Pinterest has been one of the popular platforms since the earlier days of social media alongside Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Understanding the basic architecture of the platform.
• What is the best time to post on Pinterest?
• How to generate more views and user engagement for your pins.
• How AI helped us grow our page.

Pinterest has not gained as much popularity as other peer platforms in the current scenario like Tik-Tok, Snapchat, etc. yet it is still considered as a good platform for the fashion industry.

It has a totally different algorithm compared to other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; where the feed gets updated within minutes, the Pinterest feed has a longer life span of three months as mentioned by Hubspot experts in their training courses or tutorials.

So taking the same factor into consideration we observed our page for 3 months and in this blog post we are going to publish our observations in detail.

We are not in the fashion industry, but we can run campaigns for any brand. Anyway, that is totally a different aspect and beyond the scope of this article.

We are into Graphic Designing (other services include website development, analytics, and SEO). So we will take up only how Pinterest can help align with this field if any of our readers are providing similar services.

So, let's dive down deeper.

Title Structure

First things first. As said earlier, this is a different platform, so you have to think and plan accordingly for it.

The very first thing you counter with while publishing a post on Pinterest is the title of the post. Unlike others, Pinterest post titles can be structured differently.

Some popular social media platforms do not provide a provision to add a title at all. All that they ask for is the description. This is one of the biggest differences between Pinterest and other platforms.

We used different titles on different posts. Some of them include Pipe structures while others used a single-line description. Experiments using hashtags and special symbols are also run on our page. Some posts were published without any title or description using 3rd party apps or platforms.

In the image, you can find three different ways being used for naming conventions. We have highlighted all the 3 formats we used on our page or for our pins.

The very first one has special symbols in its name or post title. The second highlighted post has a pipe structure and the third one is a simple descriptive line.

It is hard to say here at the very beginning which title structure is best suited for your post. But as you go through this article thoroughly you will get to know an idea of what you should use and how to write your post titles.

You get a list of 50 items as only 50 rows will display that match selected filters. Select individual metrics to get a clear picture of your data and analyze it to grow your page.

Keyword Ranking

Keywords play a vital role if you are planning to run paid campaigns on Pinterest.

You can take complete guidance from Pinterest Academy over running ads successfully as running ad campaigns is beyond the scope of this article.

Running an ads campaign is a very wide topic that can be discussed for hours in detail separately. Available in detail on Pinterest Academy.

Anyhow, we wanted to analyze, what role do keywords play when Pins or posts are published without any boost or normally i.e. not run as a paid campaign?

We found it is not just a matter of fulfilling the criteria of a post or the title of the post. Instead, it helps users get their feed according to their preferences.

The interest-based feed is fed or available in the home feed after someone sets preferences at the very beginning of the signup process.

So keywords do help users better organize their interest-based feed but are not a guarantee or deciding factor for higher reach.

How Algorithm Works

No social media platform opens up completely how its algorithm works. It is always a matter of experience or running experiments regularly and deep analysis, yet you can have a good idea from the Hubspot Digital Marketing Course and Hootsuite blog posts too.

We recommend Hubspot Academy tutorials above Pinterest Academy as the topics covered on Pinterest Academy are more focused on running ads.

What We Observed

If you are a content creator, you always come across these questions like:

1. What is the best time to publish a post on the respective platform you work on?

2. How many times a week should I post on a platform?

3. Which days of the week are best to reach more and more people?

4. Should I go for paid?

5. Should I use keywords and hashtags in the post title or description?

You may find answers to these questions easily on any search engine. But, not all of them are true and some of them are not even in close proximity.

The best answer to all of the above questions is "CONSISTENCY".

You need to spend time on any platform to learn more and more about it and how it works. We learned two things from Hubspot about Pinterest and those are:

1. Its feed does not change within minutes or you can say it resides for 3 months. In other words, the lifespan of a post on Pinterest is 90 days.

2. You need to choose the best platform according to your content and develop a strategy around it.

But we shall answer all those questions one by one according to what we observed or analyzed.

1. There is no such thing as at what time of the day should I post. You can post any time of the day and your post can get noticed as it has a longer lifespan.
2. We posted for 90 continuous days before making any conclusions. This post is a result of a 90-day analysis, and we recommend posting regularly.
3. You will find on Google that Sunday and Monday are the best days to post on Pinterest. But it is not true. One of our posts that we published on some other weekday (to be more specific "Thursday") ranked very well and got the maximum number of views for the 90-day period.
4. It's your individual choice. In some countries like India where we operate, we are not getting all the options to work on.
5. Here is the catch, you can be misled by some individual or the algorithm itself. While using a pipe structure for the title you can write your post title like this: Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Your Brand Name It works well as your post looks complete, informative, clear, and useful. However, it is not necessary that your post will rank for your keywords for the specified time period above. We observed that some of our posts were getting noticed or views without any title with pipe structure or keywords. So there is no clear evidence that a post with a good title or description or keywords will rank higher than the posts without them.

One secret that nobody will tell you (except Pinterest) is the relevancy. This is also one of the main reasons to publish this blog.

We posted a religious post in which we designed Lord Ganesha using AI and posted it in the beginning. We used the pipe structure for the title and added Ganesh Chaturthi as one of the keywords keeping in mind only one factor "when it ranks".

What we were thinking at that time and wanted to check, proved to be true. The post started getting views near the festival and got a good number of views on the occasion.

So, here we conclude at least one thing - "Relevancy is one of the main factors on Pinterest posts to rank".

Myths Busted

From above, you can find especially after going through answers 3 and 5 that there are no Sundays or Mondays; No ripe time to post; No special keywords to rank on Pinterest.

You just need to post relevant content consistently with complete details for a better UX.

OTHER FRAMEWORK

Post Description

The very next thing to the title of the post is the description. You can write attractive/ effective or useful lines of your choice in your post that best describe your post.

Now, you can raise a question here. Should I use hashtags in the description?

You can. But we recommend not to use them in the description because it does not affect much; as you already have the option in Pinterest to tag your post in respective categories, which we will discuss later in the article.

Details

It solely depends on the nature of your business. Pinterest provides you predefined template to help structure your content. It has 4 predefined categories viz Ingredients, Supplies, Notes, None.

You can opt-out according to your content, and which template to choose from. If your content does not match with either of the first three categories, stay with none (default).

Link

Add a link to your website. May it be your home page or any other landing page you want your customer/ client/ visitor to land.

It can vary depending on the nature of your business, campaign objectives, or goals. If you have some product-specific pages on your website and you are expecting a conversion, you can add a link to that page.

Board

You can have multiple boards in case you want to properly categorize your creative work or products.

Tagged Topics

You will find predefined categories under the title "tagged topics". When you start looking for relevant tags a dropdown opens up. If it has some predefined categories or tags based on your search it will reflect there.

You can choose multiple tags relevant to your content. Don't worry people won't see your tags.

You will not be able to define any topics/ categories/ tags in the list. Here you can decide whether to add hashtags in the description or not.

Publishing Date

The day you want your content (graphics/ ad) to be public. Post-scheduling is also available on Pinterest for 30 days. In addition, you can keep data for 30 days in drafts and schedule accordingly. So you have 60 days in total or you can queue or schedule data for 60 days overall.

Business Hub

The home page of Pinterest. Here you will find, at the very first sight, a summary of Monthly views and the total number of followers.

Also, you will find a summary of Analytics, Top Pins, and a link to Pinterest Academy under the performance section.

You can adjust or change the date range according to your choice for the analysis period. It has a predefined time period adjustment for 7/ 14/ 30/ 90 days.

Analytics overview exhibits organic and paid metrics change according to the date range selected displaying impressions, saves, and outbound clicks. Whereas the Pins section displays the metrics for Top Pins and Recent pins; Top pins being the default.

Next to it, is a wide resources tab where you will find various links to different sections you can explore to learn more about the platform and find new ways to meet your business goals.

Pinterest Analytics Interface

A very easy and simple-to-understand interface. When you click on Analytics in the menu bar, a dropdown opens up. Here you will find Analytics Overview, Audience Insights, and Trends as listed items.

We will present only "Analytics overview" in detail. But you should consider the other two options to have a better understanding of the current scenario according to your needs.

Overall Performance

When you choose "Analytics Overview" a page displaying the 30 Days data opens. The very first line holds prime importance as it says

"Percentage changes are compared with 31 days before the selected date range. Audience metrics updated 1 day ago. All other metrics updated in real time."

You can select a date range according to the number of days up to 90 days you want to analyze your data. The data can also be visualized according to the nature of content viz All, Organic, and Paid or Earned. Add more filters that are convenient for you or required for analysis.

Performance Over Time

Numbers change based on the choice of filters and the graph showing the performance over that period also sets correspondingly. Set the metrics and split by filter to have a deeper analysis of your content over the defined period.

Metrics Available - Impressions, Engagements, Pin Clicks, Outbound Clicks, Saves, Engagement Rate, Pin Click Rate, Outbound Click Rate, Save Rate, Total Audience, and Engaged Audience. Impressions being the default.

Split by Filter has: Content Type, Claimed Accounts, Device, Source, Age, and Gender. No Split being the default.

Also, you can compare two metrics using the plus sign next to the metrics drop-down. The metrics underneath vary accordingly.

Top Pins

In the past 90 days, we have posted a pin on a daily basis at a specific time as per our time zone to get the most out of the Pinterest analytics.

By the end of 90 days, we were able to reach the milestone as follows:

Impressions: 17.7K Engagements: 184 Outbound Clicks: 11

Saves: 14 Total Audience: 4.78K Engaged Audience: 82

The best thing we discovered through analysis is that 72% of our audience falls into the 18-34 age group and is most likely to consider our artwork as 98% of them have "Art" as one of their interests.

We were getting around 1K views every month before the introduction of our latest board V3: Virtual Visions Vault which consists of AI-generated graphics. And for the past 90 days consistency has changed everything.

Also, we have observed we are able to grow monthly engagement by 60%, impressions by 16%, Pin saves by 33%, and total & engaged audience by 26% and 25% respectively.

Now we are getting approximately 7K views per month and that is 7 times our previous numbers. AI helped us a lot in generating visual or imagery content for us and credit goes to it as well for the growth of our page.

Top Boards

For the aforementioned period, we added 99% of our content or pins only to one of our dedicated boards for AI-generated arts named V3: Virtual Visions Vault. So the numbers for this board in terms of views had to be the highest.

You can observe and analyze data as you want to. The numbers change when you change any metric in the respective list.

We recommend you explore as many options as available for analysis when you have sufficient data to play with.

Only the top 30 boards from the last 6 months can be shown. The stats are real-time estimates.

Summary

We published the first pin of our latest board V3: Virtual Vision Vault on July 18 and now sharing analytics exactly after 90 days.

You may observe a little variation between the images shared and the analytics in the text. The images shared are of the 90th day of this analytics journey; in between sometimes, we went up or down, especially in real-time analytics. Also, some of the figures show real-time data.

You may also ask why we wrote 7 times when we got 10K on our latest board V3: Virtual Vision Vault which was introduced exactly 90 Days earlier to this analytics journey.

The reason behind this is very simple; figure 10K represents a three-month journey whereas 7K is the number of views we are getting every month.

So you can observe a rise in the number of impressions clearly.

We can not be sure that you get the same results and would recommend planning out a strategy according to the nature of your business and start measuring your growth.

But we can assure you that you will definitely get some boost for your content if it meets the customer expectations well.

Few things to remember while doing analytics:

1. The date range must include at least 1 day from the past 30 days.
2. Only stats from the last 6 months can be shown. The stats are real-time estimates.
3. The data reported on this page is an estimate. Some charts require a minimum number of users to display.

Additional Tip:

Check all the i-icons to know more about how data is being collected and displayed on Pinterest Analytics Interface.