← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E17 Pinterest Analytics: The Good, Bad, and Ugly (and a Surprise!)
00:50:39
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- [00:02]
Tony Hill
Hey, welcome to pentalk, 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?
- [00:12]
Carly Campbell
We're going to talk about Pinterest Analytics. I can't believe that we have. That we've been recording this podcast for this long and we haven't talked about Pinterest Analytics? Because it's been a pretty important piece of my Pinterest process for a really long time. And I bet the same is true for you.
- [00:29]
Tony Hill
Yeah, a hundred percent. I rely on it a lot. Do you remember when it first came out?
- [00:33]
Carly Campbell
Uh, yes. I don't remember the year, but I remember telling everybody it was stupid and they should ignore it.
- [00:39]
Tony Hill
What?
- [00:39]
Carly Campbell
Uh, yeah, yeah, because at the time, Google Analytics gave us information at the pin level, and I relied entirely on Google Analytics.
- [00:50]
Tony Hill
Okay.
- [00:50]
Carly Campbell
I only looked in there, and at the time, the information in Google Analytics was a lot more accurate and in depth than the information in Pinterest Analytics.
- [01:01]
Tony Hill
Okay.
- [01:01]
Carly Campbell
And so I recommended that we ignore Pinterest analytics and just go straight to Google Analytics and make sure you knew how to use Google Analytics. But then there was just like this massive shift where Google. I think. I don't think it's Pinterest. I think it was Google started hiding the referral URL in Google Analytics, and so we couldn't actually see the data on a pin level anymore. And it was at that time that I started using Pinterest analytics, and I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Pinterest analytics is much more accurate by then than it had been when it came out.
- [01:38]
Tony Hill
Yeah, the table has really turned here and, like, we're now validating things, looking at Pinterest analytics more so than any other analytics platform like Google or Plausible or statcount or some of those other ones. You've been really kind of diving in deep into that because you've been having some weird analytics discrepancies across different platforms for one of your newer sites you've created.
- [02:00]
Carly Campbell
So, yeah, on one of my sites, Google Analytics was recording more sessions than Pinterest analytics was. And when we looked at the analytics in Google in, like, a really granular way, we could see that the sessions were higher than what they should be because, like, there would be more sessions than there were page views, which. Or no, sorry, wait a second. Yeah, is that right? That's how it was. Anyway, once I installed another analytics tool to, like, compare, and once we fixed the issue that was causing the Duplication of sessions. We confirmed that Google Analytics had been tracking page views correctly the whole time, but it was checking sessions incorrectly. And Pinterest sessions really closely lined up with what was actually happening. And that just underscored for me that Pinterest analytics is pretty accurate these days.
- [02:55]
Tony Hill
Yeah, actually it was a pretty good experiment here for you to install several different types of analytics scripts on your site and be able to compare and see. So, you know, there is a lot of importance and some weight that Pinterest analytics can create. So what we want to cover in this particular episode is a couple of things. You know, why it's still really important to use this tool, you know, some of its, like, biggest benefits. But also we're going to talk about some of the limitations and some of the new and better tools that we think you should know about. So let's jump into some of the importance and like, benefits of still using this tool. What kind of value can it bring? I mean, I mean, I'd imagine this person who's listening to this at this point in this podcast series, they probably look at analytics often and so they're probably wondering, okay, what is Carly and Tony going to talk about? That's like new and different for me to learn and understand about analytics. So hopefully there'll be some things in this particular episode that you'll learn. But we really want this to be an action oriented episode at the end of this. Like there's gonna be some things we want you to do, but we definitely encourage you to spend some time in analytics. And actually if you're at your computer while you're listening to this, I would go ahead and pull up your analytics while you're listening to us so you can kind of click around and listen as we're talking about different things.
- [04:11]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, that's a really good idea. I think that a lot of people open analytics and they look at analytics and they see the trend line, the general trend line of their, you know, clicks are up, impressions are down, whatever, or the other way around very often. But they miss kind of the, the very. I keep using the granular, but when we're talking about analytics, granular information is important information and you should distill the information down as far as you can to learn about what's causing that trend line to change the way it does.
- [04:43]
Tony Hill
Yeah, exactly. I like to look at it as what is a story that this tool is telling me about my traffic from Pinterest. I think often if you're like me, the first thing you do is you Pull up Pinterest analytics and you look at that big chart and you see your impressions and you see your upbound clicks, and that tells like a bigger, broader story of what's going on, but it doesn't tell the full story. And that's where, if we don't dive into some of the more granular details of this tool and then some leveraging some other tools as well, then we will be more inclined to make the mistake of having snap judgments of, like, what's going on. And really, maybe some things that you are assuming are happening with your account, for better or for worse, might not actually be true. And so there's some ways that you can really drill down and start to tell a different story or understand a different story. We actually did that before we started recording on some accounts, and we've kind of run into some really interesting insights that is going on as the time of this recording. So we're like mid April, and there's been a lot of turbulence with the Pinterest algorithm over the last month or so. And so just by us sitting here for like an hour, just kind of digging around and analytics and talking through things, we're starting to see an interesting story emerge about what's going on with the platform right now versus, like, what users are reporting, what's happening, versus, like, what Pinterest is saying, what's happening versus, like, what we're seeing here in analytics. So it just kind of validated that, like, hey, don't just look at that big chart and look at your top pens a couple times a month and move on. I think you're. You're missing out on a lot more information that you can leverage to ultimately, like, make better decisions, to make better pins to ultimately then bring in more traffic to your site.
- [06:34]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. One of the things that you just pointed out while we were digging around was desktop traffic versus mobile traffic. And if we treat those things the same in our mind, we are definitely not getting the full picture. In the earliest version of my course, I had an example PIN that I had made on desktop, and I believed it was easy to read and easy to understand. And I put this pin out there and it just got no clicks. And at the time, all the pins I put out got clicks. So I was really confused about this particular pin. And it wasn't until weeks later when I opened Pinterest again on my phone that I was able to see the immediate problem with the pin. And that was that you couldn't read it on a phone in like, you know, one Inch.
- [07:21]
Tony Hill
Yeah, the font is way too small.
- [07:23]
Carly Campbell
You couldn't read it at all. It was not only small, it was also pale yellow. It was in a script. It just really had a lot of things not going for it. But it was at that time that I realized the importance of understanding the difference of mobile and desktop traffic from a user perspective. And so if you have your Pinterest analytics open, I think there's a lot of people who won't know how to find, you know, how do I learn what percentage of my traffic is mobile or, you know, what's different about my mobile traffic or my desktop traffic. But if you open Pinterest analytics right next to the date range box and then the content type box, you can click on more filters. And over there, so I'm on desktop right now over there on the right hand side of the screen, it gives you content filters and you can select by device. So you can look at your analytics chart for just mobile traffic and just desktop traffic and you can start to watch what are the differences between those. Do you have a certain kind of pin that performs better on mobile versus desktop, or is your niche one of the very few niches that gets largely desktop traffic? I think that's an important thing to know.
- [08:47]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's the niche to be in right there. As I said, the AD RPMs are pretty good for desktop. A lot more space there to show ads. Yeah, I mean, I could see a lot of people who will complain about something going on with their Pinterest account and they will share a screenshot and it's from desktop. Like it might not be of their analytics, but it might be something funky that's going on with, with Pinterest, the app itself on the, on their desktop. And I just don't really give that much of my time and attention because majority of Pinterest users are on mobile. I want to understand what's going on on mobile because there can be a difference in the interface and features that Pinterest shows between the two different platforms, desktop and mobile. And so sometimes what you see happening on desktop is not going to be what's happening on mobile.
- [09:34]
Carly Campbell
So that's a really great point. I'd like to give like a concrete example just in case anybody didn't follow what you were saying, because I think some people don't realize that what you said is a fact. So right now, mid April, we are seeing a lot of pins with the visit button missing from pins. So we are hoping that that'll be resolved by the time this comes. Out. But what you just described basically, is that if somebody shares a picture of a desktop screen with you and the visit button is missing, you're kind of like, well, that's not really what's necessarily happening. We need to know if that button is missing on mobile or not.
- [10:13]
Tony Hill
Yeah, exactly.
- [10:15]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. And I have seen instances this week, and this visit site button thing is very much fluid right now. So nothing that that we're saying is like the gospel truth about this, but I've seen visit site button issues this past couple weeks where the button has been there on desktop but then not been there on mobile and vice versa. And it's actually been going on a lot longer than what people have been talking about. This. Do you remember we were looking at home decor pins like four or five months ago?
- [10:55]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Hit that pretty hard.
- [10:56]
Carly Campbell
Didn't have a link, but nobody was talking about it as like a global thing then. But we looked at ones where you could click through on desktop and then you couldn't click through on the phone.
- [11:09]
Tony Hill
Mm. Yeah. So if whatever you're seeing on desktop, try to go and to that particular page on the mobile app and see what's different, you might be surprised just to double check that. But that also means that translates to a different story with your analytics. I mean, I think an important number to understand with your account is, well, what percentage of my Pinterest outbound clicks comes from mobile versus desktop? You might be surprised. It's like it could be 80, 90% of your clicks come from mobile. And so that's a good number. So go look that up by using the filters as Carly described. Unfortunately, it's not super easy to, like, calculate that. Pinterest could do a better job improving some of this tool. So you're just gonna have to like, record those numbers and run it on a calculator, give it to ChatGPT or something, and it can tell you that percentage difference. So you can have an idea of, you know, what to pay attention to, where your traffic is really coming from, how to best optimize your site as well. Looking at, if you get 90% of your traffic is from mobile, definitely be sure to that you're looking at your content from your phone just to make sure, because as content creators, like, we're usually creating content on a desktop computer, and so it can be a very different experience. So you can, like, tweak with things and spend most of your time on desktop and just assume that this is what everyone has seen and how they're engaging and what their experience is. Like, and that's just not often the case.
- [12:33]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, I mean you can, you could go as far as like, if you determine that you have two or three blog posts that get a lot of traffic on desktop, but they don't get a lot of traffic on mobile, you can even treat those posts differently in their function on your site. I would not recommend that you put a pop up email, opt in, you know, thing that's going to pop up on every page on your site, especially on mobile, because it kind of takes over the whole page. But if you have a couple posts that get a ton of desktop traffic and they're highly engaged, you could totally put like a slide in subscribe thing on those pages without really damaging the user experience. So you can find a lot of opportunities on your website if you understand, you know, where the traffic's coming from. And there's all kinds of filters inside that more filters thing. If you poke around and adjust, I mean you can, you can look at your traffic by age range or by gender or by, oh, by your pins versus other pins. I'm kind of jumping ahead. If I get not, not too far ahead, we could talk about that. This is also where you'd filter between your pins and others pins. I'm making like air quotations for the people who can't see that. What do you think about your pins versus others pins? Cause it's something that a lot of people don't understand.
- [13:57]
Tony Hill
Yeah, right. So it is an important distinction because with your pins. So for a lot of creators, whenever they see their pins, they're gonna see them from their account and. Cause it's their pins that they've created and added to the platform. But also there are times where people are like saving your pins. So it kind of creates what you call like baby pins. Is that what you were referring them to?
- [14:19]
Carly Campbell
Oh well, I think of the baby pins as like if you save a pin and then somebody saves your pin, that's like a baby of your pin. But the others pins are actually like they're their own parent pins. They can have their own babies when.
- [14:38]
Tony Hill
People are saving them from your site.
- [14:41]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they can go on to have their own baby. So separate. But like sometimes the easiest way for people to understand this I think is if you have multiple Pinterest accounts and you create pins for a different one of your websites. If account A creates pins for account B on account A, those pins will show up in account A's analytics as your pins. But because they link to site B, they'll Show up in account B's analytics as others pins because an other account owns those pins. And so it's important to go into that more filters place every now and then and filter by your pins, look at that chart. Then filter by others pins and look at that chart and understand, is the majority of my traffic coming from pins that I have created or pins that other people have created? And if you're seeing that the majority of your traffic comes from pins that other people have created, I sometimes think that that means that you need to do some like strengthening of your own account, start new boards, maybe, maybe pin more often. But I also think that it shows you opportunity to find ways to increase those others saves of your pins. How are you going to get your readers to make more pins since that's going well for you, obviously. How do you get them to make even more of them? And it's good, it's good to know, you know, who is the real driving force behind your traffic. Is it you or is it someone else?
- [16:19]
Tony Hill
Yeah, for sure. That is good. I have access to accounts and I have accounts that it just kind of depends and it can be niche dependent, I found. So for example, if you're in a very visual niche and you're not like immediately pinning all of your pins, then it can be very common for a lot of other pins to show up and have a lot of your traffic just driving your traffic. Because they're beating you to the punch. Right. And that's something that I was known for. Like when I came onto a couple different podcasts, I talked about how I would wait like a couple weeks to pin my own stuff and it would give users an opportunity to pin stuff for me before I could get to it. I was doing it for completely different reasons, but I think it had its advantages because to me, those pins send a higher quality signal to Pinterest.
- [17:07]
Carly Campbell
Sure. Yeah, Like a vote for somebody else's stuff instead of a vote for your own self. I think that that makes sense.
- [17:13]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [17:14]
Carly Campbell
I also think that over time Pinterest has changed the dial and they go back and forth and I think that they will continue to go back and forth on the value that they're placing on others pins versus your own. I think sometimes they, they want to place the value on our own pins, you know, as they're like working with creators. But what you said is so undeniably true that I think they always end up tilting back in that direction. Does this site have third party pinners saving from it or does it not? And I Don't think they've ever been able to or they've never wanted to ignore that signal.
- [17:53]
Tony Hill
Yeah. And that's where you will often see if your traffic drops from other traffic sources, like Google for example, then that means there are less people coming to your site from Google. That means there are less people who are pinning your content on your site. So you'll see a drop in others pins, uh, when that happens, unfortunately.
- [18:14]
Carly Campbell
Does anybody ever ask you about the Milo Tree extension?
- [18:18]
Tony Hill
No, I've never heard of it.
- [18:19]
Carly Campbell
You've never heard of it? It's like this. It was really popular with Pinterest bloggers years ago, but it's like this little box that slides in on the side. It's really small, but it'll say like, follow me on Pinterest. Save this on Pinterest. You, you can use it for any social network, but Pinterest bloggers use it for Pinterest. And I've been thinking lately about installing the Milo Tree app just to see would I really be able to increase my followers and saves on Pinterest if I was prompting my users. And it's not, it's more invasive than just like a sharing button because it slides in onto the page. But I think for that reason it also is, you know, users just kind of gloss over the sharing button. Cause it's there on every site. Whereas with milotree, it's in your face. Not. Not in like a content disrupting way. Not. It doesn't take over the page. It's just little. Yeah, but you see it.
- [19:17]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [19:18]
Carly Campbell
And I've been thinking about trying it again. Maybe I will do that. It would be a fun experiment.
- [19:22]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Yeah, I like that idea.
- [19:24]
Carly Campbell
So those are the things that are inside the more filters button that we had on our list. But one other really important thing that I love to do in analytics is weekly kind of like. Well, honestly, if I'm growing an account, I'll do it every day. Even though I think it's an unhealthy habit. Open my top 20 pins across the top of the screen and in every one of them, click in to see more stats so that I can see the exact trend lines for every pin. And I can't even remember how I would have done this in Google Analytics because Pinterest analytics makes it so easy to do this.
- [20:02]
Tony Hill
Mm. Do you first adjust that to see your top pins by outbound clicks or do you use a default by impressions?
- [20:10]
Carly Campbell
I do both.
- [20:11]
Tony Hill
Oh, okay. So you're open up like 40 tabs.
- [20:14]
Carly Campbell
Well, yeah, I'll do, like, impressions first, and then.
- [20:17]
Tony Hill
Yeah, okay, I see. Okay.
- [20:19]
Carly Campbell
Yeah.
- [20:19]
Tony Hill
Dang. So you're. You're, like, forming a picture, like, in your brain, like. Cause you're. You're making all these snap. They take all these snapshots in your brain of, like, all 20 pins. Your. You're clicking on them, open up new tabs, looking at the charts, and then just kind of switching through each tab, trying to kind of remember what you just saw previously. And then you're using that part of your brain that recognizes patterns. I'm gonna guess when you're, like, looking.
- [20:45]
Carly Campbell
For some things, I'll, like, drag the patterns that match next to each other. So if I. If I start to see, like, this pen trend line for impressions, it has the same trend line, is this pin. I'll, like. I'll drag them next to each other so then I can open them next to each other.
- [21:01]
Tony Hill
Oh, wow.
- [21:02]
Carly Campbell
Like a crazy little OCD squirrel, probably. That's what I do. So then. Then I've organized them the way that I want them organized, and I'll just look at the ones that match together.
- [21:16]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [21:17]
Carly Campbell
And start to look for similarities or differences. Very often you'll see, like, okay, well, here's one that follows the exact same trend line. It'll be on the same subject. It'll target the same keywords. So the trends aren't, like. They're usually not crazy anomalies. They're usually painting a whole picture. Sometimes you'll find the ones that are crazy anomalies, and you'll have to go, like, why is that? Like that?
- [21:42]
Tony Hill
Yeah. And I think it's one of the reasons why you're just so knowledgeable is because you take the time to look at these details. I mean, getting to know you over the last year or so, I mean, you can really go down some rabbit trails. More so than, like, I know of a lot of people and what they're willing to tolerate. And so you think you learn a lot through that process of digging in. Like, going back to the issue where you're having issues with your analytics and sessions and page views and RPMs and all that stuff. Like, I watched you dive deep into that, get a little obsessive in a positive way. I mean, like, these are all, like.
- [22:21]
Carly Campbell
It's a good quality word.
- [22:25]
Tony Hill
Like, wow, you are going into it. A lot of times. These things work out for you. On the other side of it, you're learning something new about Pinterest or about your analytics software or your traffic. Like, there's something you're Picking up, I.
- [22:39]
Carly Campbell
Mean, with the, with the analytics thing that, that you're talking about there, it was really frustrating for me. Like, you know, I, I emailed the ad network and I, I emailed all kinds of people that work directly with my site. But I could see that there was a problem, but I didn't know how to identify the problem. Cause I don't know enough about it. But I mean, nobody is going to care enough to learn the things that are going on that affect you as much as you are. And I feel the same way about Pinterest Analytics. I mean, you could give your account over to a Pinterest manager and the Pinterest manager will look at the generalizations and say like, no, it looks okay. This looks like it could be improved. Nobody else is going to dig in on the pin by pin level the way that you can and start to put together the pieces of the puzzle. I think in, you know, a very obsessive way, I think it's a very good foundation for your Pinterest traffic.
- [23:41]
Tony Hill
Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the things, when you're diving in, you're once a week, like you're looking at the top 20. There's some things I recommend doing like maybe once a month to look at some of these trends, like at a percentage level. So for example, when you are looking at the performance over time section, by default it shows you impressions, but you can see things by rates. So I said percentage. It's also like rates. And that can tell a different story than what you're looking at when you're, when it's just impressions or just outbound clicks. Because sometimes the rates can fluctuate when your traffic goes up or down. Sometimes they're, they're steady. It kind of depends on what you're looking at. So we were looking at an example earlier where it was, let's see, it was like outbound click rate over time versus pin click rate, right? So pin click is when someone clicks on your pin. Like they see it in the feed somewhere on a search, they tap on it, right? And then so now they've, they've clicked that pin. And now how are they going to engage with it? They're just going to, you know, close it, move on, or they're going to, you know, click the Visit site button if it's showing up. But there was one account where over the last 90 days, and I was looking at here, where that pin click rate was really steady. So people are consistently clicking on it. But that outbound click rate has Dropped quite a bit over the last several weeks as we've gone through this craziness of the visit button being removed. And so it went down a little bit. But then once I set that filter to look at mobile, then I could see a much sharper drop. Mobile versus desktop. So again, going back to like why it's important to look at all of these through those filters of mobile versus desktop to see what's going on.
- [25:34]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. And so in that situation, you have probably identified something that is a little bit outside of your control or might feel outside of your control to begin with. And yet I think that if we go back to what we talked about, you know, like understanding where your mobile traffic and your desktop traffic comes from, if you are able to identify blog posts on this site that get more desktop traffic in this situation, you could start pinning more heavily for those, start creating more pieces of content in that vertical, knowing that the desktop click throughs are not as affected right now. And that will help to increase your bottom line traffic. If you lean into the place where clicks are still happening at the same rate that they were before. And not every niche will have probably lots of posts that could do really well on desktop. But some will, right?
- [26:35]
Tony Hill
Yeah, some will. Anything where people are at work and they're doing some research and ideating. So maybe you can find out that pattern looking at your own analytics, filtering by desktop, looking at your top boards, your top clicks and seeing which ones are standing out versus your mobile traffic. And you might find that there's a certain type of audience or demographic. That's what's nice about, you know, there's the age filter. Right. So you can use that break down. Okay, what, what content do I. Am I creating that is attracting a certain age? I mean, one of my favorite little tips is to like look at your outbound click rate for all of your top pins and see which one has the highest outbound click rate. But also filtering that by the age demographic or you know, you can also do it by mobile, desktop, that kind of stuff. Just to give you an idea of like, okay, which specific pins tend to. Even though like they're very similar, but some maybe are covering a different topic or at a different angle and they're attracting to different audience by age or by platform. So pay close attention to those outbound click rates.
- [27:41]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, and I certainly am guilty often of just like painting my Pinterest traffic with the same brush. But the further you get into your business, you'll probably find that a certain demographic is worth more to you. Like you connect more with this demographic or that demographic, this demographic is willing to give you their money and this one's not. You'll definitely find that if you can identify which demographic is the most valuable to you, which group of people you can serve the best, and then you focus on creating content that speaks to that demographic, you might actually see a shift in your traffic. You might find that your traffic goes down a little bit because you're not creating content that speaks to everybody. But you might find that your overall revenue goes up and the demographics are worth different dollar values to advertisers as well. So if you can identify which demographic is the most beneficial for your site for advertisers and lean into creating content that is going to make you higher RPMs, that's just one more way to use your time better, I think.
- [28:48]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's right. And even if you sell like a product or service like with Google Analytics, I think it'll break down by age groups and Google Analytics. So making sure you have that tag like on your checkout pages or like your confirmation pages where people are purchasing a product. If you don't understand the age demographic of your purchasers, then that would be important to know because then if you can trace those back to where's that match up with here are my highest grossing products based on this sage demographic. And like okay, what are my best pins within that similar demographic? How can I focus on creating more of those pins?
- [29:25]
Carly Campbell
So I mean, well, I was going to say to take that a step further, but I don't think it's a step further. I think it's like actually pull it back a step. The thought does Mediavine and Raptive and Azoic, do they also have a way to see ad spend by age range?
- [29:41]
Tony Hill
Not that I know of.
- [29:42]
Carly Campbell
Okay. I have never actually looked specifically but I was just thinking if we did know, you know, this demographic is more high earning then you could lean into that. Creating that kind of content based on what Pinterest says gets the click throughs.
- [29:54]
Tony Hill
But I mean I guess you could figure that out if you merge your Google Analytics data with then mediavine or Raptive at the URL level. Oh sure, maybe that makes sense. You could deduce it like roughly. Yeah, Raptive does give you more data.
- [30:12]
Carly Campbell
I will have to look. I'll do a comparison afterwards and see if I can see. But yeah, I just think that these little kind of hidden stats in Pinterest analytics are often overlooked by people because they have painted all the Pinterest traffic with the Same brush. And we, we don't take the time to analyze it granularly. There's a lot of information in there. But the analytics platform as a whole does have some massive limitations. That has made me very frustrated over the years because I came from this background of using Google Analytics.
- [30:49]
Tony Hill
Mm.
- [30:49]
Carly Campbell
Where I cannot remember thinking about Google Analytics, like, oh, this is a terrible limitation. Back in the old days. I'm not talking about now Google Analytics. Now Google Analytics is a nightmare. But old Google Analytics was amazing. You could, you could compare every URL from Pinterest because it used to show you every single pin. So you could see all your pins that drove traffic, not just your top 50. So that, that's a major limitation in Pinterest analytics that you could only see your top 50 pins because you could see all of them. You could tell if there was a blog post that gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but it only gets a few clicks from each of a hundred pins. That blog post might not even show up in your Pinterest analytics, but it might still be one of your blog post best Pinterest posts. But you wouldn't know that unless you're really inspecting. You're comparing Google Analytics and Pinterest analytics, which you should be, but it's just so hard with current Pinterest Analytics. In the current Pinterest analytics, you can't compare dates straight across. Like, you know, you can't go like, I want to Compare March of 2025 to March of 2024. And that's really frustrating because you used to be able to do that with a click in Google Analytics. Sometimes it makes me sad when I think about these things that we lost.
- [32:17]
Tony Hill
It is sad.
- [32:18]
Carly Campbell
Yeah. Let's see, what are some of the other limitations on Pinterest Analytics? You can only go back six months for pin level data and you can go back like 18 months for account level data. But once you set it for account level data and you try to drill down further, it'll tell you like out of date range or something. Or oops. Yeah, it'll give you a warning. It won't let you actually see what was going on at that time. All you can see is the trend line, which is very frustrating.
- [32:46]
Tony Hill
And it's gone.
- [32:47]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's gone.
- [32:49]
Tony Hill
It's nice that they have an export feature though. I'm going to guess it's underutilized.
- [32:54]
Carly Campbell
I literally never exported my Pinterest analytics one time before I met you.
- [32:59]
Tony Hill
That hurts.
- [33:00]
Carly Campbell
I know. I'm, I, I know. And I actually didn't do it for a long time after you told me to do it. I didn't do it either because I looked at it and I was like, what will I do with this in the future? Yeah, yeah. But you are fixing this problem that we have.
- [33:18]
Tony Hill
Yeah. Because not everyone likes to look at spreadsheets. And then now you have. Yeah, they're just collecting dust in a folder.
- [33:24]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, they're not useful for me.
- [33:26]
Tony Hill
No, they're not. So I did something about it.
- [33:29]
Carly Campbell
I'm very excited to hear what you did about it.
- [33:31]
Tony Hill
If you don't know yet, I've launched a tool called pinneranalytics.com where you can take all of these dusty exported CSV files from Pinterest analytics and you can import it into this tool where it will be stored for longer than your six months or 18 months from Pinterest. And you can look at all of your data for as long as you keep exporting it, which is a really.
- [33:54]
Carly Campbell
Good reason to export it. Finally.
- [33:56]
Tony Hill
Finally. Yeah. And so we show you charts and everything. Like, it looks a lot like Pinterest analytics. So you can see all that data very easily. We bring in, you know, the pictures of all your pins and all that kind of stuff. So not only does it kind of model what you can get out of Pinterest analytics, but I'm working on implementing features to make up for some of these limitations. Now, one of those limitations that's really hard to get around is you can only see your top 50 pins at a time per filter. So I mean, technically, if you use all these different filters, you might end up generating a list of like a hundred unique pens because you're gonna have some drop out when you use a filter. Right. But my goodness, to like figure out that full list of your top, say 100 or 200 would be really hard to do because you'd have to do a bunch of exports, all that kind of stuff. It's crazy. So there's still opportunity for improvement for Pinterest Analytics. But for now, I'm trying to make up for some of these limitations with Pinner Analytics. And one of those being, well, like, you can't see your top URLs in Pinterest analytics, even though they have the actual URL these pins are linking to, you don't get to see any of that information.
- [35:12]
Carly Campbell
Interesting. In the old days in Google Analytics, that was like the number one thing we looked at. The number one thing that I wanted to see when I opened Google Analytics was what post is getting the most traffic. But Pinterest doesn't show us that. Because Pinterest doesn't care. They just want us to know about the pins. They don't care what's happening on our websites. We really do care what's happening on our websites.
- [35:36]
Tony Hill
Yeah.
- [35:37]
Carly Campbell
So being able to see the top URLs at a glance is going to. It's going to blow some people's minds, for one thing, because people think that their top URL is going to be the same as their top pin, which is not true. And sometimes there won't even be any overlap in your top 10, depending on what kind of site you have. But it will really help to guide us with what kind of content we should be making and what kind of old content we should be prioritizing making new pins for and what kind of new boards we should be making based on what content we put out overall that gets the most traffic from Pinterest.
- [36:13]
Tony Hill
Right. Where you can start to see maybe your one hit wonders or maybe You've got some URLs that you have lots of pins that have done really well. So for example, I'm looking at Pinner analytics for one of these accounts and I found a URL here where it shows the pin count. I'm looking at this over time from when I've started exporting. And for this one URL, it has 10 pins that have shown up in the top pins. So I can click on that and I can see those exact 10 pins that have driven a lot of traffic to this one URL versus like there's another top URL here and it's got one pin. That's it. So it was like kind of a one hit wonder there.
- [36:53]
Carly Campbell
So do you see that as an opportunity to be making more pins for that one post?
- [36:58]
Tony Hill
The one hit wonder? Yeah. Yes. I think they're all seen as opportunities.
- [37:04]
Carly Campbell
Okay.
- [37:05]
Tony Hill
But the one with, you know, that has like 10 pins for this one URL that's made it to the top 50. It's like, okay, that, that one's gonna get my attention first on. Okay, is there another way I can approach this particular topic either with that URL? Cause it could be a strong URL. Could I put more pins behind it or can I do like a spin off of it or both or both.
- [37:26]
Carly Campbell
Because just do more of what's working.
- [37:28]
Tony Hill
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. So being able to, you know, to see at that level, I've never been able to see before.
- [37:35]
Carly Campbell
See, you think that I do like the. A little bit obsessive thing. But we have this in common and that is why we get along so well.
- [37:42]
Tony Hill
Yeah, that's right. You usually do it the hard way. And then I figure out, like an easy way. Okay, what can I build to just systematize and automate?
- [37:50]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, it's amazing to watch your brain put these things together. And one of the things that I love about Pinner analytics is that now we can identify our biggest traffic drop pins really quickly. Whereas before, especially with my very established account for the last many years, ever since Google Analytics stopped showing us the pin level data, I've literally identified my biggest traffic drop pins from my brain. Like, I know that this pin was a really strong pin 8 months ago. Can't check it because I can't go back that far, you know, to see in Pinterest Analytics, I know it was strong and now I know it's dead. And one of the hardest things for me about that is now I gotta go find the pin. I know it was strong, I know it was probably on this board. Now I'm gonna scroll back through because I wanna look at it, I wanna see what date it drops specifically. And then because my brain works the way it does, I also wanna find 10 of its best friends that are about exactly the same thing. So I can compare their little charts at the same time too. And I can spend years of my life doing this.
- [39:03]
Tony Hill
Sounds like a lot of work. I ended up creating a Google sheet where you could take this exported data and plop it into a Google sheet and then it would show you your biggest drops and everything. So that was kind of helpful. But yeah, being able to put this into a tool where you don't have to run the formulas in a Google sheet and everything and you can see a lot more detail about each pen. To see those, those biggest drops and the patterns behind those is interesting. And you can also see like, how long some of these pens can last for. Like, there's a monthly appearance metric that's been really interesting to see. Like, there are some pens that have done really well for six plus months. You probably have pens that last a lot longer. It depends on the niche that you're in, where it could be more evergreen, some could be more trend oriented. But I like to look at the ones that they've had the most monthly appearances in my top trends report and see what I can do. Like, especially if those have been ones that have dropped, what can I do to replicate that? Sometimes it's hard. Like sometimes you just get lucky with pins and they just last a Long time. And you. You're. You're just riding a wave that you can't control.
- [40:12]
Carly Campbell
Yes, I have tried to control. That's probably one of, like, the most common questions that I have had over the years, consistently, is how do I revive a completely dead pin? And it's unfortunately one of the questions that I've never been able to give a reliable answer to. There is no surefire way to revive a dead pin. There are things that you can try, but sometimes you just don't get that pin back. But even then, being able to identify those pins still helps you understand your traffic story, and it helps you understand your aim for next month. I mean, I had a pin in 2018 that ranked. It ranked really well for. It was a blogging pin. I don't even pin about blogging anymore. Like, I don't pin about starting a website or anything like that. But this pin at the time made $5,000 a month very consistently.
- [41:17]
Tony Hill
Like, one pin.
- [41:19]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, very consistently made $5,000 a month. And I was able to feel in my soul the day it stopped ranking. And I tried to get it to rank or another pin for that article to rank again for over two years. And it's never. Was never successful. And I tried literally everything that you could possibly think of, including spending maybe not thousands. Maybe thousands of dollars on ads for the pin. Like, I could not do it. It was not for me. I do think one of the reasons that I couldn't do it, because that sounded like a hopeless story, I'm gonna follow that up with this. I didn't have any context on my Pinterest account for that. Like, it's just one. One blog post about this completely random thing that had nothing to do with toddlers and potty training and pregnancy and postpartum and. And so there was no context on the account. The account wasn't pinning anything else in that niche. And I do believe that contributed to, like, the lack of absolute impossibility of getting it to rank again. I think that I had an entire account dedicated to blogging. That pin would probably still make $5,000 a month, but it just doesn't anymore.
- [42:30]
Tony Hill
Wow, That's a lot. Okay.
- [42:33]
Carly Campbell
It was a lot. I really liked it.
- [42:35]
Tony Hill
Yeah, I think we all would. Yeah. So as you can tell, like, there's. There's plenty of limitations with analytics tool. They haven't really made a whole lot of updates in a while to it. They're due for some updates.
- [42:49]
Carly Campbell
Yeah, maybe they're going to listen to this and they're going to Just make crazy updates and then we'll regret that we asked them to do that.
- [42:58]
Tony Hill
Well, it's fine if I could leverage it and they can do it better than I can. That's cool. Give you more information. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of. I mean, there could be like a whole laundry list of limitations, but if you can think of some that we haven't mentioned that you think is really important, like, reach out to us in one of our communities. Love to find out what that is. Maybe something I can add to Pinner analytics or something else. Let me know. Okay, so again, we want to make this one, like, action oriented. So what are the next steps before they end this episode? Like, they can just write down. Okay. What are some things that they can do from what we just talked about?
- [43:36]
Carly Campbell
Well, regardless of, you know, whether or not you think you need more insights for your Pinterest Analytics, I would start exporting those stats every month the way that you told me to a year ago, because I. I really wish that I had my stats from more than six months ago now. So even if you don't intend to do anything with them, I would set an alarm on your phone and export them every month and just let them sit there and get dusty. Because in the future, when you want them, you will have them. There's a very hard time limit on how much time Pinterest will give you to get them.
- [44:11]
Tony Hill
Right. And so I understand it's hard to consistently do that. I have a team behind me, so it's like someone's job just go in and do that every month. It's like a checklist. They've got to check that off and so they're consistent with doing it. But I understand not everyone is. But if you use Pinner analytics, there is like a. Literally, like you click on a button where it takes you to your Pinterest analytics report and it presets it to exactly what it needs to be. I was able to figure out how to get the right URL to make it set the analytics. Cause it's important to pull in your impressions and outbound clicks. We want to see those two particular metrics.
- [44:47]
Carly Campbell
When I did it last month, I didn't pull in outbound clicks and then I didn't look at it right away. It's okay because I can. It's only one month old, so I can still do it again.
- [44:54]
Tony Hill
Okay.
- [44:54]
Carly Campbell
But then like it, because if you don't get that right, you just get one flat line that skews everything.
- [45:00]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So you want to get that right. So just literally click that button from Penner analytics and then click Export out of Pinterest. It downloads at your computer and then you just click the upload button in Pinner analytics and you're done. And you don't have to deal with it. It takes 30 seconds at the most. Maybe the first time you do it, it'll take 30 seconds after that. It's so fast. But then you've got it now. I mean, you can go crazy with your exporting out of Pinterest analytics because every time you do a filter, then it will change the export data.
- [45:31]
Carly Campbell
Oh, I didn't realize that the tool would look at anything beyond.
- [45:37]
Tony Hill
It doesn't. Panoranalytics doesn't.
- [45:39]
Carly Campbell
Okay, but you could export them and have it.
- [45:40]
Tony Hill
But as a user. Yeah, as a user, you can do that. Maybe one day in the future we can support all these other kind of reports that some people are doing. Because, I mean, you could, you could probably end up exporting 30 different reports for Pinterest analytics. But who's going to sit there and do that?
- [45:55]
Carly Campbell
Right? The main one that you want is impressions and outbound clicks, right? Yeah, that's together on the same screen.
- [46:03]
Tony Hill
Yeah. So there's that. Start exporting every month. And look at those especially over time. You'll want to reference those especially as like the seasonality aspect of Pinterest. It'll be interesting to, you know, go back and compare pins with different seasons, like, you know, Christmas and Easter and all that. You can't do that at the pin level right now because it's only six months. So you don't get that full year of data.
- [46:28]
Carly Campbell
That's right. And actually I found that as time goes on and I've been doing this longer, I will have blog posts from 2018, 2019 that did really well at Christmas. And I was diligent for a couple years about making new pins for them the next year. But then as time's gone on, we, we've introduced more and more Christmas content and now all of a sudden, instead of just having 20 Christmas posts that I have to remember to make new pins for, Now I have 150 and I miss pins. I miss remaking pins for posts that were strong two or three years ago. And that's a real shame. It's just a waste because those pins were strong before. I shouldn't rely on the old pin to drive traffic. This year there should be new pins made for those to being able to just see at a click what is strong or what was strong last December and the December before will be really helpful.
- [47:31]
Tony Hill
Yeah. And especially once the Pin analytics has the date comparison feature, which will eventually come.
- [47:37]
Carly Campbell
That is really exciting. There's another thing that I hope everybody does after they've listened to this and it is Open your Pinterest Analytics. Open all of your top 20 pins by impressions. Open all of your top 20 pins by outbound clicks. You can do that separately if you want. Click into the See more stats on each pin and just start clicking through those tabs and looking at the trend line for those pins and try to identify similarities between the pins where you saw a drastic drop, you know, on one specific day. Or identify similarities between the pins that had a giant pickup, you know, this week. Sometimes it'll be really obvious. Sometimes you'll be like, oh, well, it's Father's Day and this pin is about Father's Day. And so that's really obvious. But I remember seeing this massive pickup across a whole bunch of pins at Father's Day on one of my accounts and it wasn't until I opened them all and looked at them that I realized that they were new father related. So it wasn't that it was about Father's Day, but it was things like, oh, 10 ways for daddy to bond with baby and five things that new Dads should know before their Wives Go into Labor or whatever those things were. And there was just a strong relationship between them and the singular Father's Day pin I had that was doing well. And if you can identify things like that, you'll be more diligent to be creating more pins around those things. Some of those posts I haven't pinned in years and years, but they still pick up at Father's Day and I should be pinning them again at the beginning of May because there's potential there that I'm missing out on. And one of the reasons I'm missing out on is because I don't see it at the level that I used to see at in Google Analytics, but now I think I will thanks to Pinot Analytics.
- [49:40]
Tony Hill
Yes. I mean every pen is going to tell a different story. And so it's good to look at those pens and see maybe like as you said in one way as like a puzzle piece. You can see how these pieces can fit together and start to find some patterns that you can then leverage. And sometimes it just helps you make sense of either traffic going up, traffic going down. But you don't know until you dive into Pinterest analytics and start looking at all those things. So that's what I recommend you do. Next, after you listen to this or if you have a question, you can reach out to us in one of our communities and we'll be happy to answer your questions about analytics. All right, thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of PENTALK. Head over to PENTALKpodcast.com to @ 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.