Winning Tactics For Pinterest Audience Insights

Pinterest just rolled out another new thing for us to learn and master, Pinterest audience insights. This time it is something that is beyond cool and will definitely help businesses gain more traffic through targeted pins. 

Audience insights is the answer to the question: what do we pin?

Using the information we learn from audience insights we can create content geared towards our audiences. Learning what our followers want and not just pinning what our competitors are pinning or pinning stuff our audience does not read.

Before we dive into it I gathered a list of terms to learn so things make a little more sense below. Once you master this you will be able to drive more traffic to your site via targeted pins.

Glossary of Pinterest Terms

Affinity: How much your audience is interested in a topic compared to the rest of Pinterest users. Affinity indicates the strength of your audience’s interest in a particular category compared to the average Pinner. A high affinity indicates that this portion of your audience has a strong likelihood of engaging with content related to this interest.

Audience: unique visitors (not views). An ‘audience’ is defined as the people who have viewed or engaged with all Pins you have saved (both organic and Promoted) and any Pins that have been saved from your claimed website.

Pinsights: The insights you need to reach the people you care about. Using the latest behavioral studies, industry research and measurement results. 

To get to your audience insights you click on the Analytics tab on the top let of your Pinterest homepage. You will see audience insights, click on it.

On the left side of your report, in the first column,  you will see your viewer’s most popular categories and related interests for your audience. This is what categories people who see your pins are interested in.

The right side is a more detailed look into the category you have selected on the left. For instance, in this screenshot of my page, it shows that a lot of people who view my pins are also interested in pins related to the architecture category. With a topic of cultural architecture being higher than the others.

How to Use Pinterest Audience Insights

High affinity & low percentage = opportunity

Higher affinity & higher percent = you are doing it right

Using the info above you want to see what your audience likes and how to target them. These stats are only for pins from your confirmed website. And the stats are only your viewers for the last 30 days.

The numbers show you exactly what your audience is interested in. 

When you have an affinity number that is higher with a low percentage of viewers this means you have a good opportunity to gain more viewers concentrating on this category. Once you find a good match (high affinity and low percentage) you want to head over to that category and dive in deeper. View what is popular in that category by clicking on a subtopic of that category. It will take you to a board with trending pins from that category.

Let’s see an example. Below is the same screenshot as above but just the top portion cropped. As you can see my highest affinity score is 2.40. My percentage of the audience is 50.7%. If I look and see the subtopics of the architecture category I can see what my viewers are interested in more. Remember the affinity number is the number of your viewers interested in this topic compared to the rest of Pinterest. So my viewers are 2.44 more times interested in cultural architecture than the rest of Pinterest.

Since I have a high affinity score and a higher percentage, this means I am hitting this target and doing it right. Where I need to spend the time and I have opportunity to grow (gain impressions) is the areas with a high affinity and a low percentage.

For instance, I might need to spend some more time on the topics of open space architecture. Which means I might want to look into some pins with home decor related to open spaces and homes that are designed that way. I am not going to switch all of my pins to this but I will start by searching these categories and seeing what pins fit my brand and pinning those.

To look further into any of the Pinterest categories and their topics all you have to do is click on the topic and it will take you to a new page and list of pins from that category. Below is a screenshot of the first topic from above.

Above is a cellphone photo (sorry it’s so bad) of a slide from the In the Making conference I attended where I learned about the new audience insights. As you can see with their example there is more opportunity with a higher affinity and a lower percentage.

More opportunity to grow. More opportunity to gain traffic. Which in turns means more opportunity to gain income.

Using these Pinterest audience insights we should all be able to gain more traction because we see what our viewers are interested in. According to Pinterest for Busines blog one of the things they are seeing right now is the trend of Gen Xers and what they are searching. Straight from Pinterest:

“Marketers these days are focused on reaching millennials but Gen Xers have 75% more spending power. Check out our insights on this key audience as well as our tips for reaching them.”

Just one reason why these audience insights can help gear some of our pins towards certain people depending on what we are posting. Click here to read the full article on Gen Xers on Pinterest. If you want to see more from Pinterest about this and other articles head to www.business.pinterest.com there you will see the articles Pinterest is writing just for business owners and brands. Learning from Pinterest themselves is how to make sure you are kept well informed and it’s from the right source.

Pinterest Other Statistics

Below the categories and interests section, you have age, gender, location, and device. 

Age:  Knowing the average age of your audience can help you to optimize your website accordingly. Gear your pictures, graphics, maybe even videos to certain ages.

Gender: The audience’s gender plays an important role in how they communicate and engage online. Women are the ones who are going to pin more.

Location: Understanding where your customers come from can help you to plan marketing strategies according to the physical location of your potential customers.

Device:  With this information, you can help your website get more responsive on various devices. Making sure your pins and graphics are good on mobile and desktop.

What to Pin on Pinterest

We will learn over time what we should pin about and what our readers want. I am going to dive in deeper and see what interests my users have. I will be doing a follow-up blog post with more screenshots and information once every month.

Below is Pinterest’s Audience Insight graph it shows what all users on Pinterest are interested in. Very interesting to see what most users are looking at.

Implementing a Pinterest marketing strategy for your business may increase sales and brand awareness. Fifty percent of people made a purchase after seeing a Promoted pin and 67% say they’ve discovered a new brand or product from content on the network. If you would like to read more about advertising and why Pinterest is the platform to use head to their website here.

Learning more about why to use Pinterest and who uses it the most will help you pick posts to write about and things to promote. I know I struggle with creating content and these insights will lead me to what my audience wants. When I started blogging I always saw what others bloggers were doing and thought that’s what I should be doing too. It works right?

Wrong! It works for them but it may not work for you. Each brand is unique and we have different users and people interested in our stuff. My blog is very modern and heavy on the design. Where others in my niche are very girly and pink. Learning what my audience likes is a game changer because I can actually target the right things now. Not what I think will work because it does for others.

Take a look at this infographic from Pinterest. The stats are astonishing. Pinterest is definitely a huge platform to use to grow your brand and gain traffic. Buh bye Instagram and their ever-changing algorithm!

Promoted Pins

Promoting pins is a lot to go over but I will just touch base how you can use the audience insights to promote pins. Below is a script from Pinterest in regards to using the insights when promoting pins.

To reach the right people at the right time, use targeting to show your Promoted Pins to relevant Pinners. Aside from location, gender, language, and device, you can also target your ads by using interests, keywords or audiences—or any combination of all the three.

Placement targeting

Interest targeting

Keyword targeting

Audience targeting

Expanded targeting

Locations, languages, devices and gender targeting

Best practices

With interest targeting, you can take advantage of Pinterest’s unique understanding of people’s interests, tastes, and life stages. Within Browse placements, like the home feed or Related Pins, interest targeting lets you reach Pinners based on other Pins they’ve saved or engaged with. Within the Search placements, like search results & Related Pins, interest targeting lets you reach Pinners when they search for relevant terms.

Add interests related to the thing you’re promoting – for instance, if you’re promoting mid-century modern living room furniture, try targeting Pinners interested in “mid century modern”, “modern living” and “living rooms”. However, make sure any interests you add are relevant to your Pin and are compliant with our policies or your Promoted Pin may get rejected

Pinterest Services

Now that you are a pro at what to pin how about Pinterest SEO? It’s a whole new thing to learn and master!

Hire me to do it for you!

Check out my shop for my services or more Pinterest for business resources.