How to Use Pinterest Analytics in 2023 (3 Main Tools Explained)

Let me guess, you came to this page in an ultimate attempt to understand how to use Pinterest analytics.

Before we get in deep water with Pinterest analytics metrics, let’s make it clear that the only thing that really matters to you is getting Pinterest traffic to your website. Am I right?

Whether you need the traffic to monetize with ads, or with affiliate offers, or even your own products, you first need to get Pinterest users to visit your site.

This is why in my post, I’m not trying to explain in detail every single metric Pinterest shows in your business account. Most of the data that Pinterest shows is only important for Pinterest and not for you as a website owner.

So why waste my time, and your time, and further confuse you with vanity metrics? I will only mention them in order to show why you can totally ignore most of the data Pinterest Analytics shows.

But first things first…

How do I find Pinterest analytics?

You need to use a business account on Pinterest, to have access to Pinterest analytics. If you are using a personal account, you can convert it to a business account and in about a week you’ll be able to see your first data in Pinterest analytics.

Once you are in your business account, you can either go directly to this URL https://analytics.pinterest.com/ or click on the Analytics link in the left corner and choose Overview to start with:

What does impressions mean on Pinterest analytics?

Impressions on Pinterest is the first metric you’ll see in your Profile and Website analytics, but you shouldn’t focus much on Impressions because they don’t correspond to your traffic.

Impressions show how many times a Pin from your profile was shown on Pinterest (this includes category feeds, search results and Homefeed).

Under average daily Impressions, Pinterest also shows average daily viewers – this is how many users saw your pins in the selected date range. An important note here: this includes all Pins you saved to Pinterest, plus any Pins other people saved from your website and linked accounts.

Are you still with me? I warned you Pinterest shows a lot of vanity numbers, this is one of them. Who cares how many times people have seen your pins? What matters, how many clicks these impressions generated.

I would only look at impressions to understand how well your pins are converting into click-throughs. It would be really hard to see an overall picture on the account level, some pins can outperform others 100X times, so making an average just brings you to wrong conclusions.

I would suggest checking Impressions on a pin level. If you are getting extraordinarily high impressions on some pin and very low clicks, something might be wrong with your pin image. Maybe you should add a text overlay, maybe you should make your pin more intriguing, or add a call to action.

Understanding Pinterest Analytics Dashboard

Let’s start with the Overview tab in your Pinterest Analytics.

Here you can get the data about your Profile, Reach and Activity from your domain.

Pinterest Profile data shows how many times the pins you saved were seen, saved and clicked.

People you reach shows how many people have seen your Pins and/or acted on your Pins (30-day aggregate). You can compare under this report, your monthly viewers against the monthly engaged audience.

Activity from your domain shows impressions, saves and clicks for Pins linking back to your site as a daily average. 

The Overview tab also gives you a look at the top performing Pins from your website, however, in this case, you only see the top 5 pins by impressions. This metric doesn’t allow you to see the top performing pins by clicks.

You can go from the Overview to check more details on each of these metrics.

Pinterest Analytics Explained by Metrics

I wouldn’t spend much time in Profile analytics because this doesn’t reflect how pins linked to your website are performing.

I’ll intentionally skip explaining the metrics of Profile analytics. Especially since all four of them are called the same way in Website analytics.

What can we find here?

Impressions show how many times a pin from your website has appeared in the Pinterest home feed, category feed, or search results. I would only look at this number to compare with your Profile impressions, in order to understand if pins from your site are shown a lot compared to whatever you repin from other sites. Being shown though doesn’t mean you are getting clicks or saves.

Saves – shows how many times pinners saved your image to their boards. This metric is an important indicator of whether or not users find your content interesting. Plus, the number or saves (more often called repins) is a strong ranking factor on Pinterest. Search for any keyword on Pinterest, and then check how many repins the top pins in search results have.

Clicks – that’s how much traffic you’ve got from Pinterest to your domain. I believe it’s also one of the user engagement factors in Pinterest SEO which effects pin’s popularity and rankings.

Original Pins – this is how many times users created unique pins from your website using either your hover save buttons or Pinterest browser extension or even manually uploaded pins with links to your site. I’m often seeing a strong connection between the number of original pins and viral effect on Pinterest.

All Time – this is a pretty cool report that shows top pins of all times from your domain: most shared pins, pins with highest positions in search results and so-called Power Pins: Pins with a high mix of saves, clicks and more.

The idea of showing pins that rank high in search is great, but Pinterest needs to work on this report a lot more as currently, the report is useless in all senses:

• It doesn’t show for which Pinterest keyword each particular pin ranks
• It doesn’t show how high the pin can be found
• Plus, most of the pins I found in this report, are not popular and I couldn’t find them in search results for any relevant keywords.

Save button – that’s Pinterest’s native save button. If you are using it on your website, you can track how many times readers saved pins from your domain using this button.

For impressions, saves and clicks, you will find the following top-performing lists (for the last 30 days only! you can change the dates in the calendar of the report, but these lists will still show the last month’s top performers):

1. Top pins – the top 50 performing pins (can be filtered by impressions, saves and clicks).
2. Top Boards – the top 50 boards (not necessarily your own boards, this report includes boards of users who saved your pins too!). Can also be filtered by impressions, saves, and clicks.

Pinterest Audience Insights

I find the data under Audience Analytics report quite useful when you need to pitch for a sponsored post – it shows demographics and interests of your audience on Pinterest.

Demographics

Shows location (country, metropolitan for US) and language, gender, devices your audience users.

Categories and Interests

This report shows which niches (categories) and topics (interests) your audience is really into.

For example, in the Health category, my audience is mostly interested in diets and nutrition.

The Affinity metric in this report allows you to see how your audience is interested in a particular topic compared to the rest of the Pinterest audience.

Best Pinterest Analytics Tools – Free and Paid

The first tool you can use is native Pinterest analytics and I’ve been talking about them all the time until now. Again, you can only have access to Pinterest Analytics with a business account. Now let’s move to other tools.

How to Track Traffic from Pinterest – Google Analytics Reports

I personally use Google Analytics to track my Pinterest success more often than I use Pinterest Analytics on the platform itself.

That’s because I mostly care about traffic Pinterest drives to my blogs, and not about vanity numbers like Pinterest impressions or Pinterest audience.

In Google Analytics, Pinterest traffic can be found in different places:

1.    Go to Acquisition >> Social >> Network Referrals >> Pinterest.
You’ll find here a list of posts which get more Pinterest traffic. If you click on each particular posts, you’ll see the exact pin URLs driving you more traffic.

2.    Go to Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Referrals
You’ll find here a list of pin URLs which get more Pinterest traffic.

Tailwind Pinterest Analytics

If you are using the paid version of Tailwind for scheduling pins, you are also getting full access to Pinterest Analytics.

You can get the first month of Tailwind for free here.

To find analytics in Tailwind, you need to look for the Insights tab.

The first thing you’ll see is Profile Performance – it gives you information about the overall “health” of your account. Such as follower growth, repin rate and number of comments.

If the number of pins and followers you can find on Pinterest repins and comments totals you can only see in Tailwind analytics.

The next interesting pieces of data which you’ll never find in Pinterest Analytics are:

Virality score –  the total number of Repins (saves) you’ve received divided by the number of Pins you have ever saved to Pinterest.

Engagement Score is calculated by dividing your total Repins by all of your Pins and then by per thousand followers.

Engagement Rate is the percentage of your Pins with at least one Repin.

Tailwind Board Insights

You can see which boards are popular in Pinterest native Analytics too, but in Tailwind Analytics, you’ll see additional data, such as virality and engagement scores for each board.

The data from the Board Insights can be used to evaluate your own boards, but also group boards. You can then decide if it’s worth leaving or archiving some group boards. I wrote why you should analyze the performance of group boards.

Pin Inspector in Tailwind Analytics

In Pin Inspector you see the data based on your last 5000 pins, and good news even pins you saved manually, will be tracked in Tailwind stats.

This report might be especially useful to help you identify the most popular topics and create more content around them since your audience is engaging well.

When you find a list of high-performing Pins from your domain, you can either reschedule them right on the same page or add them to your Tribes.

In Conclusion

This has been a really long post, and it had to be as we are speaking about analytics. It’s not easy to read and understand Pinterest analytics, this is why you came to this page in the first place.

And since it’s so much info in this post, I’d like to give you a short summary to simplify things:

1.  Don’t get carried away over-tracking your success with Pinterest Analytics. The numbers in Pinterest native analytics are most important for the platform. What matters to you is how much traffic you get, and this can be tracked better in Google Analytics.

2.  Use Pinterest Analytics to identify which topics get more engagement and write more content around them to grow your traffic.

3.  Tailwind Analytics can show you some additional metrics which you will not find in Pinterest’s native Analytics.

Did you find this post useful? Want to get back to this page later? Save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board on Pinterest!

How to Use Pinterest Analytics in 2023 (3 Main Tools Explained)

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Instructions

1. How do I find Pinterest analytics?
2. What does impressions mean on Pinterest analytics?
3. Understanding Pinterest Analytics Dashboard
4. Pinterest Analytics Explained by Metrics

Anastasia Blogger

I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.

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