Pinterest Sales Funnel: Can Pinterest Traffic Convert as Good as Google?

You already know that the majority of my blogging income comes from ads and the majority of my traffic comes from Pinterest. So, based on my blogs, we can tell Pinterest traffic works great for ad monetization.

But how about sales of products/services using Pinterest as a marketing funnel?

A common misconception about Pinterest is that it’s a social media platform, people go to Pinterest to entertain only, and so it’s very hard to convert visits from Pinterest.

Well, let me tell you what is wrong about this statement.

Pinterest is not a typical social media site because people barely connect with each other. Sending a direct message in Pinterest can easily get you in trouble, especially if you send a link in your message. Pinterest doesn’t encourage direct interaction between users on their platform.

Pinterest is a visual search engine which relies a lot on the social factors.

By social factors, I mean both user interaction with the content (aka click-throughs, likes, comments), and the connection between users (meaning you will see content from people and boards you follow more often in the Smartfeed).

Pinterest as Traffic Source for Your Sales Funnels

Users on Pinterest can be in two modes:

• Active search;
• Explore by scrolling the Smartfeed.

Both ways you can get users who are genuinely interested in your topic. If they come from search results, even more so. That’s definitely a positive thing about Pinterest audience compared to social media like Facebook or Instagram.

However, in 2020 making a sale online from the first time a user comes to your site is a rare luckiness. You need to nurture your audience before they are ready to get their credit cards out of the pockets.

This is why you need sales funnels and this is why you are reading my post in the first place, aren’t you? 🙂

How do You Capture Visitors from Pinterest into Your Sales Funnel?

This is how the stages of your sales funnels based on Pinterest traffic can look like:

1. Content Discovery = Keywords or SmartFeed = > your pins

2. First evaluation of your Expertise = > your posts / landing pages / videos

3. Educate, Nurture and Prove your Authority = > email list / ebooks / cheat sheets / case studies / free guides

4. Conversion = > demo /trial, customer stories, events or webinars, challenges, testimonials.

5. Retention = > If your business is here to stay, you need to think about the ways you can keep your customers and turn them into repeat buyers. This is retention and believe it or not, Pinterest’s social side helps you work on this too.

Remind your readers/viewers to follow you on Pinterest once they discovered your pins first time, and your new content and offers will be delivered to these followers without much effort on your side.

Outside of Pinterest, your typical strategies for customer retention would include:

• Special offers for repeat customers;
• Emailing for follow-up;
• Customer support;
• Additional information shared exclusively with customers.

For advanced online marketers, I would add to this funnel a step of ad retargeting. After you capture your visitors from Pinterest into the funnel, you can retarget them and send them your offers using ads on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

How do You Track Your Conversions in Analytics

When I need to analyze how my Pinterest traffic is converting, I can rarely rely on Pinterest’s native analytics. I don’t recommend you to spend much time looking at the metrics which Pinterest shows there because most of them (like following or monthly viewers) don’t exactly correlate with traffic to your website.

So, what you should do as soon as you create a landing page, a webinar, a freebie, and start driving Pinterest traffic to it, is set up your goals in Google Analytics. You can also check the events in Google Analytics to see how many of the important activities on your site can be associated with your Pinterest traffic.

This sounds like a great theory but I personally learn much better from real-life examples. If you are lucky, you might even be invited into the behind-the-scenes and see how Pinterest traffic is converting 🙂

Ok, so I’ll be the first one to show my stats. But if you have something to share on converting users from Pinterest, you are welcome to leave your comment and screenshot below the post!

I made a screenshot from my Google Analytics and you can see that in total, Pinterest traffic brought about the same amount of conversions as Google. I’m showing on this screenshot the total for my goals, the highest conversions are of course on my free Pinterest workshop.

Some of the goals have monetary values, so excuse the blurred parts of the screenshot. My purpose here was just to show you how you can track your Pinterest traffic conversions in Google Analytics.

As you can see, Facebook and Instagram are nowhere close to Pinterest’s input into my conversions. It’s not that I’m happy about it, it’s just a fact. And I know that if I try to improve my conversions from FB and Instagram, I would anyway have to drive paid clicks to my landing page / freebie. The organic reach on both platforms is not an easy objective even for accounts with over 100K followers.

If you use them regularly, you probably have seen tons of sponsored posts from people who sell their products or services. Now try to remember how many times you’ve seen their offers in organic feeds of FB and Instagram. It’s just doesn’t work the same way on social media.

Luckily, Pinterest is a hybrid of a search engine and a social platform which makes our goals more achievable even without an ad budget if you know what you are doing with your Pinterest SEO!

Are you enjoying my Pinterest marketing tips? Follow my board with exclusive Pinterest tips.

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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