Social Media: Pinterest Analytics and Links for 3/18/2013

March 18, 2013
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infographics, pinterest, pinterest anyalytics, seo and images, social media, social networking for writers

August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!

Pinterest has rolled out Pinterest Analytics. To add it to your site in order to see what’s getting pinned, you need to verify your site. Here’s the instructions for doing so.

Pinterest Analytics

Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.

I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.

Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:

Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.

Day one: 1 pin from 1 pinner
Day two: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day three: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day four: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day five: 5 pins, 3 pinners

Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.

Day one: 0 repins, 0 repinners
Day two: 10 repins, 10 repinners
Day three: 2 repins, 2 repinners
Day four: 2 repins, 1 repinner
Day five: 3 repins, 3 repinners

Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.

Day one: 247 people saw 474 total images
Day two: 324 people saw 1063 total images
Day three: 242 people saw 1347 total images
Day four: 159 people saw 247 total images
Day five: 856 people saw 2957 total images.

Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.

Day one: Three images were clicked on, each time by a different person. As a note of interest, Google Analytics claims only one visitor from Pinterest that day.
Day two: Eight images, eight different visitors. (Google Analytics reports 6.)
Day three: Twelve images, one visitor. (Google Analytics reports 4.)
Day four: Two images, two visitors. (Google Analytics reports 2.)
Day five: Three clicks, three visitors. (Google Analytics reports 3 as well.)

Factors that might have affected those numbers:

Day three: I re-organized my boards so one with a lot of links pointing back to my site was in the top row. I submitted that board as a StumbleUpon bookmark. And I made one of my boards, fabulous female protagonists, a group board and invited some other people to pin to it.
Day four: I was completely absent from Pinterest activity.
Day five: I pinned a new piece from my site onto a personal board that collects similar pieces from my site.

The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.

And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.

So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.

Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.

Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?

Recent Social Media Links of Interest:

WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.

Facebook Changes: Facebook’s redesigned their news feeds. What are they and how do they affect reaching readers? Facebook’s also acquired storytelling social network Storylane.

Twitter: A guide to some Twitterspeak, some instances of which I’m not convinced are actually used by anyone.

On the tools side of things, I’ve been messing with Followerwonk. I’ll write that up next week.

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WIP: A Cavern Ripe With Dreams

September 5, 2014

Cover for A Seed on the Wind, painting by Mats Minnhagen — Tiny things floated through the air all around him. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed. Attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, to carry it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. So small. As it neared his eye, it became no longer brown, ridges and swirls marked its surface in grays and greens and reds that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.

I’m finishing up A Cavern Ripe with Dreams, the sequel to A Seed On the Wind. A version will undoubtedly go out to Patreon patrons before I start shopping the combined novellas around as a single entity.

This story owes a great deal to both William S. Burroughs’ Junky (indeed, the protagonist is named Bill in his honor) and Joe R. Lansdale’s Drive-In, a book I found immensely freeing and exhilarating in its sheer WTFery and bravura. If you’ve read A Querulous Flute of Bone, it’s the same world, that of the co-writing project The Fathomless Abyss.

From part of today’s writing:

Bill felt a rush of fear, but a kind that he had never experienced before, something like the fear you feel when someone tells you a frightening story that they believe is true. A terror that was convincing yet somehow dilute. A terror that was not his, somehow.

A fear that was enjoyable.

He realized that it was the creature. That he was feeling its emotions. That if he closed his eyes, he could still see the room like a ghostly overlay across the darkness behind his lids.

He wondered if it experienced the same phenomenon, this double life. He put his hand up and touched it with a fingertip, stroking along the coarse fur that was still damp with eggy fluid. It smelled like newly-split wood, rare and sharp. As he touched it, it shuddered but stayed still, like a woman whose innermost core had been touched, who feared and craved more. At the thought, he grew hard, and he felt it shudder again before it curled tighter around his neck.

He lay there with it around his neck, savoring the mental taste of it, dipping in and out of its perceptions. After a while, his bladder drove him into standing and using the chamber pot beneath his bed. As he pissed, he could feel the creature tasting his sensations in turn.

It made him curious. Settling back onto the bed, he took a syrette from the bedside table, already loaded with honeypain. He injected it in his wrist and lay back to feel the twofold sensation.

First it felt as though the back of his eyes had dissolved, only to be filled with a subtle warmth that flowed out from them, flowing through him until he was only a zone of temperature and sensation, as though he was warm water in a bath, only an outline. But always with that lurking presence perceiving him, keeping him whole. He had loved honeypain for its ability to take him outside himself, but now he realized that it was nothing compared to the creature.

He tried to think at it, to see if it would answer him, but all his thoughts were blurred by the honeypain. He could hear only his blood drumming in his veins, a hard and insistent beat that told him he was alive, as it had before, for sometimes when he was dipped deep in these reveries, he thought himself dead. Now he had that beat but more ““ the creature curled on his chest. Part of him but not part.

After a while he slept.

Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon..

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Tracking Story Submissions

December 16, 2011

Mechanical Fortune Teller at Pike Place Market — One of the problems with submissions is the guesswork involved - there is no way to predict what market will love a particular story.

Part of today is going to be spent sorting through my spreadsheet of what stories are out where and getting stuff out. That’s one of the really tedious things about being a writer – all the paperwork.

So how do I track submissions and figure out where to send them?

I have an Excel spreadsheet. One page has short stories that are circulating, a second does the same with flash pieces, a third tracks sold stories, a fourth audio reprints, and a fifth foreign reprints. When a rejection comes in, I mark the story on the sheet as freed up and put it in bold red. Once it’s been submitted, I switch the color to blue. That lets me look over the sheet and get an idea of what needs to go out. Right now it’s looking pretty red, so I’ve compiled a list of five flash pieces and ten short stories that need to go out, making a note of the word count.

After that I usually go to a market list, usually Duotrope.com or Ralan.com and look. I have some markets that stories always go through, but once they’ve been through those, it becomes a matter of finding the right place. I’ll look to see what anthologies are open first and see if I’ve got anything that fits into a particular theme.

Another system that can be used to track submissions is the excellent Story

Before I submit anywhere, I read their guidelines and do my best to read an issue or two (if they’re free online fiction, I don’t think there’s any excuse for not doing a little research there.)

Things that up a market’s attractiveness:

Good pay – I make my money through writing and editing, so this is a big factor to me.
Fast response time – When sending via snail mail, for instance, that adds at least a couple of weeks to the response time. A good resource for checking how fast they’re responding is the Black Hole.
Circulation – Do people read the magazine? Is it getting discussed/reviewed? Are many year’s bests coming from its pages?
Good editor – A good editor is a joy to work with.

Audio reprints and foreign markets are usually separate passes, since I’m working with different lists there – the best of the stuff that’s been published. I absolutely would be lost in looking at the latter if I didn’t have Douglas Smith’s Foreign Market list. I’ve been bad about audio reprints and need to get more of those circulating, so that will probably come after this pass.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Perefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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Social Media: Pinterest Analytics and Links for 3/18/2013

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