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.

One Response

Pingback: Social Media: FollowerWonk Writeup and Links for 3/25/2013 | The World Remains Mysterious

You may also like...

How to Critique: Best Practices for Workshopping

January 31, 2014

Abstract image to accompany blog post about critiquing stories by speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo. — If you're interested in getting your stories workshopped, click on this picture in order to find out more about My Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction Stories online class. There's also an Advanced Workshop, as well as classes focusing on individual aspects of writing, like description, characters, and fleshing out stories.

Both my Writing F&SF Stories and Advanced workshops offer students a chance to critique and be critiqued. To my mind, the latter is actually more useful, because being forced to articulate one’s position on an aspect of writing can be enlightening and instructive. With that in mind, here’s some best practices for such workshops.

Overall:

Start with what works. Let the writer know what you see as the story’s strengths and how they might capitalize on them.
What keeps you from connecting with the story? What don’t you understand? Sometimes the most useful thing you can give someone is a brief synopsis of what you think is going on in the story, because it may not match their intent.
Critique big ticket items, not little nitpicks.
It’s more important to point out what’s broken than to make suggestions how to fix it, because that fix will differ radically from writer to writer.
How do the beginning and ending work together to create a satisfying story? Is the story that’s provided the one the one promised in the beginning? Is the ending set up in a satisfying way? Is it the result of character actions?
What’s missing? What don’t you understand?
What seems extraneous, unneeded or distracting?
What’s the pacing like? Where does the story drag and where does it skip too quickly through details?
Where are the info-dumps and how can that information be spread out?
How well does the title work? If not well, what possible better titles can be drawn from the story?

Characters:

Are the characters likeable?
Are the characters acting or reacting?
Does the character have a point of identification with the reader, such as a problem, situation or want that both of them hold?
Where can we go deeper into the character’s head? Does the reader know what the character wants? Where don’t we understand what the character is doing?
Are there too many characters? Can any be combined?
Is the dialogue interesting and informative of character?
Is the point of view consistent?

World:

Is the world clear? Does the reader know where they are?
Does it feel generic? (Is it?) How can it be made more specific and evocative?
Does it make sense?
How important is the science of it? Are the facts right?
Where should we know more?
Where can the world come forward more?
Where can more sensory detail be worked in?
Is the culture interesting and also make sense?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content 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.

Prefer 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.

...

Clarion West Write-a-thon Goals

June 18, 2012

Picture of the advance reading copy of Cat Rambo's Near+Far — I won the Leilani doll in the Locus Awards raffle, and the lei is also a souvenir of that delightful occasion. But the coolest thing received there was the Arc of NEAR+FAR!!

It’s the start of another Clarion West season. As always, it was marked by the Locus Awards, which were a ton of fun and extra cool because they were my first chance to see the ARC (advance reading copy) of the book coming out this September. I’ve been to the house and met most of the students — they all have that glazed, not-sure-what-to-expect look in their eyes. And the Clarion West Write-a-thon is starting. This’ll be the 6th or 7th time I’ve participated in it, I think.

This year I’m using it to spur effort on the urban fantasy novel I’ve been working on, THE EASTER BUNNY MUST DIE! At Rio Hondo, they suggested a new way to begin it, so I’ve got to write that chapter, tweak the existing ones so they fall in line nicely after that, and then take up where I left off, in a grumpy healer’s cavern, confronting the Marlboro Man. Nuff said?

So I must tell you, that should you wish to support me in the Write-a-thon, even if it’s just a buck, you’ll be receiving snippets in the mail that will not be made available to the public – perhaps ever, perhaps not until the book is done. I hope you’ll support me (or perhaps some other fine writer working on Write-a-thon goals) this summer.

Love the Easter Bunny and want to find out what happens next? Support Cat on Patreon in order to have a say in what she writes next, as well as getting other snippets, 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.

...

The World of

books, community, classes, & resources

Share this:

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

One Response

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each Month