When it comes to Pinterest is can be a bit of a guessing game as to what pins are performing well and which ones are completely falling flat and the on-site analytics aren’t always the best resource when you want to know what is going on on your Pinterest account. Luckily you can use Google Analytics to track pin performance and see which pins are bringing in the traffic, which ones aren’t, and if new designs are taking off or falling flat.

Let’s get started!

 

 

Track Pin Performance with Google Analytics

 

Open up your Google Analytics Dashboard.

On the left side I want you to do to ACQUISITION –> SOCIAL –> NETWORK REFERRALS.

Then click on Pinterest as the Social Network.

Up at the top set your dates to the past 30 days or the last 7 days- depending on how targeted you want to get on tracking your pin performance.

 

 

When you click on Pinterest you will be brought to a graph of the traffic you have received from Pinterest in the selected time frame.

Below that will be your top 10 posts from Pinterest. Go ahead an click on the first one.

Now you will see a graph of Pinterest traffic specific to that post.

 

 

 Dig Deeper

What does this graph tell me about this post?

For the post in the above picture I can tell that the new strategy I started around the 14th is working. I can also tell that the new pin design that I uploaded on September 30th was a good one.

If you look at the referral links you will see a few different pinterest links.

The one that says pinterest.com/ accounts for traffic from the home feed and or some mobile traffic. And, I am sorry to say, it doesn’t tell you much of anything.

BUT the one directly under that which says pinterest.com/pin/############ is the direct link to a specific pin that is doing very well in terms of driving traffic to my site.

 

Copy and Paste Your Top Referral

If you copy the entire pinterest.com/pin/############ link into your browser you will be brought to a pin on Pinterest.

From here you can see things like who pinned it. And if it was you that pinned it you can see what board you pinned it to.

Oftentimes the top referral will be a no-name, generic profile picture person with like 10 followers- yet you are getting massive traffic from it!

 

You may also like: How to Use Google Search Console for SEO and Rank Higher in Search!

 

Pin it!

This step is totally optional, but when I find a pin that is doing REALLY well, I pin it immediately. Pin it to your best relevant personal board or to a group board that hasn’t seen it in awhile. This just kind of helps keep the momentum going just a bit.

 

How to Track New Pin Design Performance

Sometimes you just want to see how a new pin is doing. Sure your Board Booster or Tailwind Analytics will tell you a little bit- but most of the time all it tells you is repins. And repins don’t tell you the whole story.

So go back to your dashboard to the ACQUISITION –> SOCIAL –> NETWORK REFERRALS  –> Pinterest.

Below the graph but above the URLs you will see a search bar. This is where you can search for specific terms or URLs.

I recently redesigned an old, dead post on tarragon and I wanted to check how it was doing. So I simply searched for tarragon and the post URL came up, along with the graph for that URL.

 

 

From this I can see that my redesigned pin was successful and the post that was barely seeing any traffic at all from the old pins is now starting to grow.

Since Pinterest is a slow game, I know that I can put this new pin back into my rotation schedule and that post should see a steady growth in traffic.

If I were to click on the URL for the post, again I would see the listings of specific pins that are driving traffic as well.

 

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I like to check in my Google Analytics at least once a month to see what is doing well and what is not. I use this information to tweak my pinning strategies and change up which pins I want to put in rotation. I also use this time to decide which posts might need a fresh design to drive more traffic.

I also check in within a week of doing a new pin design just to see how it’s doing.

 

Did you find anything surprising when you checked the performance of your pins in Google Analytics?