Until now, Pinterest, the world's third-largest social network, has been lacking one big thing: analytics. Users could rack up followers and repins of their content, but there was no way for business owners to find out what had been pinned from their sites, or, in the other direction, how many people were coming to their sites from Pinterest.
But today the company announced that it has introduced an analytics dashboard to help website owners -- whether they're running a small business or a big brand -- gauge the popularity of their content.
The analytics will show how many people have pinned content from your site and how many users have seen those pins. It will also track visitor traffic from Pinterest, and you'll be able to see recent pins and your most repinned content of all time, so that you can get a sense both of what is currently trending and of what is most popular overall.
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"We think that these tools will help website owners understand what's working for them and what’s not so that they can create even better pins in the future," writes Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer, in a company blog post.
To start using the analytics yourself, first get your website verified by Pinterest and then simply access the Analytics tab on the top-right menu. You can even download your analytics to study offline.
News of the analytics dashboard comes only weeks after Pinterest closed a $200 million funding round that valued the social bookmarking site at $2.5 billion. With Pinterest experiencing explosive growth, brands are taking a greater interest in it than ever before.
As of February 1st, 69 of the world's top 100 brands, as measured by consulting firm Interbrand, had Pinterest accounts. Large retailers are especially eager to capitalize on Pinterest's majority-female user base. Pinterest shoppers spend $169 on average per session, according to RichRelevance, an ecommerce consultancy. Nordstrom, one of the most popular brands, has nearly 4.3 million Pinterest followers, and L.L.Bean has 5.7 million.