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

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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February 10, 2013

I have a couple of stories that were requested, so I’m picking away at those. One’s a military fantasy piece that I’m setting at Hadrian’s Wall, right around the time it was built. Another’s for the Glitter and Madness anthology, and it’s a fun structure I’m playing with, through which a murder gets told, revolving around a lesbian were-seal. Im finishing the revision of “The Threadbare Magician,” which is a novelette I’d like to get sent off this week. I’ve also got some nonfiction stuff.

I’m also finishing up (hopefully today) the dark mermaid story. Here’s an excerpt:

When she got home, she went to the tanks, curious to see what progress had occurred. She’d put the coral seeds in them late last night. The seeds were globes now, made of a glossy gray material, almost two and a half inches in diameter. She could see something moving inside the globe. Its sides flexed and bulged as the thing inside it shifted. Even as she watched, it shuddered and wobbled. Whatever inside — presumably a mermaid — was eager to escape. Should she help it, perhaps poke a small hole in the side so it had something to work at? She consulted the pamphlet but it said nothing about the hatching process.

But by the time she came back to the tank, the question had resolved itself. A rent in the side was rapidly widening. Through it Petra glimpsed orange scales and pale flesh.

She checked the second tank. There the same thing was happening, although the scales were turquoise rather than reddish orange.

The globe convulsed and collapsed. In a flurry of scales the turquoise mermaid emerged.

Petra stared. She had expected Sea Monkeys.

This was very different.

The mermaid was tiny and perfect as one of the elaborate little fish that school in coral reefs, colored parrot bright. Her upper half was a tiny woman, complete with blue sea shell bra hiding the faint swells of her torso.

She called Leonid. “What are these? Are they intelligent?”

“Of course not!” he crowed, pleased at his creation having deceived her sharp eye.

“But it’s wearing clothing.”

“Look closer,” he said. “All natural coloration. Or engineered, to be more precise.”

Her fingers were tight on the cell phone as she leaned down to look into the tank. The mermaid coiled, long tail writhing in the water. It nosed among the plastic seaweed in the tank, perched atop an arch of rocks and groomed itself, running fingers through its long blonde hair.

“You’re sure?”

“They’re not even animals, really,” he said. “Think of them as little flesh machines.”

The flesh machines floated in their tanks. Petra pulled her eyes away from them.

“Very well,” she said.

That night she set two more seeds into their starting buds, one white, the other purple. It amused her to think that these were Suffragist colors, the same colors banner wearers of the 19th century had sported. She wondered what a suffragist mermaid would look like.

(As a side note, if you’re interested in the editing class that starts today, 4-6 PM PST and runs today and two additional Sundays, drop me an e-mail or a comment, because I’ve still got openings. It’s a class that’s useful not just to editors, but to writers wanting to enhance their own self-editing skills.)

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Teaser: A Seed on the Wind

August 18, 2012

The Jelly Bean Tanker Explosion, drawn using Sketchpad Pro on the iPad, included here because a blog entry is so much more interesting looking when there's a visual element. Plus, I like this picture.

Should it be “on” or “upon” the wind? I’m torn. Either way, here’s a scrap to tantalize you a little.

He tried the drugs of Waterdeep.

He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.

He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.

He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.

He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.

He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.

He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.

He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.

He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.

He drifted from high to high, abandoning himself and becoming a new thing.

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