How to Get Free Website Traffic From Pinterest
Top Tips for Pins that Convert Pinterest Traffic into Customers.
The reason Pinterest is so brilliant for marketing is that it’s such a powerful search engine. Did you know it’s the second biggest search engine, after google? There are 367 million monthly active users on Pinterest, and if you learn how to create pins that entice those people over to your website, then you have the opportunity to bring lots of organic traffic, you can then turn into customers.
People come to Pinterest to plan - so you can introduce yourself to your potential customers at exactly the right moment, when they know roughly what they want, but they don’t know who to buy it from yet. Learning how to optimise your Pinterest strategy will help you get more impressions on your pins, but the important next step is creating pins that get people clicking through to your website, and that’s what this post will help you with.
Which Metrics are Important on Pinterest?
Before you can start tracking your Pinterest analytics, you need to make sure you’re signed up for a business account. You can either start a new business account, or you can convert your personal account to business in your settings. Once you have a business account, you can then claim your website and other channels (eg. instagram). This will give you access to your all important pin-alytics, so you can keep an eye on your metrics and analyse your results.
There are lots of different metrics available on Pinterest analytics, the most prominent and visible being your monthly unique viewers (the number at the top of your profile). The monthly unique viewers metric means the number of impressions your pins are getting (and that includes pins you’ve saved from other people). So while it’s a useful number to look at, it’s not the most important metric to focus on when marketing through Pinterest.
Saves are also a useful thing to keep an eye on (that’s how many people are saving your pins to their boards), but the metric I am always the most interested in is link clicks, because that’s how many people are actually clicking through to your own website to find out more - that’s where the money is, and that’s what we’re aiming for with our marketing right?
How to Get Impressions on Your Pins
First, it’s important to know Pinterest’s best practices for creating pins. For standard static pins here are some things to focus on to get impressions on your pins:
Vertical (portrait) images, in a 2:3 aspect ratio. In 2020, the most recent optimal pin dimensions are 1000 x 1500px.
A keyword rich pin title, no more than 100 characters long (eg. a good pin title for this blog post could be How to Create Pins That Get Clicks).
A description with no more than 500 characters, again using descriptive sentences with keywords that tell the viewer what the pin is about. The first 50-60 characters are the ones that show up in peoples feeds, so stack your most important info at the front.
Include hashtags - did you know you can include hashtags in your pin descriptions? The maximum you can add is 20, but I tend to add around 5 because I often run out of character space.
These are the basic first steps for optimising your pins to be found in search, and the next step is to make pins that convert to engagement and ultimately potential customers clicking through to your site.
How to Create Pins That Get Clicks
Try some text overlay - Images with text on them are proven to get a better click through rate than images with no text, so much so that Pinterest actually have the technology now to be able to read the text on the images, as well as in the pin titles and descriptions. So the text on your images also counts towards your Pinterest SEO. With this in mind, make sure the text you use on your pin images is clear and easy to read, for both viewers on mobile devices, and Pinterest’s algorithm.
Test out different copy - this counts for the text on the images themselves, and for your descriptions and titles. Try out lots of different copy, and think about ways to entice viewers to click through to your website to find out more. What value is waiting for them there? Is it a step by step guide to something? A free download? A new product collection? The best way to get a handle on this is trial and error, split test lots of different types of pin copy and see what tends to get more clicks.
Include your branding or logo - Pinterest encourage the use of your own branding and logo on your pin images, so it’s good to include them. Be careful not to place your logo in any of the corners though, because that’s often where Pinterest features are displayed (like the visual search tool).
Use calls to action - you want to be wary of “click-bait” here, but using calls to action in your pin description or the image itself can be a good extra way of enticing someone to check out what you’re offering.
Mix up your pin templates - don’t use the same design for every single pin, switch it up. This is for two reasons: firstly it makes sure that Pinterest registers all of your pins as fresh content (you can read more about that in this post), and secondly it means you can experiment with different pin styles to see which designs get better engagement.
Make multiple pin designs for each piece of content on your website. Don’t just pin a product once and never pin it again, keep repurposing and freshening up your pin image. You can post the same piece of content (eg. a blog post or product listing) hundreds of times, so keep repurposing the work you’ve already done and it will go much further for you.
Create valuable content - the best way to get people clicking over from Pinterest to your website, is to provide the viewer with real value, and give them a taster of that value in the pin itself. For example, you could create a gift-guide on your blog, and include a collage with some of the gifts displayed in the pin, with some text that lets the viewer know there’s more to see if they click on the pin.
Keep an eye on your analytics - notice which pins do well, and think about how you can replicate that in other pins. The more you test and look at your results, the more you’ll start to learn what works.
Ultimately, people go to Pinterest to be inspired and to build their dream lifestyle. They’re there to find solutions to their problems and ideas for their life, so you need to make your content about THEM and not you. If you can provide that for them, then you are likely to turn impressions into website traffic, and then website traffic into loyal customers.
I hope you’re now feeling fired up and ready to crack on with your new Pinterest strategy! If you’d like to work with me 1-1 to get some personalised help and advice, then you can read about my strategy coaching packages here. And if you want more free tips for getting started on Pinterest with your brand, you can download my free guide here.
