How To Get And Use Pinterest Stats with New Pinterest Analytics

 

Did you know that Pinterest launched new analytics tools today?

There are a variety of third-party Pinterest metrics providers out there, and all of them fall a bit short in one way or another. Pinterest is now entering the game on its own and offering its own reporting. While what Pinterest rolled out today isn’t really earth-shattering, it’s a start – and I’d expect there to be even more to come as move deeper into 2013.

Here’s a step by step guide for how to get and use Pinterest’s new metrics:

Verify Your Site

You must verify your website in order to access Pinterest Analytics. There are a couple of ways to do this. You either a) download a file from Pinterest, then upload a file to your web root, or b) add a meta tag to your header HTML code.

Now, if you’re like me, you might be deathly afraid of touching your code. And I never can make sense of my file manager (I am on self-hosted WordPress).

So I spent 30 minutes scouring the web to find the easiest way to do this. I read probably 30 tutorials, and this one from A Royal Daughter not only covers BOTH methods of verifying your account on Pinterest, it also covers both Blogger and WordPress. And it’s really detailed, so you can’t mess up. Even I figured out how to upload the file to my web root and voila! I was verified in seconds.

Check Out Your Analytics!

Now it’s time to check out your analytics! Log into Pinterest. In the dropdown menu under your profile photo, be sure and switch to the Pinterest “new look” in the upper right corner. (thanks, Alison of Writing, Wishing for this update) Now, you’ll now see a link for Analytics. Click on it.

Now you’ll be taken to your analytics page. You can also get to this page by typing http://pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com into your browser. [replace yourdomain.com with your home page URL]

You’ll have the following data to view:

• Most recent
• Most repinned
• Most clicked
• Site metrics

Just click on the analytic you want to view. You can easily toggle back and forth between them.

Change The Date Range

If you want to change the date of the report, head over to the left part of your screen. There, you’ll see what time period the analytic is reporting. Right now your options are one specific day, the last 7 days, and the last 14 days.

Your main screen won’t show you a whole lot of meaningful information here. Your best bet is to export the report using the button on the right-hand side, and viewing the data in Excel. For example, when I ran the “most clicked” report for the last 7 days and opened in Excel, I was able to see the repins, comments, likes and total clicks for every pin.

Drilling Deeper With Site Metrics

If you click on the Site Metrics option on your analytics page, you’ll get a graphical representation of your data over the reporting period. This also gives you some additional data, like impressions, reach, clicks, visitors and more. What’s nice about the Site Metrics section is that you can be more granular with your date range as well, spanning bigger periods of time.

Site metrics will also take your defined date range and indicate whether certain data points have increased or decreased since the previous reporting period of that same length. So if you’re looking at the last 30 days of data, Pinterest will compare it to the previous 30 days before that.

Again, by exporting your site metrics data into Excel, you’ll be able to dig even deeper into what each individual pin did for your Pinterest traffic.

What do you think? Will you be using Pinterest’s new analytics? Do you use a third-party tool now?