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Vanity metrics are hard to ignore. At times, we feel elated looking at our numbers climb, but when they fall, we feel confused and wonder what we are doing wrong.
Pinterest monthly viewers are a great example of a vanity metric that we need to stop putting so much emphasis on.
Focusing on your Pinterest monthly viewers will harm your marketing strategy and prevent you from digging into data that will actually help you grow your blog/biz.
In today’s article, you’re going to learn why you should ignore your Pinterest monthly viewers and what you should focus on instead for better results!
What are Pinterest Monthly Viewers?
A major Pinterest mistake many people make when first getting started on Pinterest is to focus solely on their Pinterest monthly viewers.
Pinterest monthly views (or viewers) are the number of times your pin was viewed in the Pinterest feed.
A high number of Pinterest viewers indicates your Pins are showing up in many different feeds which could mean:
- you’re using the right keywords and your pins are showing up in different searches
- you have lots of followers
- your pin was pinned by someone with a large following
- your pin went viral
- you pinned someone else’s content and it went viral (remember: viewers aren’t just for YOUR pins only, they take into account ALL your pins, including other bloggers)
Pinterest viewers by themself don’t tell a big enough story. If I have 2 million viewers but absolutely no clicks or traffic back to my website, then those 2 million viewers are worthless.
Luckily, there are lots of other Pinterest metrics you can focus on that will help you understand your Pinterest marketing strategy!
Pinterest Metrics to Focus On Instead of Your Pinterest Monthly Viewers
With a Pinterest business account, you’ll have access to so many incredible analytics. It’s time we wave goodbye to your Pinterest monthly viewers and see what other handy metrics to focus on instead.
You can find your analytics located along the top bar.
If you click “Overview” you’ll be able to see a summary of your analytics.
To view the analytics for your website, make sure to change the selection from “All Pins” to your website.
Now you’ll be able to see your analytics for the past 30 days. You can change the timeframe if you wish, Pinterest currently allows users to view data up to 90 days.
To start, take a look at your “Performance over time”.
Here you can view different metrics to build a colorful story about your Pinterest marketing!
Pinterest offers a variety of metrics you can choose to dig into:
- impressions
- engagements
- closeups
- link clicks
- saves
- engagement rate
- closeup rate
- link click rate
- save rate
- total audience
- engaged audience
- monthly total audience
- monthly engaged audience
Ok, now I know I told you that we’re not going to focus on your monthly viewers but here’s a situation where you might still find it handy…
Let’s say you have 300,000 monthly viewers, but when you dive into your analytics, you find that you only have 30 link clicks per month. That means your click-through-rate (CTR) is 0.01% and could indicate many different problems.
If you were to only use your monthly viewers as your guiding metric, you’d probably think a number such as 300,000 means you’re doing a great job.
However, once you take into account the CTR, it’s clear there are major problems and your pins are not performing how they should.
On the other hand, if you have 500 monthly viewers but your CTR is 100%, you’re driving traffic back to your account and your account is performing significantly better than the previous example with 300,000 Pinterest monthly viewers.
These two examples illustrate why Pinterest monthly viewers are such a poor metric to look at on their own.
What You Should do Next
To start, stop holding some much weight for your Pinterest monthly viewers. If they fluctuate, it’s fine.
They shouldn’t be your main focus!
Get familiar with other metrics and comfortable with your Pinterest analytics dashboard so you can paint a clear picture of how your account is performing.
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Dana Nicole is an award-winning freelance writer for MarTech/SaaS who was rated one of the best SaaS writers by Software World. She specializes in writing engaging content that ranks high in search engines and has been featured in publications like Semrush, ConvertKit, and Hotjar.
Dana holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and has over 15 years of experience working alongside national brands in their marketing departments.
When Dana’s not working, you can find her dancing en pointe, cooking up new recipes, and exploring the great outdoors with her two big dogs.
True, the monthly numbers is not all-inclusive until combined with CT’s. You are very knowledgeable and it is awesome to read an article like this one. Because it is both invaluably helpful to the newbies and also verifies if you basically were pretty sure as to what you were thinking. Thank you.