Introduction to Pinterest Analytics: KPIs, Language, and What’s Next

Welcome to a the first in a series of new posts all about measurement and analytics for the newest, freshest, and somewhat misunderstood social network: Pinterest.

This blog will explore both the user side of Pinterest (who is using it, why they are using it, what this means for marketers) and the marketing analytics side of the platform (what should you measure for success on Pinterest? What kind of intelligence can you get from the network?) I’ll be using a tool called pinfuse to analyze how brands are doing on the network, but first we need to set the stage with definitions of success.

Let’s dive in!

SOME BACKGROUND:

Pinterest has been around for more than two years, but it’s been in the past twelve months when marketers have really started to pay attention. Based on the meteoric traffic numbers in 2012, users have had no problem finding value in the service.

If you look at enough Pinterest pins, you’ll see some usage patterns start to form:

1. Projects that users want to catalog and collect to someday get around to doing
2. Ideas, products, and themes you are considering for an upcoming life event
3. Products that you either own or want to own, a collection of things that you believe somehow represents who you
4. Pictures, products, places that you identify with or enjoy collecting
5. Sayings or quotes that echo your beliefs or personal brand

Marketers have been slower to find value in the platform. The more seasoned digital marketers have found ways to make Pinterest work for them but to many, it’s the Oklahoma Land Rush to claim their stake on the network, and figure out how to drive revenue from the channel next quarter.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Like most social networks, Pinterest give marketers a chance to connect with users on their own turf, by creating and curating content that encourages interaction and sharing. The difference with Pinterest is in the data – more specifically in affinity data.

It’s been said that visuals are king on Pinterest, and that it’s truly the first purely image-based social network. I believe those subscribing to that theory are missing out on the real meat (and insights for marketers) that Pinterest provides.

(Youtube video clip from Burn After Reading, NSFW language but highly amusing)

Text provides order to the madness. Language on Pinterest provides, as Brad Pitt’s character says “…the RAW intelligence”, to give brands insight into brand/product affinity and Pinterest outreach strategies. The board labels, pin descriptions, and comments on Pinterest can provide intelligence that has never existed before for brands. Text can help bring water to the social media desert!  But before we dive too deep into language, let’s work on some basic KPIs for the channel.

THE MEASUREMENTS:

Every good marketer knows that all efforts should be measured, but new channels bring confusion on what success should look like. So let’s start by defining some good, basic KPIs for the Pinterest channel. 

In new channels, most people’s gut reaction will be to measure whatever’s easiest to measure (on Facebook it’s Like’s, on Twitter it’s Followers and Retweets.) But instead of measuring what’s easy, we should measure where the value is.

So that begs the real question: What’s important about a social network like Pinterest? Let’s break it down into a few buckets of value:

• Referral Traffic (and behaviors of those visitors)
• Owned Pinterest Brand Interactions
• Earned Pinterest Brand Interactions
• Pinterest Language Goals

This is a good time to stop and define a few terms, mainly how I am referring to Owned and Earned media on Pinterest. It’s a similar concept to the grand Owned/Earned/Paid concept in digital that has been so popular for the past few years.

Owned Boards for Martha Stewart

Owned Pinterest Content: Pins and Boards on a brand’s own Pinterest page, like Martha Stewart’s Pinterest page. This is content the brand has curated and put out into the world for users to share, comment on, and enjoy. This is the controlled environment of Pinterest, where a brand can paint the picture they would like others to see (other than comments from users.)

An earned pin for Nike.com

Earned Pinterest Content: Pins about a brand or product that are pinned by users from a brand’s domain and posted to the user’s own personal pin board. Here’s an example for Nike, where a user went to the Nike.comwebsite, found a brand/product they liked, and posted it to Pinterest (all without Nike’s knowledge.)

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into some KPIs:

Referral Traffic and Behavior KPIs:

• Traffic originating from Pinterest.com to your site
• Conversion rates by this segment
• Specific URLs (pins) driving traffic

You’re smart, so this one is a no-brainer for you. As a brand, you’re looking to drive more traffic to your site. Which pins/boards are doing that today? How much traffic is the channel driving overall? Behavioral analytics is the answer here.

Owned Pinterest Brand Interaction KPIs:

• Owned Repin Ratio: (Repins / Owned Pins)
• Owned Comment Ratio: (Comments/ Owned Pins)
• Owned Like Ratio: (Likes/ Owned Pins)

Pretty straight forward, right? Ratios are the best way to see what you’re getting based on what you’ve got, how much engagement is happening per piece of content you have created. Here we’re taking the Owned pins from a brand’s board and understanding the average repin, comment, and like ratio per pin. You can also do this at the board level if you really want to dive into the data and find out what’s resonating with your user base. Bonus points for adding in competitive benchmarks (which we’ll get using the pinfuse tool, but more about that in the next post.)

Earned Pinterest Brand Interaction KPIs:

• Earned Repin Ratio: (Earned Repins/ Earned Pins)
• Earned Comment Ratio: (Earned Comments / Earned Pins)
• Earned Like Ratio: (Earned Likes / Earned Pins)

These KPIs track the engagement for Earned pins out in the wild, in the greater Pinterest universe. For example: when John Smith pins the glasses from Target on his pinboard, how much to other people interact with that content with repins, comments, and likes?

Why separate out owned and earned into two categories? Well, there’s two good reasons: First of all, the two types of content represent two different things. Owned content interaction rates show how well you connect with your customer base through the Pinterest medium, but also measures how comfortable users are interacting with you as a brand. On the Earned side, you get a measurement of how much people want to share information about your brand that their friends are posting. Second, the measurements turn out to be very different. As you’ll see in the next few blog posts, the ratios show different stories for Owned and Earned content when you segment. I know, I know, you just can’t wait.

Pinterest Affinity Language Analysis:

• What groups are you customers placing your items into and how do you compare to your competition?
• How are you performing against language goals?

Now we’re getting into the good stuff. This is where a huge amount of value, if analyzed correctly, really lies with Pinterest. When users pin your items to their boards, they’re also assigning your product a label. Which labels are being attached to your stuff? How does that differ from the benchmark?

More specifically, attack language with two tactics:

• Directed Terms: This is the dictionary of language you are hoping users will echo back to you when describing your brand and products. These can take the form of category terms (like “coffee” or “SUV”), emotional terms (“love”, “best”, “favorite”), or terms from your marketing campaigns (“I’m lovin’ it” for McDonalds.)
• Undirected Terms: A raw pull of the high frequency language used by your users. What terms and language do people use to describe you? Being aware of these terms can surprise you and provide intelligence that would otherwise be off your radar.

One step that most people miss is to set goals with language – and be specific about how you want specific terms to rank, and how you want to rank vs your competition.

You can find true gold in the language of Pinterest. Not only the boards that customers lump your products into, but the comments they leave, and descriptions they use to describe their pins. And that’s where we’ll dive in with some brands in the next blog post.

NEXT STEPS:

So next up, we’re going to put these tactics into motion. The pinfuse tool makes it easy to collect the metrics listed above, so we are going to dive right in and explore the performance of some top brands.

The next blog entry will kick off the Pinterest Insight Showdown series, starting with High-End Retailers. We’ll see how top retailers are doing in the channel, how their content is resonating with users, and what we can learn from the language of Pinterest for specific brands.

Stay tuned!