Is your Pinterest account seeing a drop in website traffic?
Are you consistently pinning and no one seems to be repinning your content? Or maybe you’re seeing repins but no one is clicking on your pins to visit your website?
If this sums up what’s been going on with your Pinterest marketing plans, you’ve probably started doing some research to figure out what’s happening and how you can fix it.
Maybe it’s time to stop doing all that research and do an audit of your Pinterest account.
The reality of Pinterest is that it’s not the same social site you signed up to when you first set up your business account. And the only way that you can get your Pinterest marketing moving again is to find a way to stand out from all the other millions of Pinners.
Basically, you need to figure out a way to differentiate yourself and your business.
Why you should Audit your Pinterest Account
The purpose of a Pinterest Audit is to review how your business or blog is connecting { or maybe not connecting! } with all those potential customers actively using Pinterest every day.
A Pinterest Audit will help you figure out what’s going on with your Pinterest marketing by:
- Discover the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing plan.
- Guides you to align your Pinterest messaging of boards and pins with your online programs and products.
- Helps you determine what corrections you need to make with your Pinterest strategy.
You get all that, right?
So what can you do? You can conduct your own strategic Pinterest Audit.
Step 1: Create an Audit Plan
The first step for your Pinterest Audit is to create a plan of the topics you want to cover.
You can use a word document, an online note taking program or even a mind mapping program – use whatever you want, just write it down!
These are the elements you should consider during your Pinterest Audit:
- The messaging from your business or blog – are you clear about who you are and what you do?
- Review your website – do you have content created with engaging images that’s ready to pin or do you need to create content?
- Your targeted market – do you know who you’re trying to reach and how they’re using Pinterest?
- Review the strengths and weaknesses of your products and programs – do you have plan to market these online products on Pinterest?
- Your differentiators like pricing and quality of service – is your messaging with your boards and pins helping to define your business or blog on Pinterest?
Step 2: Look at Your Website Analytics
As an online business using Pinterest, it’s super important that you review your Google Analytics and your Pinterest Analytics on a regular basis.
When you’re reviewing your analytics, you should include the following metrics:
- Take a look at your pageviews in Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming from Pinterest. How many people are clicking on your images in Pinterest to come to your website?
- What are they clicking on? In your Google Analytics, you can see the specific pin that brought them to your site by reviewing the traffic referral, click on the Pinterest link and you can see the exact click numbers of which pin brought you the site traffic.
- Go your analytics on Pinterest and make sure that you’ve clicked on the Claimed Account connected to your website. You’ll be able to see your top pins that are being repinned the most and which boards are the best places for you to pin your top content to. By clicking on the drop down for Link Clicks, you’ll be able to monitor which pins are getting the most clicks to your site.
Step 3: Ask your Customers
Checking your analytics is a good place to see an overview of your Pinterest account but what can you do to take this down to what your customers are seeing when they see your account?
Try asking five of your customers to review your Pinterest account to learn about how they perceive your business on Pinterest.
Here’s some questions you can ask them:
- What makes my business different than others doing what I do?
- Can you do a quick scan of my boards and be able to tell what my business does?
- When you click into my Pins section – can you immediately find and see the content that I’ve pinning from my site?
- Can you review my Pinterest pins and tell me what you think the content is about without clicking on the image’s link?
Step 4: Action and Monitor
A Pinterest Audit is useless if you don’t create an action plans for all the problems and issues that you found.
To develop your Pinterest Action Plan, you should make a detailed report of everything you reviewed and then set actionable items to address the issues you uncovered.
List out all your problem areas you uncovered during the audit. Next to each issue, write down a list of action items you can take along with a reasonable timeline when you plan to get it done.
After all your Pinterest Action Plan items are done, monitor the progress of your changes and see if your actions worked or need tweaking.
One big thing to keep in mind – a Pinterest Audit is a continuous exercise, something you should go through on a regular basis so you stay on top of whether your plans are working or if some part of the process like your pin images needs to be improved.
Need some help doing your Pinterest Audit?
When was the last time that you took a really honest look at the pieces and parts of your Pinterest account? I’m going to make a guess that it probably happened the day you set up and verified your business account.
And I may be just taking a stab in the dark here but I’m going to say that you’ve probably never taken the time to really review all the elements that make up your Pinterest account – things like your images, boards and pin descriptions – and evaluate their cohesiveness … or lack there of.
If you need some help doing your Pinterest Audit, reserve your coaching space for one of my Pinterest Audits and get your custom Pinterest Action Plan to make sure that your marketing plan is consistently bringing you website traffic directly from Pinterest.
I ran a pinterest ads campaign and now that it is no longer running, I am getting zero organic traffic! My monthly views are decreasing now. Has this happened to you? I feel like Pinterest wants me to keep paying.
I’ve had that happen to me too – I think that the program was getting used to the push from the paid ads that when you stopped it, the algorithm saw the drop in your ‘paid push.’ I would see a dip BUT then I picked up my manual pinning activity and then my numbers went back up. Let me know if you have more questions!
Hey, ive audited my account and everything and all Is good but my Pinterest traffic dropped from 800 a day to barely a hundred in less than a week and i think its approaching zero all my new pins have 0 views and i really don’t know what that means
Spend some time in your Pinterest Analytics and you’ll be able to see where the traffic is dropping off. I would also suggest that you make sure that you’re manually pinning EVERY week and adding in new content every week as well.
I am not sure what is happening. My traffic if taking a huge sudden drop and I am panicking. I was getting consistently around 1200 a day and then 900 and yesterday barely over 600. Sometimes I just want to throw the towel as a blogger, honestly.. this is all extremely frustrating!
First – don’t freak out. That’s part of the Pinterest process and you’ll see your numbers go up and down all the time. Second know that Pinterest is going through some changes and that usually affects the algorithm and your numbers.
And last thing – take a step back and run a Pinterest Audit that I shared in this post. Take a look at what you’re doing with your content and your pins to see what you can do to start making any changes. If you need some help, please join us in my FB group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/peaceloveandpinterest/ – and I can help you work through what’s happening.