Pinterest analytics: How to analyze the performance of your organic and paid campaigns [including 2 free templates]

TL;DR If you want to hit the ground running, you can swipe our Pinterest organic reporting template and Pinterest Ads reporting template. For more tips on analyzing your Pinterest data, keep reading.

To grow your business on Pinterest and drive more revenue, you need to double down on what’s working for your audience and business.

That’s where Pinterest analytics comes in handy. With Pinterest analytics, you’ll understand:

• How your Pinterest strategy is working
• What you can do to improve your performance

In this article, I’ll show you how to build two Pinterest dashboards in Google Data Studio to analyze your organic and paid campaigns’ performance.

So roll up your sleeves, and let’s get started.

What are the key Pinterest metrics?

When promoting your business on Pinterest, you can choose to grow your account by creating organic content, running ads, or combining both.

Now, I’ll show you what organic and paid Pinterest metrics you should track.

Organic Pinterest metrics

Let’s not forget one fact: Pinterest is more than just a social media platform. It’s also a visual search engine. 

And like other search engines, getting your content to rank on Pinterest search is anything but easy.

But worry not, because there are metrics that can tell you whether you’re heading in the right direction. Typically, you’ll want to look at:

• Impressions: the number of times people have seen your pins. They might see them through their home feed, search results, or someone else’s boards.
• Engagements: the total number of engagements on your pin. Including saves, link clicks, and closeups.
• Engagement rate: the number of engagements divided by impressions.
• Closeups: the number of times people have tapped on your pins. They might want to see the full pictures or read the descriptions.
• Clicks: the number of times people have clicked through your website from your pins. Click is an important metric to look at, especially if your goal is to drive traffic to your website or store.
• Click-through rate (CTR): clicks divided by impressions.
• Saves: the number of times people have saved your pins to their boards. When someone saves your pin, it means you’ve inspired their next project or purchase.
• Save rate: saves divided by impressions.

Paid Pinterest metrics

Although growing your Pinterest account organically is fairly cheap, it takes time before you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. Meanwhile, you can power up your Pinterest strategy with paid ads.

Here are some metrics that can help you understand your paid campaigns’ performance.

• Impressions: the number of times someone sees your ads on their feed.
• Clicks: the number of times people click on your ads.
• Click-through rate (CTR): clicks divided by impressions.
• Conversions: the number of conversions that occur on your website. Depending on how you set your goal, conversions can include signups or checkouts.
• Conversion rate: conversions divided by clicks.
• Conversion value: the total value of your conversions.
• Cost: how much money you’ve spent on your campaigns so far.
• Cost-per-click (CPC): how much you’re paying for each click on your ad. It’s the ratio of cost divided by clicks.
• Cost-per-mille (CPM): how much you’re paying for every thousand impressions. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to optimize CPM.

Now that you know what metrics you should track, let’s see how we can put everything together and build a report.

Pinterest report templates in Google Data Studio

It’s no secret that we love Google Data Studio for data visualization at Supermetrics. The tool is super user-friendly, and it offers a ton of visual options you can use for your reports. 

To save you some legwork, we’ve created two Pinterest templates in Google Data Studio: Pinterest organic reporting and Pinterest Ads reporting. 

Now, I’ll quickly walk you through each template and how you can pull insights from them to improve your Pinterest marketing.

Pinterest organic reporting template

This Pinterest organic reporting template will give you an overview of your content performance. From here, you can quickly check:

• How your content is performing on Pinterest
• How engaged your audience is
• What your best-performing pins are

You’ll see scorecards showing impressions, engagements, closeups, clicks, CTR, and saves at the top of the dashboard. The scorecards also show you a comparison to the previous period.

Let’s say your impressions have decreased for the past months. You can increase the visibility of your pins by:

• Optimizing your visuals (whether you’re posting images, videos, or infographics, make sure to use high-quality images)
• Creating content that matches your audience’s search intent (do keyword research to see what people are searching for)
• Adding relevant keywords to the pin title and description
• Running Pinterest Ads

Next, you can see a table showing your top pins. Here you can find what’s working and what isn’t with your content strategy.

From here, you can identify what your best-performing pins have in common. Do they have the same formats or creative styles? Are they about the same topics?

Once you find what your audience loves, you can invest some $$ in the pins that drive the most conversions.

Pinterest Ads reporting template

The Pinterest Ads reporting template helps you understand your paid campaign performance.

First, you’ll see scorecards representing clicks, conversions, and cost. This data helps you understand:

• Your ad performance
• How many conversions your ads generate
• How much you’re paying for your campaigns

You can easily spot any sudden changes in your campaigns with the sparkline charts.

Impressions, clicks, and CTR tell you how your ads are performing.

If your ads resonate with your audience, you should see a high CTR. And if you want to increase your CTR, here are a few ideas for you:

• Target different keywords
• Test different ad formats and copy
• Experiment with different targeting options(e.g., try with a niche audience if your current targeting is broad)

On the other hand, conversion metrics tell you if your landing page is up to the task. Your visitors are unlikely to convert if they can’t find what they’re looking for when visiting your website. In this case, you may want to ensure that your:

• Landing page copy matches your ad copy
• Website is easy to navigate
• Call-to-actions are clear

Compare this data with your Google Analytics data to see your visitors’ path from your ad to your website and your website to conversion.

Next, you’ll see a table showing your weekly performance.

There’s also a map showing where your traffic comes from at the end of the dashboard.

Let’s say you get lots of clicks from Germany. In that case, you may want to run a campaign targeting Germany to see if you can drive more conversions.

Getting started with the templates

If you’d like to try out the templates, here’s how you can do that.

First, open the Pinterest organic reporting template or Pinterest Ads reporting template. Then click on “Use template.”

Next, under the “New data source” field, click on the drop-down menu and choose “Create new data source.”

In the connector gallery, search for a connector called “Pinterest organic by Supermetrics.” or “Pinterest Ads by Supermetrics.”

Next, complete the two-step authorization and give Supermetrics all necessary permissions.

Psst, by authorizing your account for the first time, you’ll start a 14-day free trial of Supermetrics for Data Studio.

In this window, you should choose the Pinterest account you want to get data from and the type of data you want to analyze. (Do you want to start with profile lifetime metrics, profile data, top pins, or profile pins?)

Now, click on “Add to report” → “Copy report.”

And that’s literally it. Your Pinterest report is ready to use. If you want to share the report with your teammates or clients, simply click on “Share” and enter their email addresses.

Your turn ?

This is just the beginning. Once you get the hang of Google Data Studio and Supermetrics, feel free to add any dimensions or metrics to your report. 

You can also combine your Pinterest data with data from different sources to gain a complete picture of your marketing activities.

If you have any questions about the template, let me know on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Happy reporting!