Pinterest analytics – ads next.

This week saw Pinterest introduce some pretty basic but free analytics to the platform. And they are pretty basic and probably need a few bugs ironing out. Selecting a date range is a nightmare. Without wishing to sound too geeky – it’s all over the place on Firefox.

The stats look to be split down into the following areas  – stats from your site, stats from Pinterest, stats from the main Pinterest feed and finally clicks to your site and visitors to your site from Pinterest. So that’s all good stuff.

The main things are then –

• How many people liked stuff on your site and decided to pin them
• How many people saw your pins in the main Pinterest feed
• And obviously how many visitors you are getting to your site from Pinterest.

Knife Box have always seen peaks of traffic when we manage to pin something that catches general appeal and that’s clear from these stats.

Here you see we have this big spike in impressions and reach on 1st March – over 3k impressions. Now I need to work out what exactly we did on the 1st March to create that spike.

To do that – use the “Most clicked” tab and then select that date. You can also use the most repinned on that date too.

You may not get the same pin – but at least its an indication.

For the minute there are probably better free analytics tools out there for Pinterest like Pinfluence. Mashable has a few listed here. Curalate and Pinpuff are both nice. Make use of any of the free trials that are going on to see which one you get on best with.

The interesting thing about Pinterest introducing their own free analytics tools is that this kind of paves the way for advertising. No advertise will pay money to a platform that cannot demonstrate or at least record performance and this looks to pave the way for that natural journey into revenue generation from display advertising.

It’s easy to see how an MPU type ad could be embedded in the main Pinterest stream without disturbing the whole user experience.

Pinterest fans will no doubt be up in arms – but they have to make money somehow. Knife Box have seen better conversion rates from Pinterest visitors than from say Twitter or Facebook – so this is all very logical.

We’ll keep you posted on how this one develops but in the meantime – spend some time increasing the performance and reach of your pins by tracking how they perform.