Pinterest's New Analytics: What Business Gains

As Facebook's updated News Feed demonstrates, it's all about the images. Pinterest was built from the ground up on image-heavy content, and companies are increasingly taking advantage of its popularity for marketing and sales purposes.

Now Pinterest is making it even more worth their while with the introduction of Pinterest Web Analytics tools.

Pinterest has become a key traffic driver for sites, as users "pin" content that interests them to their various Pinterest boards and the content gets clicked on and repinned again and again.

[ What's this about private Pinterest boards? Find out at Pinterest Tests Secret Boards. ]

As measured by Experian Marketing Services' Hitwise as of the week ending March 9, Pinterest ranked as the fourth most popular social network -- behind Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- receiving more than 37 million visits. According to Pingdom, Pinterest users grew from 9 million to about 40 million in 2012.

However, up until now, businesses have had little insight into just what users were doing with pinned content. Pinterest Web Analytics tools enable businesses and website owners to get information about how many people have pinned from a site, how many people have seen the pins, and how many people have been directed to a site from Pinterest.

Even more useful than quantifying Pinterest use is qualifying it. For example, Pinterest Web Analytics Tools will let website owners see what content is being repinned most, what is being clicked on and what was repinned most recently.

This will give marketers and content developers a sense of what is resonating with readers, when and why. So, for example, a recipe featuring guacamole that starts getting pinned as it gets warmer might tell the guacamole maker that it should ramp up advertising during the summer months and perhaps develop themed in-store merchandising efforts. That's a pretty simple example, but the organic and specific nature of Pinterest shares should yield information that cannot be derived from other social networks.

To use Pinterest Web Analytics tools, a website must be verified. Website verification, a feature that Pinterest introduced last fall, verifies that you own the website on your Pinterest profile.

With its Web Analytics Tools, Pinterest is rounding out a growing number of business-focused tools and capabilities that it has added in the last couple of years. These include Pinterest Business Sites and buttons and widgets such as the Pin It button, Follow button and Profile Widget.

Do you find these Pinterest business tools useful? Leave a comment below.

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