and it will highlight, like, which pins, saw drops and like, by how much and all that kind of stuff.

[Carly Campbell]

Do you share this tool for, like, your Maverick four members?

[Tony Hill]

Oh, yeah, that's true. This tool is.

[Carly Campbell]

Do you do that?

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, and I have an instructional video on how to use it.

[Carly Campbell]

Cool. Yeah, so I've noted that for myself to note.

[Tony Hill]

There you go.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, it's important to. And actually, like, recently, I was complaining to you about one of my sites that just had a drop, and you suggested using this tool, and we looked at my pins that had dropped. I didn't even have to put it in the tool. After I actually opened every pin and looked at it, and I was like, oh, yeah, Every single pin that's dropped is a Super bowl pin, and the Super Bowl's over. And it was just very. I felt very silly because I say this to people all the time, but sometimes we don't think about the application of it on our own accounts. That's a big deal. So we've kind of jumped right into one of our points here. We should.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Did you want me move that one to the top so we can just go and talk about it now? All right.

[Carly Campbell]

I'm moving it right now because it's my favorite one to. To point a finger at anytime somebody comes to us with these. It's my favorite one And I didn't even think about it. But seasonality, a seasonal downtrend, it's a big deal on Pinterest, even if we have evergreen pins, which I do, I have an entire site that is built with evergreen pins. And so there is a baseline of traffic that doesn't dip to nothing. But the seasonal swings on that account, Even though the 75% of the content is evergreen, are still monstrous. And that's because even my evergreen account is going to be treated differently during the different seasons. Sorry, My evergreen content is going to be treated differently during different seasons, as there is room in the feed for it. Or not. Pinterest is in the business of leading people to content. And if Pinterest thinks that this content's more seasonally relevant than this evergreen content, they're going to fill the spaces in their home feed, the gaps in the user's scrolling, they're going to fill those with seasonal content if they know that's what's getting engaged with. And so your evergreen pins kind of get pushed out to the side. Not because they're not valid, not because they're not good pins, not because people wouldn't engage with them if they were put in front of them, but because Pinterest is more highly prioritizing the seasonal content for whatever. Pinterest's reasoning is behind that. Maybe it is genuinely because people engage with it more. Maybe it's because it's better for the advertisers, whatever the reason is. And so seasonally, your Pinterest traffic will be affected. Even if you are not blogging seasonally, you will see it go down and up and down and up. And because the seasons change, it makes the platform very volatile. You just need to embrace that and be ready for that.

[Tony Hill]

That's right. That's why. And I encourage people to try to find that seasonal angle with their content. If they're not covering the season, maybe there's a way they can start covering. Doesn't work with every niche, but it can work with a lot. You might be surprised.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. I think that a lot of niches, even if you're not gonna get into like the specific little Holidays, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, we're recording this February 24th. So those seem relevant to me right now. But even if you're not gonna lean into those seasons, count winter or summer for this niche, you know, or that niche. Like, I mean, let's talk about cleaning and decluttering, for example. You're not gonna have cleaning and decluttering for Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. But you can have spring cleaning and fall cleaning. You can have getting your house ready for company at the holidays. Like, there's a lot of seasonal angles you can put on there, even though it doesn't immediately seem like a seasonal just topic.

[Tony Hill]

Right? Yeah. And that's kind of one of the disadvantages of choosing a niche that is very seasonal based. Right. Like if you're in the gardening niche, for example. Yeah, that's gonna be kind of rough throughout the rest of the year outside of that season. And so you think about your audience and what other shoulder content you could create that they would be interested in. Or you just start up another Pinterest site and account and cover other seasons or more like evergreen stuff. Or do you like what you say? Like, is it like with food and pregnancy? Like those are things like people have to deal with all the time? Like it is, it's just, there's no seasonality to it. People have to eat every day. People are, you know, having babies every day. So like there are just gonna be some topics that are important in Evergreen. But even food can see volatility.

[Carly Campbell]

Oh, I, yeah, I would argue that food is a wildly seasonal niche, actually. But pregnancy, which is not, is still affected by Pinterest's choice to populate feeds with this content or not with this content. Now, if a user is very heavily engaging with pregnancy pins and searching for pregnancy topics, then because it's a personalized experience, of course they're still likely to see those things, which is why you get that baseline traffic in some of these evergreen niches. But your general traffic overall over, you know, over the course of the seasons, especially Christmas, because that's a really big season, you will still see at least a stagnation and expecting growth through that season is crazy.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. I remember it was this past fall, there were some people in my forums who were complaining about seeing their traffic drop and they were not in food. But then there are people who were in food starting to see their traffic grow. Right. And so there are people who are trying to figure out what is going on. And it's just because in particular, I remember there were some people in home decor that started to see their traffic start to fall off in the fall season as. Especially as we started getting closer towards Thanksgiving.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

And it's challenging. I mean, the whole algorithm adjusts to allow in the seasonal content, but that's not an algorithm change. And so we see this happen and people panic. They think there's an Algorithm update. But that's not what's happening. It's just a seasonality update. Pinterest is removing that content from the algorithm, but it's not a penalty for the content. So that's, I think, the number one important takeaway for seasonality.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

In my mind. Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Okay.

[Carly Campbell]

Because they will complain. People complain about, like you said, but there's nothing you could do to fix that, except maybe publishing seasonal content. I think it's important for us to follow that up with. If you go really hard into publishing the seasonal content, you should expect that you're creating more volatility in your traffic, and you should be ready for that.

[Tony Hill]

It's true.

[Carly Campbell]

I did that this year, and I knew what I was doing, but it was still hard for me to accept when it happened.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. There are quite a few people for sure. Like, once, you know, Christmas was over, January 1st hit. Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

Such a sad day.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. But then I also saw even my own. My own accounts, I have some accounts that do well come January 1, and other accounts that don't. Like. It's just kind of gets inverted. It just really depends on the platform, what users are looking for and what Pinterest, you know, decides to show. And sometimes there are algorithm updates, which is our second item on the list here, and that is algorithm updates or shuffles.

[Carly Campbell]

So when I say shuffle, what I mean, when I say shuffle is like the seasonality thing. They're shuffling content in and out. There's nothing fundamentally at the algorithmic level change. But when you say algorithm update, you mean they've changed the algorithm, right?

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, they've updated the algorithm.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. So I think those are different things.

[Tony Hill]

Okay, I see.

[Carly Campbell]

Shuffle versus update.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. All right, so we were talking about, like, seasonal shuffles. So this number two on the list is algorithm update. Okay. Yep. Which means. Yeah, it's also important. And how often they do it. We don't totally know. Sometimes they talk about when they've. I say they. Sometimes Pinterest will refer to algorithm updates they've made, sometimes they don't. And sometimes they're obvious when there was one, because you just see all these Pinterest communities blow up from people showing screenshots and freaking out of what's going on with all their. Their traffic and their. Their rankings and whatnot.

[Carly Campbell]

I do believe that shuffles are often mistaken for updates because the same thing you see people showing screenshots and freaking out about what's happening with their traffic.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Okay, so.

[Carly Campbell]

So how would you know when an algorithm update has happened? How do you identify one?

[Tony Hill]

Usually when I just see a lot more people than usual complaining in a shorter amount of time that traffic has changed and it's kind of up and down, maybe split. Like some people are seeing traffic go up, some seeing it go down.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

Because yes, algorithm updates, just like seasonal shuffles, often affect somebody positively.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. There's always going to be like winners and losers there. Yeah, yeah. And so the areas they can update and how it gets updated, I'm sure it looks different a lot of the time. So, I mean, there's a home feed that's still an algorithm. Right. Then they've got the search algorithm and they've got their related pins as an algorithm. Just very rudimentary, those three core things. The third item on our list today, there's an algorithm involved in that. We'll talk about that in a minute. But yeah, I mean, they're constantly using machine learning and AI to better understand their users and content and how to ultimately increase engagement on the platform. Right. At the end of the day, that's engagement as well as I would imagine that they are tuning their algorithm in ways that enhance anything. Product oriented.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

Because they're very product oriented right now. And so if there's things that they are testing, that showing from this small shift that we've made with the algorithm, it led to X amount more people clicking on product pins and buying products, whatever. Or not only did it improve engagement with users, but also it improved the advertisers and their ads and the performance of the ads as well. Like, that's kind of a win win for Pinterest. Right. A win for their users and a win for their advertisers that pay the bills. I still think Pinterest will often forget about their like blogger creators that make up a huge chunk of the platform. And trying to figure out what are some wins for us, but we don't pay their bills like, but we provide a lot of their content and I think they forget about that.

[Carly Campbell]

It's an important distinction though, because as a business, customer service has to come first and we are not the customer.

[Tony Hill]

Right. But without us, it wouldn't be as great of a platform.

[Carly Campbell]

No, true, absolutely true. Yeah, very true.

[Tony Hill]

But yes. Yeah, so I get it. We're like not at the top of their priority list as content creators and bloggers and I'm sure there are people listening to this podcast who have some sort of product or service that they are creating pins around to support. And that's just a different game to a degree. I mean, there's still a lot of similar strategies, bloggers and content creators, but in my opinion, you're going to be in Pinterest's my good graces a little bit more if you have anything that's more product oriented, at least these days. Yeah, but I'm not in product on Pinterest, so.

[Carly Campbell]

No, neither am I. Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

So don't totally listen to me about like product, product pens and accounts. All right. Anything else you would add to the algorithm update?

[Carly Campbell]

No. I always want people to be cautious assigning a traffic fluctuation to an algorithm update. There's not nothing we can do when there's an algorithm update. We can try to understand what the update was and then adjust our strategy accordingly. But the number of times in the past that I think that we've been able to identify true algorithm update and then adjust the strategy accordingly was very, very, very rare. I think that seasonal shuffles are misconstrued as algorithm updates all the time. I think that people want to adjust course in the wrong direction because I think that the algorithm often hasn't actually changed or like you made a really good point, they might have changed something about search, but that's not at all affecting home feed or related pins, which is where the majority of traffic, I think comes from. And so just because your traffic has changed, deciding that the algorithm has updated and you need to completely change everything you're doing, I think that that's not the best way forward.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, this is one of those items on the list that you might not be able to take action on. Although one of the interesting things I like to look at after a supposed algorithm update is looking at the engagement rate in Pinterest analytics and the outbound click rate. Because oftentimes what you will see, like when your traffic goes down, those rates will go up. Right? Yeah, you know about that. I see the smile on your face.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. It makes sense that Pinterest is going to update its algorithm in a way that improves user engagement, not in a way that decimates user engagement. So I agree, that is, that is a sign. I mean, if Pinterest makes an update and your impressions skyrocket and your saves tank, you should expect that to be short lived.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Carly Campbell]

But it's not in Pinterest best interest.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, yeah. So check those particular stats and hopefully you see those rates improve and that's gonna, over time, that should help you. You know, sometimes with these algorithm updates, a lot of times they're refreshing data that they've been collecting and they are doing scoring behind the scenes and they sometimes they just need data and time to figure all that out, rerun, crunch the numbers, so to speak. And so we just see that they are like re analyzing all sorts of things from accounts to pins to boards to, you know, clusters of users or topics. And so there will be changes around those things. And it just means that, well, if there's something to pay attention to through an algorithm update, was there like certain boards that were impacted more than others. Right. And so maybe it's reaching different people. Like people have dropped out that Pinterest is showing some of those pins that they would normally show too as they try to like model to try to predict. Like, okay, if someone's interested in this particular topic, then they might be likely to be interested in this other topic. But that's, they don't always get it right.

[Carly Campbell]

No, no, that's right.

[Tony Hill]

And that's what happens with Google. It's like they, they like to think that every algorithm update they push that there's some sort of gets the, the greatest and, and best one. But they've just started to admit like we don't always get it right and there's always gonna be some use cases where results got worse and that's just a trade off that they're willing to accept. And I believe that's totally true for Pinterest as well, is sometimes you can be a great Pinterest account caught up in a really bad algorithm update. I would say really bad. But you know, just as, you know, some sort of glitch with that particular update that impacted, you know, a sector of accounts and sometimes you just have to wait and give it time.

[Carly Campbell]

We have seen these things get rolled back in the past where things will drop off drastically. Then it doesn't seem like there's any logical reason for it and then they will just come back. This happened.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

In Pinterest.

[Tony Hill]

Makes sense. Yeah. Sometimes it feels like that with Google they have never really admitted that they do rollbacks is what they call them. And I can foresee them not ever actually rolling back an update, but I can see them like kind of doing a patch work on Google, on Google, like doing a patch update. Like they realize, okay, in our testing it showed that this algorithm improved results on average. But once they rolled it out, they started to get user feedback, especially user feedback, meaning like from site owners and we're given specific examples of really bad results and then Google collects all the information and then they will work on trying to develop like a Patch algorithm to address that. And all the more reason to report, you know, this kind of problem to Pinterest because if they're anything like Google, like they're going to take some of that feedback from account owners. And if no account owners or bloggers are reporting these false positives that they believe like on their own account from these algorithm updates, then Pinterest doesn't know to look at it. And so if we're all just complaining to each other instead of also complaining to Pinterest, like might not be helping ourselves by just complaining to each other.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes, there's a recent feature, I don't know if that's what you call it, that Pinterest is testing where they've removed the site links, the visit site links from certain pins. And we do complain, you know about this all the time. I see it on lots of Facebook groups. But when I think it's time to really start passing this onto Pinterest is when you're getting a pin or five that have comments like, how do I actually read the article? Where's the recipe? When you're getting that from your users, instead of just complaining to Pinterest like, oh, this is down paste those pin URLs with those comments into an email to Pinterest and let them know my users can't access the content and they would like to. That is going to be far more impactful than saying like, I'm sad because you took away my clicks. Because the Pinterest user really matters to Pinterest. And that's, you know, if you are seeing that in reflected, that's a good example to them that you can give to them that where you're demonstrating. I'm sure they're hearing it from their users too, or seeing it. But either way, if you are going to report these things to Pinterest, let them know how it's affecting your users.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, so let's move on to the next one. Okay, it sounds like we could have a whole podcast episode on algorithm updates. Okay, we probably could. The third one on our list here of ways you can lose your Pinterest traffic or see a drop here is changes in search suggestions and guided search. And this sometimes can go hand in hand with algorithm updates.

[Carly Campbell]

And seasonality.

[Tony Hill]

And seasonality for sure. I mean it's been eye opening with pin clicks and using that to track the search suggestions and guided search. So I've been doing that for like the top, I don't know, 100 keywords that's found on Pinterest Trends. So I grabbed all those, plugged them into pin clicks into, into the search tracker feature, where every week or every seven days, basically we're checking Pinterest search to see the dropdown suggestions. So as you start typing in a keyword, right, and you see a dropdown of suggested searches and then the colored filter bubbles or guided search right above the search results. So we track those for the same keywords every seven days. And it's been fascinating to see how often they change. They change a lot with seasonality, of course. And honestly, I want to start tracking them like daily because right now it's just every seven days. I just picked that number. But I want to track those daily at some point to see how often these are really changing.

[Carly Campbell]

We found such a interesting example of this this week. I was doing some research, trying to see, I was trying to see specifically how niche is too niche for a topic. And I searched a place name and in the search results in pinks, where we can see search volume, I got back a search volume of one, well, two words around this particular keyword, which tells me right away it's not a good keyword because there's only two search results total. But one of them had zero for volume and one of them had 460 searches, which isn't good. But when you looked at the string of words that had these 460 searches, it was really clear that nobody had ever typed that into Pinterest. It was like a nonsensical string of words.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

And so I started putting in the bits and pieces of it into Pinterest search to see how had 450 people ever been attributed as having searched this thing. And it didn't take me very long to find once someone put in the first piece of words that made sense, the guided search bubbles were the next thing they were there. If you clicked them, it modified the search and it made the whole nonsensical search. And, and I guarantee that those bubbles, once they're not a guided search anymore and they will not be forever. Pinterest changes their guided search bubbles when they're not a guided search anymore. That search falls to zero overnight. The second it's not there because no one's typing this in. The volume only exists because Pinterest is guiding people there. And so if we are using search volume in any capacity to guide our keyword choices and Pinterest changes their search suggestions, it doesn't matter what the search volume said last month. It's different now. So Pin clicks is going to offer us the opportunity to actually keep track of that. In my whole history on Pinterest, I've never tracked specifically what the bubbles are for every keyword, what the dropdown is for every keyword.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

But I have had the experience years ago when I pinned really heavily in postpartum. One day, overnight, Pinterest took away all the guided search bubbles for postpartum, and traffic went away for the vast majority of our pins because Pinterest wasn't leading people to those pins anymore. And I think that this is a really common. We'll see sometimes we'll see on our graphs, our individual pins. It'll be like that pin is just ticking along and then, boom, it's dead. But when you search it, it's still ranking. And that's really confusing. You know what you're searching, Right. You type in the whole long tail. It's still there, still ranking. Pinterest can still see it. But Pinterest isn't leading people to it anymore. And that's a problem.

[Tony Hill]

Right. Okay, I'm gonna share my screen. I've never done this on our podcast. Let's do it for people who are listening only. Sorry. This would be on the YouTube, though, if you wanna see it. But I'm gonna share my screen here. All right, so here we are. We are on the search tracker in pin clicks.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

And this is what I was talking about. These are some big keywords. Actually, these are keywords that some of them are in the top Pinterest trends, but also some of them are just like big keywords that people like to put in Pinterest. Like ideas and easy. Right. And cute.

[Carly Campbell]

Like you. Meaning conjunction with another word.

[Tony Hill]

Exactly, exactly. Okay, so we've got this column called Guided Searches. And as you can see, every single one shows changes, not every single keyword. For the dropdown suggestions show changes in the last seven days, but 100% of guided searches, the filter bubbles have changed. When I look at this, I look at it maybe not every week, but pretty close. It's pretty much what I see is.

[Carly Campbell]

That they're all always changing.

[Tony Hill]

They're always, always changing. Yeah. And these are huge keywords. So some of them are like, you know, 48 million, 6 million searches a month that could greatly affect traffic.

[Carly Campbell]

Well, and it makes sense that Pinterest is going to start. Not start, but always be testing what word is best here for engagement for our platform. Because this is where the majority of users are starting, is these big words. Right. That's what people are there to search for. Pinterest would be doing poor business if they weren't experimenting with what is the best word for us to have here? And that requires changes.

[Tony Hill]

That's right, yeah. And I think there's an algorithm behind that and I wouldn't be surprised if they do some machine learning, doing some creating some models around that and then trying to figure out how to make it smarter and more real time. So that's going to be an area that I just think there's always going to be volatility in. And it seems to be an area that users engage with a lot because they've continued to keep this feature live for a while now. And to your point, because we're able to start tracking search volume, we're now seeing some of these really, really long tail keywords that people are not actually searching for that they're being guided there through guided search.

[Carly Campbell]

Pinterest took search bubbles away completely for about a year in 2019. And the fact that they were so committed to having them gone, they were gone for so long and then they brought them back really should tell us just how integral they are for the end user because that was a big change that they completely. We, we talked about rolling back updates. You know, maybe, maybe Google doesn't admit to rolling back updates. That was a massive change that Pinterest rolled back.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Okay.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

And I will see those also, like within the search results. I'll start to see those and sometimes they'll be out and I won't see them anymore.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. Did you see them on your phone?

[Tony Hill]

I don't know. I don't use it. I don't use the phone as much.

[Carly Campbell]

No, I don't think I see that. I don't use it often either. But I don't think I see them on my phone. I think I see them on desktop. That's neither here nor there. That was just kind of my own wondering.

[Tony Hill]

Right. But I am trying to use the mobile app more. I'm trying to use it actually for like some of my everyday searches that would normally go to like Google for.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

Just to interact with the app more because again, majority of Pinterest users are using the app. So I think it's important for me finding my target Pinterest users is to use the app often. I can then keep up with some of the changes that they're making within the app.

[Carly Campbell]

Absolutely. And you can save your own pins when you see them. Yeah, that's why using the app.

[Tony Hill]

That's funny, I never even thought of doing that.

[Carly Campbell]

Oh, just start.

[Tony Hill]

I mean, like. You mean on my personal account? Like on my personal account, I don't ever save them. But that's what you're talking about. It's personal.

[Carly Campbell]

That's what I'm talking about. Starting boards with those keywords that you want them to rank for.

[Tony Hill]

That's funny. Okay, so that's the third item on the list here. Changes in the search suggestions and guided search. Now, as far as. What can you do about that? Well, adjust your keywords that you're targeting. So if some of those guided searches have dropped out, are there some new ones that are in there that either you have existing content for, you can create some new pins to target, or that you might have to create new content and new pins to target it? I mean, the only way to keep up with this, realistically, honestly, is with pin clicks. I don't, I never did before pin clicks because it was just not feasible to really do that. But now you can put all your major keywords into the search tracker tool and you'll get an email every. Well, you can get an email every day because depending on the cadence in which you add keywords, because we're checking every seven days for every keyword and you can get notified whenever those changes are made to guided search. And honestly, I think it's one of the most underutilized tools in pink clicks.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, absolutely. I, I mean, back when the postpartum words disappeared and we knew postpartum words disappeared cause they were all gone. It wasn't just a matter of like, one is different. I have to notice that we knew they were gone. I made the massive pivot to pinning for the keywords new moms and after babies. And that was successful. And I think that, I mean, it could have been so much more successful if I'd had keyword research tool like pink clicks at the time. But I just had to start guessing what might be a keyword that would replace. Because the thing is that postpartum, this evergreen, you're postpartum, you're going to engage with that content. There wasn't less users that were interested. It was. Pinterest was guiding people less to that content. So I had to guess what's the next best thing that Pinterest will guide them to. But in this situation where the bubbles are just changing, we know what the next thing Pinterest is guiding them to is. It's not a guessing game. It's whatever replaced the bubble that you had there before.

[Tony Hill]

Right? Oh, oh, oh. Maybe this is the connection with Pinterest trends.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

And how like, Pinterest trends is reflective of search, of search. Right. Of what people are searching for. Well, now we've learned that Pinterest is counting search volume, what people are searching for when they're interacting with guided search.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

And so, like, which comes first? Are people. As far as what Pinterest Trends is showing you, is it a reflection of what's coming in and out of guided search? Because guided search has to be automated. There's no way they've, they've hired like, thousands of people to, like, manually adjust these guided search filter bubbles. It's, it's all automated.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

And maybe there might be some things where Pinterest has a, has a button and it's like, all right, it's Valentine's Day is coming up. Let's press the seasonality button. And it's going to maybe update the guided search filter bubbles. Maybe.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

But I wonder if it can be a reflection of just the change in search behavior and then if that affects then what shows up in guided search, and then that affects what then also then shows a backup to Pinterest trends.

[Carly Campbell]

But the reason they can't do a better job of predicting what the traffic will be like is because why you're saying they know in advance what the changes will be and they will put those changes out there at the time. But I guess because they, they're probably still adding new trending keywords that didn't.

[Tony Hill]

Exist before, adding them into Pinterest Trends.

[Carly Campbell]

Into the guided search or guided search. They're adding them to guided search. So they'll be there. They might have leftover ones from last year that they'll put in, but then they'll have to manually add some of the new ones or their AI adds some new ones. And so I guess they still wouldn't be able to accurately predict what the traffic would be like to those old ones because it's still going to be a personalized experience. And it's just like putting six cookies in front of a toddler and not knowing which one the toddler's gonna choose. Like, so, so I guess it's. It makes sense that it's not entirely predictable because it's never going to be entirely static. Like, they're never going to use the same dictionary of keywords they used last year. Just year over year over year. They have to account for trends. And I don't mean Pinterest trends, I mean world trends.

[Tony Hill]

Right, world trends, but also Pinterest trends. As far as search trends, what people are searching for, but also trends in what people are clicking on from guided search.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes, yes.

[Tony Hill]

So they might put in some keywords in a guided search that they think might do well to your cookie thing. Right. With toddlers. Right, right. But maybe people aren't clicking on it on certain ones, so then they, they drop out. But for others they are, they are engaging with it. Well, guess what, a lot of times when you go to that search page, it also has more guided search bubbles. And then it's like, okay, which ones are people clicking on from there? Right. And so then now they're collecting all this data and then I wonder if this is partly what feeds into Pinterest trends. So not only is it actual searches people are doing, but it's also the guided searches.

[Carly Campbell]

And we know that not all searches appear in trends. Not all strong keywords appear in trends. I've always thought that it was, you know, Pinterest kind of pushing creators because that's a tool for creators. I thought I was Pinterest pushing creators in a certain direction.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

But maybe it's not. Maybe it is just reflective of what people actually engaging with based on guided search.

[Tony Hill]

But what that means though is this also changes the intent of these keywords. It's a different intent when someone manually starts to search for a keyword versus they searched for a keyword. But then as they were searching, they saw in the dropdown a better one. And they wouldn't have thought of that on their own, but it changed their intent with that keyword.

[Carly Campbell]

I think that you're right. But when we search. Okay, so I just did this travel blogger summit for Pinterest and I searched the word London, just London. Nothing in the dropdown suggested that Pinterest was gonna lead anybody towards travel. Like keywords, London had words like aesthetic and bridge and broil recipes and like lots of things. No travel was suggested in my drop down. But when I forced the search to go through without qualifying it, without adding those guided search things that they suggested to me, everything that came back was travel. And I think that people can either follow the guided search or they see that the guided search is completely irrelevant to them. And search the broadest keyword and there's massive search intent at that broadest level that Pinterest isn't suggesting. And I've never seen it like this before.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I remember seeing that in your example. And I don't see that on my account when I'm logged in because I don't do a lot of travel searching.

[Carly Campbell]

So you just see the aesthetic type pins.

[Tony Hill]

I see. Let's quotes wallpaper. Mm. I'm looking at the guided search bubbles. Sky bubbles.

[Carly Campbell]

Oh, I wanna know what your images are.

[Tony Hill]

My images? Let's see. Uh, yeah. Okay. A lot of em are travel.

[Carly Campbell]

That's the thing. I think that the guided search at the broadest keyword reflects what Pinterest wants you to search for. And so I don't they like the guided searches could change but at the broadest keyword level if the pins coming back or travel then I guess creators have to identify is the search that we're engaging with actually delivering what we think it is delivering. Now, now I feel like this has gotten a bit off the topic of why your Pinterest traffic might have dropped. But it's a real, it's been a really mind opening experience for me because.

[Tony Hill]

Pinterest will get to know their users better. I would imagine it is more efficient with their resources, with their money on being able to like group users together to create different types of users. You could say the different buckets of users versus like building a personalized experience and algorithm for one user at a time.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

And so they might lump people into okay, this person has a very strong correlation with photography. And so when they are going to put in London and just type in London in the search box on their personal account, they're probably going to see more photography related pins for London rather than travel pins. Right. So I'm thinking over time as resources get cheaper for Pinterest on building algorithms, machine learning models and all these things, they can more customize. So maybe as a photographer like who maybe is also a traveling photographer. And so like they'll kind of do a better job of showing a good balance of photography and travel and all that for that particular user as it knows lots of unique things about that particular person. Maybe this different style of pins to like other things. So I'm going to kind of go into the deep in here on this.

[Carly Campbell]

But, but it's so interesting to think about. It really is. But I mean regardless, kind of, you know, regardless of how that actually plays out and I hope that we'll learn more about how that actually plays out so that we have a better understanding of it. But we know that when the recommended searches change, traffic to that corner of Pinterest can change. So even though there's more for us to understand about it, we know it changes it.

[Tony Hill]

So there are some Google SEO tools out there that will show a reflection of how volatile the search results have been and they'll show charts of it. So when they will try to predict and show you when there has been like a Google algorithm update because they see a big shuffle in the order of results for keywords that they track the search rankings for every single day. So I want to build something similar for pin clicks, not necessarily for keywords, but for guided search. I would want to do for both, but for guided search to kind of have a baseline measurement of like. Okay. On a typical day, guided search changes this much. But then all of a sudden like during this day or this week, the amount of changes for guided search across a vast amount of keywords, like was significantly interesting. Different. Yeah. And so we can kind of show you and kind of give you an alert and like we can show a chart over time.

[Carly Campbell]

It would be interesting.

[Tony Hill]

So we might see. Yeah, so like a big spike in guided search changes and does it correlate.

[Carly Campbell]

With the changes in traffic?

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, we don't know. There's nothing out there like it.

[Carly Campbell]

So I believe it does. But I would love to see it.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, me too. Okay, so number four on our list of why your Pinterest traffic may be dropping. It comes down to new competition and pins.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes. When we put this one on the list, I really wanted to like just take a moment to address it. It doesn't have to be a reason to give up. I think a lot of times people feel like there's too much competition, I'm going to give up. And I don't know why that is the go to for people, but that that is seems to be what I hear. And so we talked about some of the ways that we don't have to see new competition and pins as a reason to quit. And you had some really good insights.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I mean there's definitely a part of me, like, I think a lot of other people don't like to see competition. It's just a natural way of, like you just feel threatened to a degree. And it's hard then if you see effects of that. I mean there's one thing you see of competition, but you don't see any negative effects of it. But then at some point you start to see some negative effects and you're wondering, is it your competition? And but the reality is there's always been competition in the marketplace for anything of value. There's always been competition at some point. Sure. One person started the business. I'm talking like thousands for thousands of years that there's been trade in any sort of market where you can buy and sell. And so that's Just a reality that we live in. And we're in this time period with, well, more abundance in the sense that there are more people who are getting on the Internet, right. And starting to figure out how to create content, how to create blogs. It's getting easier and easier every year to do that. Right. AI has really propelled that and made it even easier to get going. And so that's just inevitable. And some people who, they. They want to quit, that's fine. You can quit and move on to something else. But I guarantee you, like, eventually you're gonna run into more competition. So at some point, you gotta face the reality and, like, figure out what's worth sticking through to figure out, okay, how can I make some adjustments knowing that this is just a reality of I'm going to have constant competition. What am I going to do about it? A really good book I recommend is called Blue Ocean Strategy. And honestly, you don't need to read the entire book to get the gist of it, but it's going to help you think differently. Look at the way you look at your blog, your content, how you can approach it differently than anyone else. I mean, yes, I like to keep one eye on the competition, no matter what business endeavor I have, but it also fuels me to think differently. Like, how can I think outside the box? How can I try things that my competition has never tried before that they're not thinking about? And I think there's a way to do that with Pinterest. Like, I'm constantly doing it. I mean, honestly, like, I'm. I'm in a season. Like, a lot of other people have seen the most amount of competition I've ever seen with Pinterest. I mean, I had it pretty good for a long time where literally there might have been, like, five other, like, direct competitors I had on Pinterest. And now, like, it's more than I can count. But I keep an eye on a lot of them to see what they're doing, to see what they're not doing, and to find ways that I can create a little bit different content, a little bit different pins. And so I think it's a good, good thing. It's good for just the human spirit and creativity, you know, just to force yourself to try new stuff and see what you come up with. And maybe you can come up with something that is an original idea that's attached to a known idea. And sometimes those can be the best pins. Right? So that's the way I'm looking at competition that, yes, sometimes Pinterest is going to be favoring new accounts with a lot of new pins and a lot of new URLs. And, and I've seen that come in, but I've also seen them fizzle out.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, that was interesting to hear you point out, because it's. You're right. I mean, I didn't think about it that way when we put this on the list.

[Tony Hill]

And the reason why a lot of them will fizzle around this is my theory, and that is they just weren't that great. And Pinterest needed more time and more pins to measure and understand how well people are engaging with this particular account and all their pins. And then they're gonna update the account score. And if that's not a great account, if they're not putting out great pens, then that score will get lowered. And when it gets lowered, they start to see, you know, less distribution of their stuff. So that's just one of those things, like, you just kind of had to have to hold tight and wait for some of this competition that you just know, like in your gut, their pins are not great, Their content is not great. It's not gonna last long.

[Carly Campbell]

It's not a great user experience.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

I think that also the majority of these, you know, low quality accounts, if you're identifying lots of low quality accounts that are your competition, I don't believe that the people behind those things, even if they're not really people that are involved, even if somebody's just pushing a button and the content's being spit out and, you know, some bot is pinning air, some pinning program is pinning it, I don't believe that those people have the staying power that it takes for this to be a business for them. I think that right now they think they have it figured out. They think it's easy. Pinterest is going to improve their ability to identify low quality content faster. I think it's more necessary for them now than it ever has before. And I actually think that we're already seeing them make strides in that direction. The people who are doing this, you know, low quality content, loads of it, over and over again, they are looking for fast, easy money, and there is no such thing. And so they'll only do it until they're not doing it anymore. You know, we don't know if that'll be six months or if it'll be a year, but they won't be doing it for a long time. And if you are building a real business and taking the time to connect with the real users that are landing on your site or. And it doesn't have to be all of them. Oh, my goodness. I mean, I have built a real business, and I don't even worry about 90% of the users that have ever landed on my mom blog, ever. I'm only talking to those people who want to find out how my mom blog makes money online. And then we take it this step further at. If you take the time to build a real business, it won't matter that Pinterest feels a little bit more competitive.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Right. So we're kind of talking about two different competitors. There's competitors who come in, and they're actually doing a really good job. Like, you're impressed with their content and their pins, and those can be threatening. Then there's other competitors who are not, but they are in this temporary loophole with the algorithm, and they're doing really well right now. Right. And sometimes it's because they're. They're like spammers. Which leads us to, like, the fifth item on our list. Right. So we've got new competitions, number four, where you can have good competition, you can have bad competitions, or spammers. So number five on the list is spammers taking over. And so we've seen a lot of that lately.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. I also believe that lately we've seen early indications that Pinterest is attempting to clean up some of the spam, which is fantastic. Yeah. I don't know if you've seen threads posted lately about, like, missing annotations. I'm sure you've seen them. The annotations are missing. Okay. So, I mean, I do think that Pinterest is making the annotations less immediately visible. Logged out. But if you take that a step further, and if you look into the code on the back end of the pins, which, I mean, not everybody's gonna do, but you could just do it in pin clicks. You could paste the pin into the pin stats tool, and you could see if it has annotations. But there are a lot of them that don't have annotations, and they're a year old. And in every case except one, which was a product pin, which makes it different, a different use case than a center pin. In every case of them that I've looked at once, I followed that pin through to the board that it should have been on. It wasn't there on the board, and it was on an account that I believe is a spam account. And so I think that's a reflection of Pinterest working to clean up Spam on the platform. Like the whole AI revolution, Like, we are still in the middle of it. Pinterest is just as much in the middle of it as we are. It's unreasonable for us to expect them to be able to identify and stop spam accounts immediately. They. This is a whole new frontier for them. So just the fact that we are seeing them make progress as really positive. If you think spammers have stolen your content, there's pretty clear signs it's not a really common reason for Pinterest traffic to have dropped. So I think in all my time on Pinterest, I have seen four or five accounts that have actually been decimated by having their pins stolen by spammers. And spammers filling up spammers is different than competition. Some competition is spam, some competition is just competition, like you said. So spammers being different than competition. I've not seen it happen that many times, but I have absolutely seen it happen where if you see a junkie account that is literally taking your pin images and posting them, and that's the kind of spam I'm talking about, where I think that Pinterest is working to dial it back. So if you think that your traffic has been affected by spam, my suggestion would be to keep going right now because I believe that generally the spam gets weeded up because it's not good for Pinterest as a platform.

[Tony Hill]

Right. Or you're the spammer that's listening right now.

[Carly Campbell]

If you're spammer, stop it. You'll get weeded out.

[Tony Hill]

How do you know you're a spammer? Do you think the line's getting a little blurry? I mean, the definition is maybe relative.

[Carly Campbell]

We talked about this before. Do we have a podcast episode that we can cover?

[Tony Hill]

I'm sure it was the AI.

[Carly Campbell]

Was it the AI episode?

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. If you aren't doing any work or, you know, somebody that you pay isn't doing any work, if the money that you're making is easy as just pushing a button, there's a good chance you're a spammer. Tony may not agree. I'm curious, refresh us on your opinion. What makes a spammer a spammer?

[Tony Hill]

Well, I think time will tell if you're a spammer or not. I mean, I think Pinterest will be good at weeding out spam accounts that users don't genuinely like that they're not engaging with. Now, there are accounts that I think you were to show some bloggers and they're like, oh, yeah, that's a spammer. And they're just putting out junk, pens, whatever. But they've got great traffic, great engagement, because users like that content and it's really hard for that blogger to accept it.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

So sometimes there's those cases where it's like they're pumping out a lot of content and sometimes that's been equated to spam, and that is people who are putting out 40, 50, 60, 80 pins, 100 plus pins a day, seen as spammers. Now, I've seen some accounts, it's not too often where it's like, okay, a lot of those pins are great and people love those pins because it's hard to do things at scale and maintain quality. Right.

[Carly Campbell]

If you're just pushing a button, then you're not giving any time or thought to the business that you've created.

[Tony Hill]

I admit AI is making that easier.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

It's not perfect.

[Carly Campbell]

Nope.

[Tony Hill]

It will just get better. And that's where creativity will help. Either creativity from your own brain or with the help of AI, if you can use it well to come up with some creative ideas.

[Carly Campbell]

So, yeah, I think that it'll be interesting to see. Like, I mean, if you're talking about like, like you said, there's these accounts that have lots and lots of pins that are putting out. And bloggers would say they're spammers, but the user wouldn't say they're spammers. It'll be interesting to see the way that the blogging industry changes as time goes on and more people are forced to accept AI at, at some level. I'm not saying that we all need to start creating AI images or posting, you know, 150 of them a day, but almost certainly our opinions and thoughts around AI are going to have to change. Bloggers are not the sole judge and jury of what is spam. And I think that a lot of people making, you know, these very, very hard, lying claims might find themselves in a tricky situation, you know, in the future, having to make that choice. But when I say spammers taking over, I mean, like the one I'm thinking of in particular was this one big site had their own Pinterest account, but then they were also starting thousands, thousands and thousands of user accounts that were pinning to their site and they were stealing pins from other people. Popular pins. Cause it works best with popular pins and pinning them to their site. And there'd be whole accounts that had nothing but stolen pins that linked to this site. And to me, that was A pretty clear spam. Like it's against Pinterest terms of service, for one thing, to start thousands of sites. But also like the, the pins were misleading. They would say something on them when you click through. It'd be a whole different thing on the other side.

[Tony Hill]

I remember that.

[Carly Campbell]

So really clear spam, I think. And if that is causing your Pinterest traffic to drop right now, I would just keep going. I believe Pinterest, that's what Pinterest is gonna take care of and become better and better identifying.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I would agree. They're gonna get, they are going to get better and I think they're going to leverage AI more to get better. I see AI as a great tool. It could be used as a hammer to nail something beautiful, artwork to the wall, but also be used to bash someone in the head.

[Carly Campbell]

So, yeah, that's right.

[Tony Hill]

It is. Okay, so let's move on to the next one here. Number six, six reason why you might see a drop in Pinterest traffic. And that is just new shoppable pins or shopping pins are taking over. Yeah, taking over the home feed search results.

[Carly Campbell]

So Pinterest seems to place shoppable pins. And I'm. We've never talked about this. I'm curious what your opinion on this is. I think they place them initially or they adjust them initially at the keyword level. And so obviously it affects the feed as a whole because it's taking up a spot in the feed, but it affects you, your traffic in drastic ways. Because as bloggers, we tend to focus on kind of like a small pool of keywords, which makes sense. It's just we're not targeting every keyword out there. So when Pinterest says, for example, what I think we saw happen in August, they were like, home decor is. And stop me at any point if you disagree with this, because I don't want to say all this and then have you point out that I'm completely wrong, but I think that they went home decor like, what an opportunity with buyer intent where we can get away with putting a few more shopping pins in the feeds of these people that are engaging with home decor keywords. And then we see traffic to the home decor niche as a whole kind of trickle downwards, point downwards, you know. But when I search home decor things, there are some searches that lead to shoppable pins and there are some searches that lead to informational pins. And my guess is that the ones that lead to shoppable pins are a. The one that Pinterest is guiding people to But B, because of that, also the ones that the vast majority of bloggers have been targeting in the past and potentially kept targeting out of habit and. And lack of understanding about, like, updates, this is what's happening. So we need to identify those ones that aren't immediately defaulting to Shop and put some effort into targeting those. But understanding what's happened there will help us understand why our traffic might have dropped.

[Tony Hill]

Right. Yep. Like, I just did a search for White Kitchen, and a newer feature I'm seeing on desktop is this Explore featured Boards on the search results. Have you seen this?

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

And so this featured. It's a Pinterest. They're Pinterest boards and they're all full of products.

[Carly Campbell]

Ooh, interesting.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. One's on the Pinterest Shop account, another one is on the Pinterest.

[Carly Campbell]

They're highlighting their own accounts.

[Tony Hill]

Their own accounts, and they're all products.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay, I gotta do this search now because I saw it the other day for my London search, but I didn't think they were Pinterest accounts. And that would make sense because if the Pinterest doesn't see the shopping intent there, then why are they gonna.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

Put the time and energy into curating those boards. Let me.

[Tony Hill]

They're doing well with these because they had mentioned them on their last earnings call. When they do these big features.

[Carly Campbell]

They are. These are Pinterest boards. I was wrong. Inspiring ideas.

[Tony Hill]

Okay. Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

And collages, but they're by Pinterest. Oh, that's real interesting.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. So, you know, they're just starting to take over. And so there's. If there's anything that is remotely product oriented. Okay. So White Kitchen. Not super product directly, like, with that intent, but one of the guided searches, it's the third one I see is gold hardware. And that is for sure, you know, White Kitchen fire. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's gonna show more shopping pins. Right. Cause it's hardware. That's something you have to buy. And so now, like, you're just gonna see less content, ideas, more pins with links to products. And Pinterest is all about the products, as we've talked about a million times. So. Yeah. So just know that there's just gonna be. I think that's gonna evolve over time. And Pinterest can figure out a way to take a topic and make it product oriented. They're gonna. They're gonna do it right now. So another reason to keep an eye on, you know, the search results, to see how they're changing.

[Carly Campbell]

Absolutely. And to not panic about this because they have been doing it since, like 2019, 2018. And we've always thought, like, oh, they'll completely successfully push us over the edge into shopping. But they haven't been able to do it, and I don't think they can. Because people are still using Pinterest to engage with informational content.

[Tony Hill]

They need to get inspired first. Right. They need to get an idea. And a lot of times they just need to see those inspirational pins and content before they are even in a place to check out a particular product.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. So understanding how it affects your traffic is important, but quitting Pinterest over it, not. Not a good idea.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. And who knows? I mean, maybe for some people, especially if they are all in on home decor, I mean, there are people who are doing, like, drop shipping with real products that they're shipping. So they ship their own, like, Shopify account, you know, and. Or Etsy account. Like, I see it all the time. So just requires you to, like, get outside your comfort zone and try different things.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes. I'm not ready to try drop shipping yet, but I've always thought it looked interesting. Yeah, yeah. But the informational content is still working, so I'm just going to target the words that aren't defaulting to shop yet.

[Tony Hill]

Because the buyer journey has not changed. There will always be people who need to do the research first to figure out and get some ideas, you know, ideate, and then do a little bit more research beyond that to finally make that purchasing decision. It's just Pinterest is. Is pushing that purchasing decision sooner, like trying to put it higher up on the funnel. And for some people, it's working, but there's still, I think, gonna be just baseline normal human behavior. People who just need to be inspired first by ideas.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes, absolutely.

[Tony Hill]

But this leads me to number seven on our list, and that is new shopping features taking over. I've noticed this in home decor is. And this kind of connects to what we just talked about, but also connects to, like, guided search. And that is in home decor in particular, there is an additional level of guided search. So, like, I did this search for white kitchen and I clicked on gold hardware, and now it's got these boxes at the top of, like, discover different elements in white kitchens and gold hardware. And it then takes me down to this, like, new page that I don't think I've ever seen before. Actually, this is an interesting layout. It's got a left sidebar of, like, add the finishing touches with white and gold accents. And it's got different products it recommends on the sidebar, but also has a normal feed of pins. So this is just another click that someone is making within the platform and one less click on a blog post directly.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

And so when Pinterest implements this, it's just creating another layer between the user and your site. And so this will come in and out and across different niches.

[Carly Campbell]

I would suggest that when Pinterest has taken the time to add this. I see what you're talking about. Add glamour and detail to your white kitchen. Bold accents. When Pinterest has taken the time to add this, I would not bother targeting these keywords unless you have a product to sell them, because every single pin underneath here is a shopping pin.

[Tony Hill]

Oh, really? I need to do this. Are you logged out or logged in?

[Carly Campbell]

I'm logged in. I'm logged in. Actually, it's not true. There's some. There's some that don't have any links. There's one here that has no links, but all the ones with links are shopping pins.

[Tony Hill]

Okay.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. So I wouldn't bother targeting that. If Pinterest has. Has dedicated this space for shopping, then if you're not creating that kind of content, don't bother to try to put your pins there or create a board and save all of those and put all of your inspirational content on it, because people are going to end up here and engage with these. I don't know.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. And if you just have the time, the resources, whatever, to try it. Right. And see. But if you have been trying it and you see your traffic dropping.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

And that's where it's important to pay attention to your boards, which ones have dropped and you know, put together, like, group your pins into different keywords or themes, see if there's some trends there and what has dropped and then go look at the search results for some of those keywords.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes.

[Tony Hill]

One day in pin clicks, you'll be able to take a pen URL and you can paste it into pin clicks and it will show you all the keywords it has ranked for. And then you can go check out the search results for those. So you can see. Yeah, I can't wait for that one. That's gonna be really helpful, though, kind of diagnosing some drops to see, okay, how has this. The search results changed? What was I ranking for? Or other accounts too. So I know we kind of pointed out home decor. That's just one I've seen change a lot, honestly, recently.

[Carly Campbell]

A lot recently.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. There's been other ones over the years and There are instances where Pinterest has pushed those things towards shopping and then given up. And we've seen recovery. Unfortunately, none of them come to mind right now. But I know that we've seen this. And so I think that there's good argument to be made that home decor really does have a shopping intent. And the recovery might not ever be what we'd want it to be. But I also think there's a really good argument for what you said, that even the person decorating is still going to be a Pinterest user who is going to be ideating before the decorating. And so there is also potential for that traffic to exist.

[Tony Hill]

And that might not be true in every niche. Cause I remember in food here, I can't find the example that I had found at one point. Maybe I shared it on the podcast. I think I shared it with you, but it was a food oriented keyword. It was like snacks for kids or something. Snacks for a kids party.

[Carly Campbell]

Oh yeah, yeah. I don't remember it specifically, but I remember you sharing it.

[Tony Hill]

So it was like a bunch. Normally it was a bunch of pins on like 30 easy kids, you know, snack ideas for birthday party. But then Pinterest started to show product pens of like snacks you can just go ahead and purchase.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes.

[Tony Hill]

And so now they're reaching people who, they're just on a different journey in that buyer's intent and they just want to buy the snack immediately. And I saw one pin, I think it was a, I think it was an ad, maybe not. And it was like taking you directly to that product on doordash, you can immediately buy it and have it delivered to your house.

[Carly Campbell]

That's crazy.

[Tony Hill]

So for those users, I mean, because there are some users in this particular example who they just want to go buy all the snacks. They don't want to make them. And so if they can get the idea directly from Pinterest and then go buy it through Pinterest and they have no interest in like making this stuff, then I mean that, that changes things for some food bloggers. There's the explore featured boards on this too. Nesting party Sweet treat ideas. Okay, not all. Okay. These are recipe pins in this featured boards that Pinterest has with explored featured boards.

[Carly Campbell]

But they're pinned by Pinterest.

[Tony Hill]

Right, but they're all pinned by Pinterest and some of them are. There are some product pins in here, but some of them are recipes. Yeah. So it's kind of niche dependent. You just gotta pay close attention to the search results, to guided search if you don't, if you ignore all this, then you're gonna be left kind of.

[Carly Campbell]

Scratching your head right when your traffic drops.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Although we'll. I think. Did we do it already? In pin clicks, you can explore in a roundabout way. You can look at your ranking history for keywords and we show a snapshot, like on a particular day. Like if you click on a keyword that you've been tracking for months.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

If you go to the rank tracker tool, click on a keyword that you've been ranking for for a long time, and we show you a chart over time what your rankings were like. Right now we don't show it, but we will at some point. And that is basically every date that we checked your rankings, we have a snapshot of what search results look like. So we'll be able to show you what their search results looked like on that date. Right now we don't. So sorry. I just like took us down this little rabbit trail here. But eventually that's going to come. And I'm glad I brought this up. Cause I forgot about it. I need a make sure we get this added in here. So this way it will help with the diagnosis problem that you can go back in time and look and see what the search results look like before your traffic dropped.

[Carly Campbell]

Right. Are they all different now?

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Has it changed? Right. Like is there a new guided search feature?

[Carly Campbell]

Right. And that'll help us understand if the drop has to do with our count or with the changes in results as a whole.

[Tony Hill]

That's right. So sometimes just not your fault. So moving on to number eight, this one will be quick.

[Carly Campbell]

Okay.

[Tony Hill]

That is Pinterest shadowbanned your account, which we just had an old episode about that.

[Carly Campbell]

Yes. And so we should just refer people back to listen to that episode. But remember, and I'm sure we said it in that episode too, a lot of the things that we are talking about today, like seasonal downtrends or shuffles or algorithm updates or changes in guided search in particular, I think, you know, the addition of more competition, the addition of spam, the shopability features on Pinterest, all of these things can make you think that your account is shadowbanned when it's not. So that is the really important caveat to that one.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, so we'll leave it at that. Go listen to the previous episode. Cause it's a big topic and deserved its own episode.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

Okay. Number nine on our list. Why traffic may drop. And that is. Well, it could be a bug or a glitch, because Pinterest is a piece of software, and software will pretty much always have bugs. Maybe there might be one day where the AI can completely make something bug free, but I don't think. I think we're a long ways away from that. So there's just gonna be bugs and glitches that can have an impact. Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

And I think generally when it's a bug or a glitch that causes your traffic to fall, it's just. It's short term. It'll happen. It'll be 24 hours, 48 hours, it'll bounce right back. And so the only reason this one is probably really even on this list is because when that happens, we panic. We forget that it's even an option for it to be a bugger glitch. So the first thing that I tell people who say, especially when they say my traffic's gone from, like, very steady to zero overnight, I say, like, let's give it 48 hours. Which is terrible. I know. Because we want to start addressing the problem right away. But all of these things, you're actually not going to do anything to address the problem right away. And sometimes all that panic is for nothing because it was a glitch.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. And those are hard to tell unless you are engaging with the platform a lot, especially on the app. And. And you're. You can look at your own account, you can do some keyword searches and see just, is something off there? Right. Like, is the visit site button gone? Or was there something like. I've seen. I have seen pens disappear and then come back. Have you ever seen this before?

[Carly Campbell]

Well, I mean. You mean visibly. You mean disappear to be invisible for you.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. Like my own. Like my own pens, I've had my.

[Carly Campbell]

Own pins break and show as a broken image.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I've seen that, too.

[Carly Campbell]

And then come back.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

I have also had them display as a broken image and then be removed and to never come back. Yeah. So earlier when I talked about those spam pins that I was looking at the missing annotations ones, and then I put them in the pin stats tracker and I went to the boards, they were pinned on and they weren't visible on those boards. I don't think that's a glitch. I think Pinterest has removed them. But if you have them going and coming, it could be a glitch. Like, you know, if it's not visible one day and then it is visible the next day, maybe that's a glitch. Or maybe they were testing a certain filter for a certain keyword. But, yeah, I've never had my pins vanish and then come back, but I have had them break and then unbreak. Okay, so the broken pins, I chalked them up to being a glitch.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, it happens sometimes, but that's usually kind of been isolated.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, it's not common. That's not a common one for me. Three times, I think, or four times over the last nine years.

[Tony Hill]

So it could be like a glitch with your account in particular, or a pin, or it could be a glitch or a bug with, like, the whole platform or for just, like, certain users, like iOS users who made an update with the Pinterest app. They were the first users to click that update button or they have an auto update, and so they got the new version and something went wrong with that particular release. That stuff happens all the time with software and apps.

[Carly Campbell]

Absolutely.

[Tony Hill]

And then it gets patched pretty quickly. Okay, so we also threw this in because this is kind of like a good catch. All of, like, of all the 30 things on our or 29 things on our list, like, if that's not one of them, then we just chalk it up to a bug or glitch, assuming your traffic comes back relatively quickly. Although some glitches or bugs can take a while to fix.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it doesn't hurt to report those things to Pinterest because maybe you caught it and they didn't. Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

Okay, so number 10 on our list. I was supposed to tease this one in the very beginning of the podcast.

[Carly Campbell]

I didn't think about it again.

[Tony Hill]

I did not. Because it's like, it's a good one, and you wanted it. You wanted to move it to the top, and I convinced you to move it to the bottom.

[Carly Campbell]

That's okay. We're talking about it here now, at the bottom.

[Tony Hill]

And I ruined the whole thing.

[Carly Campbell]

No, it's not a thing.

[Tony Hill]

So number 10 on the list of why your Pinterest traffic may be dropping. And that is starting to cover too narrow of topics.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, I think it's really, really typical that when we start blogging and we choose a niche, we start at the kind of broader level of what we're talking about. And over time, we feel like we've covered that and we keep going, but the Google people have put the insane fear of niching out into us, so we won't do that. We just go down, and instead of, you know, blogging like this down to start to reach more people, we blog like this down to reach the most narrow person. And Pinterest isn't designed for that.

[Tony Hill]

Right. It's like a inverted pyramid is what you're kind of showing.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

For all the listeners.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah. You don't. Oh, right. People are listening. You're not good at remembering that.

[Tony Hill]

I'm watching out for you, listener.

[Carly Campbell]

I'm so glad that you are. But, yeah, you can't narrow your focus over time and expect to reach a wider audience. You can expect to develop a deeper relationship with the person that you've already met and been established with, but you cannot expect more and more and more. And that's what we're doing on Pinterest traffic. We're not posting, expecting our followers to see everything we post, or expecting to even get in front of the same person all the time. We're expecting to get into the Pinterest pool, which is a broad pool. And if you niche down too far, you will not be allowed to play in the pool.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. This is a common problem that I see with Google Bloggers.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

Ex Google bloggers, myself included, just trying to change your mindset and understanding of the kind of content you're covering. And like it was all the long tail, was all the rage. Which can work. And Pinterest. But then once you do that with Google, like, you just keep having to dig further and deeper and like that. That's it. And you don't have to do that with Pinterest.

[Carly Campbell]

No. And as time goes on, it can become counterproductive or it can actually hold you back because your pins that were doing well, that were broad, they're old now. And other new people have put out new broad pins. So if you veer very far away from those kind of broader topics, all of a sudden you're not relevant anymore to Pinterest, not to the end user.

[Tony Hill]

So I've got a friend who is an expert in their niche and they've been doing this for, I don't know, a decade or so. And with this new keyword explorer tool that we launched with Penclicks, she was going through it and she's in one of the top level categories you can check on the left hand side. Kind of like Pinterest trends.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

And we were going through it together and we checked out that category and we were going through the list and looking at search volume and there were all sorts of keywords she had never even dreamed of. Like she never would have thought about.

[Carly Campbell]

Wow.

[Tony Hill]

Because they weren't showing up with like, she was traditionally a Google blogger.

[Carly Campbell]

Right.

[Tony Hill]

And so a lot of these keywords were not showing up there and these keywords aren't showing up in Pinterest trends, even though they're high volume and like they're worthy of Pinterest trends. They just weren't showing up because there's just a lot of volume here, a lot of keywords, and it was fascinating. So now it's like, it's so overwhelming because it's like endless ideas of great keywords to start covering and sometimes there. There's some overlapping ones and that's okay. We can still get those.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah, that is okay.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah.

[Carly Campbell]

You can have more than one article ranking for a keyword.

[Tony Hill]

That's right.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

And some of these, if you're trying to find ideas like, okay, if I can't just keep niching down further and further and you want to start, you know, broadening out a little bit more. One of the problems with keyword research and a lot of keyword research tools is that it requires you to at least start with a seed keyword. You need to start somewhere. And it's hard to find great keywords if you don't even know about those great keywords. Yeah. Okay. And so one of the areas that I really like about pin clicks and I'm thankful for Pinterest for, is these annotated interests. And so that's where, you know, once you find a keyword that you know about, like in the Keyword Explorer tool, and it's an official interest, you can click on it and we're going to show you related interests and then we're going to show you pins, like the top pins on there, and we can show you all their annotated interests and those expose me to all sorts of keywords I never would have thought about.

[Carly Campbell]

Right, yeah, yeah. You can get fantastic ideas. And very often, you know, further to the point of like, don't get too niche very often inside the annotated interests, I find extensions. No, that sounds like long tail. That's not what I mean. New ways to say the same thing I was saying before that are completely different, that would reach a different user. But I'm not going any further down. I'm not going any further niche. Just kind of going out, just further, further out in the same level of my pyramid that I drew in the air that nobody could see.

[Tony Hill]

Okay, let me give you an example. I was just. I clicked on the home decor top level category in the Keyword Explorer tool and one of the top keywords is living room designs.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

4.9 million searches a month.

[Carly Campbell]

That's a lot.

[Tony Hill]

So then I was hovering over some of these top pins.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

And I found one. And one of the annotated interests for it was called Modern TV Room.

[Carly Campbell]

Interesting words that I wouldn't use. And so it will definitely help you find words that you won't use.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, I never would have used that one. And that one gets 459,000 searches a month.

[Carly Campbell]

That's still a lot.

[Tony Hill]

That's a lot.

[Carly Campbell]

Modern TV room. I don't call the living room a TV room, but I'm guessing that used.

[Tony Hill]

To be a thing. Yeah. Like in, I don't know, back in the mid-1900s.

[Carly Campbell]

Interesting. The TV room. But they are the same room. It is the same thing. That is exactly what I'm talking about. It's the same level of the pyramid. Instead of going down once you go the next level down. And you are talking about gray living rooms now, you're the next level down. Now, I still think that's pretty broad. I think it's a pretty good keyword. But you go a little bit further.

[Tony Hill]

Down and you go like, gray modern TV rooms.

[Carly Campbell]

Gray modern TV rooms. It's getting pretty niche. And the farther down you go, the more people that you're relevant to that you eliminate from your sphere of influence right away. And so I think, yes, I had wanted to put this one at the very top because I actually think this is the number one reason that we see outside of like, I think that seasonal shuffles might be the number one thing that we see that Pinterest does that affects our traffic. It's not a reason for panic. It's a thing to understand. I think that being too narrow, publishing too much too narrow might be the number one thing that we see that we do that affects our traffic and it's really easily addressable, which is really exciting, for sure.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah, that's a good one. And it just requires just a change in your mindset and having good tools to do that with to help you start thinking outside the box.

[Carly Campbell]

You can do this for a decade and then you can start a brand new site and then you can come out of the gate really good and you can forget that and go really, really too niche and you can watch your own traffic job. And I did that this year.

[Tony Hill]

Yeah. One of the things I can't wait to roll out more within pin clicks is like anytime you see keywords, whether they're keywords in the Keyword Explorer tool or annotations like, we'll show you, if you are targeting these or not, because like with that modern TV room, maybe I've already targeted it and I don't know if I have and it would be nice to know.

[Carly Campbell]

Right? Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

That way you can easily keep up because that's the challenge with, you know, tools and keywords and trying to figure out, like, what is target, what not to target, what have you targeted in the past? And some new ideas. So, yeah. Okay, that covers these 10, I would say the top 10, but they were 10 important ones. There are like 20 more we've come up with and some important ones that we haven't covered. We've hinted at them and we're going to provide these as like a bonus. So I don't know how long it's going to take us to get through all these, but we're going to get through them and talk them through so that you are more informed and you've got some new strategies on how to maybe approach some of these things that might have caused some of your traffic drops.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

If you want to receive this free resource, what should they do?

[Carly Campbell]

Carly, you can go to pintalkpodcast.com drop and put your email address in to get immediate access to the rest of this list of 30 reasons why your Pinterest traffic might have dropped. And it will also subscribe you to our email lists.

[Tony Hill]

That's right, yeah. This list, we'll go and have it as a PDF, but also we've got a recording and video with it.

[Carly Campbell]

Yeah.

[Tony Hill]

All right. Well, if you've got any questions about this, feel free to reach out to us in one of our communities. We'll be happy to answer them. Until next time, keep on pinning. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.