How to See Your Most Popular Topics Using Pinterest Analytics
I have written and talked a lot about the popular topics on Pinterest. They are useful for marketers to understand so they can adjust their social media strategy to work in Pinterest’s unique environment. Pinterest has expanded features into new countries, changed its advertising options, added a new Showcase area to business accounts, and updated their mobile apps all in an effort to expand its business. Although these many changes have come at a rapid pace, the most popular topics on the social media channel have remained constant.
Pinterest has over 150 Million monthly active users* on its highly visual social media platform. Users save posts, called Pins, to their accounts. Pins are organized in accounts where users save them onto boards.
Pins are grouped onto boards. The boards can also have an assigned, but optional, category. The current list of categories can be seen from the drop down menu in the upper right corner of desktop Pinterest. The categories can also be seen on the mobile app by navigating to the home screen and then tapping the search box at the top. A partial list of categories appears. Tap on the plus sign to see the complete list. The Pinterest category list the same on desktop and mobile.
Pinterest users have always been interested in these popular categories:
- Home décor
- Do-it-Yourself projects (DIY)
- Fashion
- Food & Drink / Recipes
- Beauty
These popular Pinterest topics are all represented under the categories menu.
However, none of this tells a Pinterest user much about what’s popular amongst their own followers or what content working for their strategy. This is where consulting Pinterest Analytics helps. Let us explore Pinterest Analytics, one of the features added to help businesses understand their accounts and userbase.
Pinterest Analytics is available, free, to all business accounts. Pinterest business accounts are also free. Converting from a personal account to a business account is quick and easy. Users only need to verify their website URL and add some additional account information to get started.
If you already have a business account, log into your Pinterest business account and head over to your analytics. There you will user data split into three groups:
- Your Pinterest profile
- People you reach
- Activity from {website URL} (in my case it’s pintalk.net)
Go to the middle column and look at activity from people you reach. This data is from Pinterest users who see your Pins within the app. The initial view shows the demographics of the people who see your Pins and people who engage with them via comments, likes, or trying your Pins. This tells a business what their audience interacts with on Pinterest.
Stay in the “people you reach” tab, and then choose “interests” at the top. Unlike the demographics tab, interests cannot be modified by choosing another date range. The interests tab is split into two sections. The first is the interests (again) section. The next is the boards section.
Interests show what categories appeal to your followers. These interests” are the same categories from the categories menu. The initial view shows 12 categories. Tap the “show more” button to get another five categories for 17 categories in total.
The second section shows the names of boards your audience saves Pins to. This may or may not be useful information. Board names are a sort of Wild West. Pinterest users can name the boards anything they like. Although I name my boards after quality SEO phrases, many users do not. The result is, this area may be useful or it may be a bit useless. It depends. My audience is good and most of their board names are meaningful and let me know what my audience’s interests are.
So how is this information about interests helpful? This is an insight into what your audience is looking for or interested in. It should align with whatever you are selling. If you are selling women’s clothing and only ship within the United States but find that most of your audience is abroad (from the demographics sections) and male (again from the demographics section) and into tech (from the interests section, then your Pinterest strategy is probably off target.
In this case, you will have to adjust your follower base. There is nothing wrong with the mostly male tech followers, but they probably will not buy as many women’s sweaters as you had hoped for!
The interests section is also good for targeting Promoted Pins, but that’s a topic for another blog post! This is only a small portion of Pinterest Analytics. Of course, we want to examine our Google Analytics or others stats packages to see what pages are working well for your users and check on their interests there too.
*Sources
http://fortune.com/2016/10/13/pinterest-monthly-active-users/
