Pinterest has been making jaw dropping headlines lately. This social ecommerce site has recently announced that it has raised a $200 million investment that values it at $5 billion, making this powerful social site one of the most valuable venture-capital backed start-ups in the world.
On May 12th they officially announced that they will start to make money with ads called Promoted Pins working with 12 US major brands. They promise these commercial pins will be; tasteful, transparent and relevant. They have made improvements on past commercial experiences based on all of our collective feedback. Their stated goal is to ensure that Pinterest continues to be a great experience for everyone and I believe they will because they have always protected the users experience from day one.
These 12 advertisers are asked to spend a whopping $1 to $2 million on advertising. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rate for the ads is in the $30 to $40 range. What’s this telling you? These brands must be confident that Pinterest can drive massive engagement & web traffic/sales… enough to provide them with a very substantial return on investment.
Source: Pinterest blog
As of April 2014, over 70 million Pinterest users had uploaded more than 30 billion pins and created 750 million boards and that 30 billion marked a near 50% increase from only 6 months before.
For the first time Pinterest is opening up a business insights API, allowing third-party developers who build software for marketers to tap into it’s intelligence about how pins are performing across its network of 30 billion and counting. (API stands for application-programming interface and is a set of rules that allows third parties to interact with platforms and services.) Those participating include:
3rd party software and marketing companies are going to be offering us more and more insights because of the API access. This will help all our businesses learn:
- which of our products are the most popular across the network
- what types of images are being shared and liked the most
- which pins are driving the most traffic and sales.
Powerful, cool and money making!
I’ve said this time and time again that your Pinterest strategy should always include measuring your ROI. I have always been a fan of Tailwind and use their LITE plan for small businesses.
Their metrics are invaluable and they have recently added additional features that will help you craft content strategy that will drive more traffic to your site to empower you to get more sales. Now that Pinterest has opened up their insights to Tailwind, their metrics will continue to expand to become richer, more powerful & more accurate than ever before.
For example here are some of my favorite features:
1. My weekly summary report shows me my MOST REPINNED BOARDS which tells me how many repins I received combined with a virality score.
What this means to me is the knowledge of which boards to feature on the top row of my Pinterest page. If my virality score isn’t doing so well my strategy would be to add more content to those boards or to delete it.
2. My MOST REPINNED PINS helps me to craft more of the same type of content and I make sure I feature this image as my cover board. It also shows me how long pinners have been engaging on that pin meaning the shelf life of the pin.
3. My LATEST PINS helps me to see who’s been pinning from my website and by clicking the “COMMENT” it’s the most efficient way to thank them for sharing my pins.
4. Tailwind also gives you other recommendations that I didn’t expect. Some include:
- to verify your website
- Tailwind actually shows you which boards need a board description and points out categories on boards that you might have overlooked.
- makes sure you have at least 15 – 20 boards
- points out which boards needs more images. From their experience you must have at least 10 pins (images) per board.
Pinterest is encouraging the companies to add their own additional insights and features, like conversion tracking, which Pinterest itself doesn’t currently offer.
Although women are the majority of users and some businesses tend to down play Pinterest’s significance to their business because of it let’s not forget that women make the majority of their household purchasing decisions. Statistics shows that nearly 85 per cent of consumer purchasing decisions were made by women.
If your business is not on Pinterest, you very likely making a big mistake. If anyone wants to learn more about how to leverage the power of Pinterest into their business quicker and avoid wasting time trying to figure it all out alone please contact me to reserve a free 30 minute business consultation. Or get Chapter 1 from my Pinterest course for FREE.