Past winners of our coveted Agency of the Year awards — awarded for both SEM and SEO specialties — have included Metric Theory, Rise Interactive, Wolfgang Digital and Wpromote. Make 2020 the year you and your team are awarded the highest honor in search.
Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.
Talk about buying power!
Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.
Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.
And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.
We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!
Here’s what we learned…
How people are using Pinterest
According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”
Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.
Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.
Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.
How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team
There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!
1. Brand your pins
A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.
Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.
2. Create mobile-first content
As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.
A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.
3. Create a similar look and feel
Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.
According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”
This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.
And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.
4. Time your campaigns
A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?
Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.
For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February. They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!
These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.
5. Set up your shop
One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.
The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.
Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.
We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!
If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.
Eventbrite’s chief marketing officer, Brian Irving, is leaving the event management and ticketing platform to join Facebook as global head of marketing for augmented and virtual reality products. Before joining the social network in March, Irving will take some time off to spend with his family. In his new role, he will report to Rebecca…
Instead, they give feedback to the engineers who code up the algorithm so they can make it more relevant to searchers.
Now, the real question is, how do you know your site is
being reviewed?
First, I want you to log into your Google Analytics account and go to the audience overview report.
Then click on “Add Segment.”
Your screen should look something like this:
Then click on “+ New Segment.”
Your screen should look like the image above.
I want you to click “Conditions,” which is under the “Advanced” navigation label. Once you do that, fill out everything to match the screenshot below and click “save”.
Just make sure that when you are filling out the table you are clicking the “or” button and not the “and” button. And make sure you select “Source” for the first column.
Now that you’ve created the new segment, it’s time to see if
any Quality Raters have viewed your site.
How to spot Quality Raters
When you are in Google Analytics, you’ll want to make sure
you select the segment you just created.
If you copied my screenshot, you would have labeled it “Search Engine Evaluators.” And when you select it, you’ll probably see a graph that looks something like the image below.
You’ll notice that no Quality Raters have been to my site
during the selected date period, which is common as they don’t visit your site
daily and, in many cases, they don’t come often at all.
The other thing you’ll notice is that next to the “Audience Overview” heading, there is a yellow shield symbol. If your symbol is green, then that’s good.
Yellow means your data is being sampled.
If you see the yellow symbol, reduce your date range and you’ll eventually see a green shield next to “Audience Overview” like the image below.
In general, it is rare that Quality Raters view your site each month. But as you expand your time window, you’ll be able to spot them.
And once you spot them, you can shorten the date range so the data isn’t sampled and then drill down to what they were looking at on your website.
The key to analyzing what Quality Raters are doing on your site is to look at the “Site Content” report in Google Analytics and that will help you produce results that look like the screenshot above.
To get to that report, click on “Behavior,” then “Site Content,” and then “All Pages.”
What do I do with this information?
The goal of a Quality Rater is to help improve Google’s
algorithm. And whether they have visited your site or not, your goal should
be to make your site the best site in the industry.
You can do so by doing the following 3 things:
Follow the quality guidelines that Google has released. It’s 168 pages long but, by skimming it, you can get a good understanding of what they are looking for.
Always put the user first. Yes, you want higher rankings, but don’t focus on Google, focus on the user. In the long run, this should help you rank higher as Google’s goal is to make their algorithm optimized for user preferences over things like on-page SEO or link building.
If you have Quality Raters browsing your site from time to time,
don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean your rankings are going to go down or up.
And if you can’t find any Quality Raters visiting your site,
don’t freak out either. Because that doesn’t mean that you won’t ever rank well
in Google.
As your site gets more popular, you’ll notice a higher chance of Quality Raters visiting your site over time. This just means that you need to focus more on delighting your website visitors. Create the best experience for them and you’ll win in the long run.
So, have you spotted any Quality Raters in your Google Analytics?
PS: Special shoutout to Matthew Woodward who originally brought the Google Quality Raters segmentation to light.
Past winners of our coveted Agency of the Year awards — awarded for both SEM and SEO specialties — have included Metric Theory, Rise Interactive, Wolfgang Digital and Wpromote. Make 2020 the year you and your team are awarded the highest honor in search.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
