Grow Your Business with Pinterest Analytics (2019)

1. Intro: 2. Busting That Pinterest Myth: Hi, and welcome to Grow Your Business with Pinterest Analytics. My name is Claire Williamson and I'm a freelance web and graphic designer based out of Vienna, Austria, specializing in website creation using Squarespace. Once I understood the power and influence of Pinterest and growing an online audience, and I started using analytics towards a Pinterest growth strategy, I was able to more than double my monthly viewers in just a few weeks. In this course, I'm going to share the exact tactics I use to hopefully get you the same results. Who is this class for? Freelancers, entrepreneurs, business owners with the website, bloggers, and basically anyone with an online business presence. Why is the online part so important? You may believe that Pinterest is just another social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, but guess what? Pinterest is a search engine. You want the search results of this engine to point to your profile and your website. If you don't have a website or other online presence, where are your pins pointing to? Most likely to someone else's website and someone else's business. As a side note, if you are in need of a website, I would be happy to help you further @clairedesigns.com, or you can click the link in the About section below. In this course, you will learn useful tips to avoid common penny mistakes, clear definitions to overcome confusion and overwhelm, and effective tactics to implement towards your Pinterest strategy and achieve your business goals. By the end of this course, you will know how to measure and influence your Pinterest growth like a pro. Why is this important for your business? Scratch that. Why is this super important for your business? Well, when you understand Pinterest analytics, you can use that knowledge to gather more followers, increase your impressions, and grow your engagement. Which translates to increase pageviews, a larger e-mail list, and ultimately making more sales or growing your business. 3. Class Project: Since Skillshare's a community-based platform, we are going to complete a class project together. To complete this project, you will need a business Pinterest account and a computer with the ability to take a screenshot. You'll be creating a visual before and after record of your analytics. Step 1, take a screenshot of your Pinterest analytics stats before watching the course. Step 2, write down your questions about Pinterest analytics and the goals you have for your Pinterest account. This will help you pick the top three tactics you will want to implement. Comment these in the class so we can encourage and help each other reach our goals. Step 3, watch the course in its entirety, and choose three tactics you want to use toward your Pinterest strategy. Step 4, over the course of at least one week, implement the tactics you chose by following the instructions given in the class. Step 5, take a second screenshot of your new and improved Pinterest analytics stats and post it along with the before screenshot in the class project gallery, so everyone can see and congratulate you on your achievement. Well done, you. 4. Top Pinterest Terms to Know: Before I explain the five key tactics I implemented to more than double my impressions, I want to first clarify the most used Pinterest terms on your analytics pages. Let's dive in and have a look. To find your Pinterest analytics stats, simply go to the left of the search bar and click on the Analytics tab. A drop-down menu will show up with overview profile, people you reach, and website. You will only have the website tab if you have claimed your website. You can do so in your Pinterest settings and I've included a tutorial link in the About section under this video. Depending on your location, you may also have a tab called Audience Insights. As I am based in Austria, and this function is currently only available in English speaking countries, this tab doesn't show up for me. If you do have this feature, lucky you. It is a bit more in depth than the people you've reached section and you can use the tactics I will explain later on in this class to better understand the data shown there as well. But don't worry, if like me, you don't have this feature yet, we can get plenty of insights with the data available. Let's start with the Overview page. Right off the bat, you see a lot of Pinterest terms you may or may not be acquainted with yet. Impressions are the number of times the pin from your profile has appeared on Pinterest home feeds, category feeds, and such. In other words, the amount of times your pins have been shown. Average monthly viewers and average daily viewers are the number of people who saw your pins in the last 30 days or 24 hours. Engagement, shown as average monthly engaged measures interaction, clicks, saves, etc, with your pins. Audience, aka viewers, should not be confused with target audience. Your audience or viewers are your demographic seeing your pins. Your target audience is the demographic you want seeing your pins. I will discuss ways to check if this is the same audience when we go over the five key tactics later in this class. Neither of these terms should be confused with your followers. Who are the people that have click the follow button on your profile or a selection of your boards. If we click on the More tab to expand your Pinterest profile page, we again see the term impressions or how many times your pins have been shown, alongside a few more terms used quite frequently in Pinterest analytics. Saves are the number of times someone saved your pin to one of their boards. Clicks measures the number of mouse clicks on pins from your profile back to the corresponding website. Hopefully your website. All time shows the pins that have performed the best throughout the entire time you have had an account on Pinterest. Scrolling down, you may notice a new categories labeled pin type and a small R icon. This symbol represents rich pins. According to Pinterest, rich pins add extra details to pins and update important information from the websites they came from. If something changes on the original website, the rich pin updates to reflect that change. You can make the pins you create from your website rich pins by adding metadata to your website. Pinterest has lots of helpful tutorials on how to do this and I have added links to these resources in the About section under this video. Throughout Pinterest analytics, you will also see other types of pins, including power pins and original pins. Power pins can be found at the bottom of your Pinterest profile page and are pins with an all-time high engagement using a combination of saves, comments, and clicks. Original pins are on the website page and our pins created directly from your website. 5. Picking a Focus: Now that we know all the key terms, it's time to get focused. As you now know, you should be using Pinterest as part of a strategy to achieve a business goal. There are several ways to measure your growth on Pinterest and to check if your efforts are paying off. Focusing on one of these is called picking a key performance indicator, or KPI for short. The one you pick will depend on your overall business goal and reason for using Pinterest to achieve that goal. Pay an attention to just one set of numbers your followers impressions or engagement helps to avoid confusion and overwhelm when implementing your chosen tactics towards your Pinterest strategy. Here's a quick rundown of each indicator, what they mean for your business and what you would need to do to improve them. Focusing on the number of followers your account has is important if your main business goal is to grow a dedicated fan base for your brand. These are the people who are more likely to repin your content and share your profile with their friends. To increase your followership, interact with other Pinterest users by commenting on pins of their as you like, following their boards that are similar to yours and joining group boards that resonate with your brand. Remember, authenticity is key. No one likes fake friends and the same goes for followers. A quick side note on Pinterest followers, unlike actual social media platforms, the number of followers you have on Pinterest means very little. If you have a large following, but a small number of impressions or engagement, it's a bit like being at a party with lots of people, who aren't dancing or eating or even talking with each other. Just a crowded room of awkwardness. Which is why I really recommend to focus more on one of the next two. But having said that, growing your followers is a perfectly reasonable number to focus on when just starting out and trying to gain some traction for your brand. Growing the number of impressions your profile gets means there are more eyes getting to know your business. Your brand is constantly getting in front of new people, all of whom are potential clients and customers. You are staying in the view and the minds of your followers and regular viewers. To increase your impressions, you should pin a relatively substantial number. Start with 10 pins a day and work your way up. To make things easier on yourself, you may want to use a scheduler like Tailwind and join group boards or Tailwind tribes. Engagement is a great indicator to focus on and the indicator I am currently using. If your business goals include getting more page views, making more sales, growing your e-mail list, establishing more authority and legitimacy as a brand, and/or collaborating with other established brands in the future. To have more engagement on Pinterest, make sure to pin and repin with your audience in mind. Create clear call to actions when needed. Use relevant keywords and hashtags, and order your boards correctly. How do you know who your audience is? Which keywords are relevant for your business? Or if you have arranged your boards, "Correctly". Don't worry, I'm going to explain all of these in more detail in the next section. 6. Useful Tactics 1 & 2: Now the terms are clear. You've picked a KPI and you have a business goal with its corresponding Pinterest strategy in mind. It's time to get tactical. Remember to choose three of the following tactics and write them down in your notes as part of the class project. Feel free to share them with the class under the community tap. To organize lots of mini tactics into five main tactics, I use a series of five questions. The first is, to whom are you pinning? As a business, you most likely have a persona and target audience you keep in mind when creating any ads or business proposals for new products and services, when you write blog posts or send out newsletters, etc. When creating pins, you'll want to keep that target audience in mind as well and pin to your audience. This is not the time to pin a recipe or hairstyle or cute puppy if your profile and business has nothing to do with food, hair, or adorable baby dogs. Save those for private boards. Pin with your target audience in mind and only them, your Analytics page is a goldmine in terms of seeing if you are actually attracting and getting viewed by the audience you are aiming for, or if your pins are missing the mark. How do you know who your current actual audience is? Check out the section entitled, People You Reach. Here you'll find all demographic information including location, language, and gender, along with their top interests and which boards they pin your stuff to. If the data shown correlates with your intended target audience, great job. Make sure to keep pinning this type of content. However, let's say, like me, you are in a period of transition for your Pinterest profile and are not satisfied with the results you see here. Don't worry. It just means you need to pin and re-pin more content related to your current business and give it time. If you change course on your business journey and want to start targeting a new audience, no need to delete suddenly ill fitting pins. Simply keep going with your new pins and implement the next tactic by asking yourself, "What are you pinning?" Then answer that question by adding relevant keywords and hashtags in the descriptions of new pins, re-pins, your boards, and your profile. You can even include some in your name, as I did with the words, web, graphic and designer. Remember, Pinterest is a search engine and users can get very specific with their search inquiries. When adding pin descriptions, make sure to include the most unique and accurate parts of the image, so your pin is more likely to come up in specific search results. Did you pin a cookie recipe? Or did you pin grandma's delicious chocolate chip caramel cookie recipe using Spelt flour that is perfect for packing and school lunches? Hashtag cookie recipe, hashtag baking. Keep in mind, the Pinterest algorithm doesn't like keyword stuffing. Be sure to sprinkle your keywords throughout a couple sentences with a few hashtags at the end, for best results. Considering that you are following Tactic 1, and only pinning things with your business' target audience in mind, it should be safe to say that by accurately describing those pins, you are already using some relevant keywords. But what can you do to find even more? The answer is, you guessed it in your analytics. Go back to the intersection of the People You Reach page, scroll down to the list of Boards that have lots of your pins. Click on those Boards that fit in with your target audience and check out the hashtags and keywords those people are using on pins that are similar to yours. Another quick tip can actually be found in the Search bar at the top of any Pinterest page. Type in a topic and hit Enter. As you can see, Pinterest supplies you with several suggestions for more keywords to help you narrow your search. But you can use those keywords in your descriptions as well. Using relevant keywords and hashtags makes it easier for your intended audience to find and recognize you, as long as you pin your images in the right place, as we will now discuss in Tactic 3. 7. Even More Useful Tactics: Where are you pinning? As you are aware, all of your pins and repins must be allocated to a board. Using your analytics, you can make sure to catch ideas for boards you may not have thought about creating, but your audience already recognizes and uses. Make sure your boards are arranged on your profile page starting from most relevant and on-brand to the least. Although again, the goal here is to grow your business. Really all of your boards should somehow be pointing back to you, and your company. Make sure you have at least one board with only pins from your website. If you need help coming up with more boards that center around your brand content, take a look at the website section in your analytics. Scroll down to top pin impressions. As you can see in mine, local pins and website pins are the most popular. I could consider making an entire board for logos and another for website design. You will also want to make sure to add your best-performing boards to the featured boards carousel at the top of your profile. You can do so by clicking on the three horizontal dots in the far right corner, then settings and scroll to the bottom of the page and then click "Edit" in the featured boards section. For more board ideas, go back to your people you reach page and look at how your audience has organized your pins on their own boards. Make sure your pins are organized across a similar group of boards. Or think of additional boards you can make related to this information. You may also want to include topics from their top interests. For example, I see that people love my interior design pins and they're interested in DIY. I can make a new board all about DIY furniture to engage them even more. You may also wish to create spinoff boards from the ones that are already doing very well. To do this, go to your Pinterest profile page and look at the boards with top pin impressions section. My top three boards are not very specific. I could quite easily branch off each topic and create a series of more specific boards under the umbrella of the well-performing main topic. If you are not so sure about a board idea, but it fits into the theme of one of your pre-existing boards. You may just want to create a section in your board, and when you see pins from that section outperforming other pins, turn that section into its own board. That is a good way to test the waters for that idea without cluttering your profile with too many boards and coincidentally, avoiding clutter and pinned noise is the focus of our fourth and next tactic. How are you pinning? The vast majority of your pins should be your own, not repins. Pins from your website, social media posts, advertisements, etc, all pointing back to your website. Not only is this because priority goes to new pins, but also because if I had to sum up the main message of this entire class in one sentence, it would be the point of your Pinterest profile is to drive traffic to your website. See what I did there. This is how you will ultimately use Pinterest to grow your business. This means when making your pins, not only do you need to stay on brand by sticking to the topics and themes relating to your business, you also need to pay attention to the look of your pins. Make sure to use your brand colors, fonts and logo or icons. When writing your descriptions, use the tone you have established on your blog or website and social media posts. People say vertical pins do best because they take up more space. While that may be true for getting someone's attention, what makes them actually click will be your content. Try to focus more on what really matters and what you are trying to get across as a brand. For getting shown by the Pinterest algorithm, content relevancy is far more important than anything else. A way in which your analytics helps you with the look of your pins can be found in the all apps tab on the your Pinterest profile page. You can use this data to design some of your pins based on the most popular devices used to view your pins. For example, if a large percentage of your impressions are coming from iPads, you'll want to be sure your pins and the areas they link to on your site look great on iPads. How can you make sure these great looking pins are getting seen? To figure this out, let's ask the last question of this class. How often are you pinning. Pinning is the action that sets all of your time and efforts in motion. The more you pin, the more content you have pulling eyes to your profile and clicks to your site. Your pinning should be consistent and relatively even like a steady stream, not sporadic pinnings breeze of a large amount of pins followed by hours and or days of silence. Tactic five is of course, to pin a lot. But what exactly is a lot? How can you pin consistently and often without interrupting your day and turning into a stressed out pinning monster? Because remember, Pinterest is supposed to be fun. I have heard all numbers thrown out there. But after switching the focus of my profile to web and graphic design, my account experienced its first large boost up growth with just about 10 pins a day. My updated tactic is to pin 24 pins a day throughout the day using a scheduler. This way I hope to catch my current audience as well as fresh eyes that may love my content. Pinterest itself lets you schedule pins up to two weeks in advance with the provided scheduling tools, as seen here when you click on the "Add pin" button, you can either publish immediately or at a later date. If you want to schedule even further in advance, you will need a scheduler. I have included the list of Pinterest approved marketing partners in the about section below. Right now I'm on the free trial of tailwind, a pin scheduler that allows you to pre-schedule your pins down to the minute. I like the interface and I'm very satisfied with their customer support, I will probably go with them. If you would like to see another video all about using tailwind to make implementing your tactics and Pinterest strategy easier, let me know in a comment or in your review. If you aren't sure what times to start with and don't want to use a scheduler, you can glean some information from your analytics to get you on the right track. Under the demographics tab of your Pinterest profile page, you will see the country and metro sections. With those time zones in mind, try to schedule a few pins during the hours most people are awake, a few in the morning around lunch, and again in the evening. 8. Don't Forget!: There are of course, many other tactics and tips for improving your Pinterest strategy's effectiveness. But with these five, you are surely off to a great start. In this course, you've learned key definitions, how to pick a KPI, know your audience and pin with purpose, as well as five measurable tactics for growth. Don't forget to implement your tactics for at least 1 week, as it takes up to 48 hours for your most recent Pinterest activity to register and show up in the graphs. If you only implement the tactics for two or three days, you will barely have any data in your analytics. Complete your class project by posting your before and after screenshots in the class project gallery, and ask any questions or offer up feedback and encouragement to your classmates in the community section below. I hope you feel knowledgeable and well-equipped to achieve all your Pinterest and business goals. Thank you so much for watching this class, and if you would like to get in touch to learn more about my web services, you can find me at claire-designs.com or by clicking the link in the about section. Happy pinning.