How to Understand Pinterest Pin Stats (And When to Ignore Them)

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If there’s one area of Pinterest that gets the most questions of late, its been the stats that are visible on pins.  Pinterest pin stats are something of a headache for marketers because they are easy to see and hard to actually use!  Let’s take a look at how to understand them, when to watch them and when to ignore them.

What are Pinterest pin stats?

Pinterest pin stats are those figures you see under a pin on your ‘Created’ tab of Pinterest.  Usually, you see them for your own pins and occasionally for other people’s pins you have saved to your boards.  The second group seem to be the stats for your repin rather than the whole pin but don’t quote me on that.

The basic view of a pin on the feed will tell you three things:

• Sessions – eye icon
• Saves – pin icon
• Link clicks – arrow icon

When you click on the pin itself, there’s the same three stats along the top.  It will show that the stats are for the last 30 days and when they were last updated.  There’s also the option to ‘see more stats’.

If you hit that button, you’ll gain a fourth metric, close-ups with the pointing finger icon.  These are where people have tapped the pin to see more information in it, a nice engagement stat.

You’ll also see the boards that the pin has been saved to.  Three show automatically and you can select ‘see all’ to see more if there are any.  This can be handy to find out what boards people are pinning your content to.

Finally, in the top corner of this screen, there’s the option to change the date range from 30 days to 24 hours, 7 days or 90 days.  Remember, if your pin is 30 days or less in age, that last one won’t change anything.

January 2021 update

In January 2021, there has been a change to the look and information in pin stats – in a good way! I’m writing this as an amendment for now as not everyone may have this and we don’t know it is the final layout. But here’s what I’m seeing.

When you click on the ‘see more stats’ button there’s now a lot more information for that pin. The graph at the top gives you four sets of stats, you can select to see the for each:

• Impressions
• Close-ups
• Saves
• Link clicks

You can select content types, devices and if it is your pin or someone else’s to fine tune the data. The default is 30 days but you can go back as far as 180 days or add a custom period.

Once the pin is 30 days old, you will get a comparison figure for the previous 30 days. Here’s an older pin to show an example of that.

The other area of stats is below this and tells you about where the pin has been saved. It also tells you how many comments and tries the pin is showing.

We will see over time if these stats are more reliable than the old pin stats, I’m hopeful. I also like that you can see things like the trends in impressions and how that corresponds to engagements. With the pin above, it got most of its impressions just after being pinned but the saves came later.

Why do we use them?

At first glance, Pinterest pin stats are super useful but there are issues, we’ll look at those below.

There are some things you can learn from them, especially for those at-a-glance assessments.

Impressions 

First thing I use them for is to see if they are getting impressions.  While impressions aren’t as important as link clicks, they do tell me that the pin is being at least seen by people.  If it isn’t, then there’s a problem somewhere such as bad keywords or even an account issue.

Saved boards

Another handy area is that saved boards section.  This can be a good place to see what people are saving the pin to and how they see it.  

With the example here of the bruschetta recipe, it is a possible lunch recipe.  But looking at the boards it is being saved to, people clearly see it as an appetizer.  So maybe in a later pin, I can even use that keyword in the pin text and description.

How to understand pin stats

There’s also a few other things you should know about pin stats that help you understand them and keep the data in context.

Figures (usually) aggregate across all versions

This is one of those things that often doesn’t happen but on paper should.  If you pin a pin to two boards, the figures you see should be an aggregation of both versions of the pin.

It used to be that this didn’t happen if you pinned through Tailwind which was another reason scheduling through the tool was super helpful.  However earlier this year Pinterest corrected this ‘mistake’ so now Tailwind pins usually aggregate.

I say usually, because it doesn’t always happen.  If it is doesn’t, then the pins are being viewed as two separate fresh pins.  That’s good for your account but there’s no way to make it happen, it’s more of a happy accident when it does.

Stats are only from the last 30 days so once a pin a month old, they can change daily

The default setting is 30 days on-screen so once a pin hits 30 days, it will likely change stats frequently.  For example, on the 1st if you had 1k impressions but on the 1st of the next month, you only have 500, then the overall stats for impressions will fall by 500.

I don’t really track individual pin stats too much because that’s a LOT of data.  But if you notice this drop or increase after a month and it continues, this is why.

Link clicks are still the most important metric

You can get quite a bit of data from pin stats but let’s always remember that the most important one is those little arrows, the link clicks.  While the other metrics can tell you a lot, this is the one you really want to study.  After all, we want people to visit our websites!

Why don’t we trust them?

The big problem with pin stats is that they aren’t reliable.  Sorry Pinterest, but I’ve seen it myself and others have seen the same thing.  Pin stats show figures then change – which makes sense over 30 days as data will be replaced each day.  But even in the first few days, pins will have a certain number of impressions or clicks then suddenly go down.

This is why I like to look at pin stats and understand what I can learn.  But they aren’t the main way I measure my Pinterest marketing success.

Using Google Analytics to investigate further

If you do want to do more of a deep dive on how to find what pin is doing well and driving traffic to your site, Google Analytics is always your friend.

To find out what pins are doing well, go to:

Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals > Pinterest

Here you’ll see a list of the posts that are getting traffic from Pinterest.  Click one and you will now see a list of pin URLs.

The big problem here is that a lot, even most, of these URLs are going to show something like ‘pinterest.com/’ or just ‘pinterest’ which isn’t super helpful.  Some people believe these are mobile traffic and Google Analytics can’t track it.  

However, if you highlight a pin URL and right click then go to the pin, you can see exactly which one this is.

You can see the pin and the details of it.  It will also tell you the board name and person who pinned this.  Both of these are clickable if you want to check out the board or the person.  Plus those basic pin stats are also there.

It is worth noting that Google Analytics doesn’t track things like saves or impressions.  Only the link clicks to your website.  So if you are curious about these, Pinterest analytics or those on-pin stats are the best bet.

Using Pinterest pin stats

People get a bit hung on up Pinterest pin stats which is understandable.  They are useful but need to be taken with a pinch of salt.  They aren’t 100% reliable and you never know exactly if you are getting the full story.  But to have a regular view of how things are going, they are useful.