How To See How Many Monthly Viewers On Pinterest

Do you keep an eye on the number of monthly viewers that shows up under your Pinterest profile description? Perhaps it's one of your key Pinterest metrics? Some accounts have millions of viewers. It looks impressive, but it's actually notthat important. Find out which key Pinterest metrics to focus on instead of monthly views on Pinterest!

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Why you should ignore monthly views

Do you get excited when the number goes up? Or, perhaps you are wondering why your numbers are so low compared to other pinners?

Stop sweating over this metric. It's just a vanity stat.

I have around 350K monthly viewers on Pinterest at the time of writing this article. This number goes up and down through the seasons and is at the whim of algorithm changes. One thing is for sure, these monthly viewers do NOT convert into 350K visits to my website, or email subscribers.

So, what does this number actually mean?

The number of monthly unique viewers is simply the number of times any of the pins you shared appear in a Pinterest feed. Whether people click on it or not. In fact, they may not even see your pin in the stream of pins they scroll through on their screen. Not only that, the monthly views is a count of your own content, as well as 3rd party pins. If you share content from other pinners then that gets included too. To find out which proportion of these views are for pins to your website, checking your monthly total audience in Pinterest analytics will give you an idea of the volumes for each:

Image of graph with monthly total audience on Pinterest

In the example above, monthly views of the claimed domain on Pinterest (purple line) were extremely low. By pinning more of this account's own content and reducing 3rd party pins, the trends have been reversed. The large majority of views is now for content that links to the company website associated with this Pinterest account.

A high number of monthly viewers is, of course, extremely flattering. It looks good and gives you "street cred". It's an indication that Pinterest is showing your content in people's Pinterest feeds. If nothing else, a high number of monthly views is a sign that the content you share is consistently being shown for certain keywords. So, if this is you, you're probably doing a great job of key-wording your pins!

However, a high number of monthly views is absolutely meaningless if they are not generating traffic to your website. After all, the purpose of distributing your content on Pinterest is to get more business! If people are seeing your pins but are not clicking on them or sharing them, then you need to modify your Pinterest tactics.

Example of Impressions vs Engagements - 44K impressions generate 1544 engagements (close-ups + clicks + saves = 3.2% engagement rate)

What to track in Pinterest Analytics

Instead of tracking your monthly unique viewers, it's good practice to check your website data in Pinterest Analytics each month. These Key Metrics recommended by Pinterest are a great starting point:

Source: Pinterest

As well as looking at numbers, you should also look at rates for all of these metrics. Rates give you meaningful performance insights about the overall effectiveness of your pinning tactics.

Let's head over to Pinterest Analytics and take a look at some different monthly figures for your website.

Engagement matters

Increasing engagement on Pins is one of the best ways to signal to the Pinterest algorithm that your content is worth showing. Engagement rates on Pinterest are based on total impressions:

Pinterest Engagement Rates

Close-Up rate
Link Click rate
Save rate
Engagement rate

Close-Ups / Total Impressions
Link Clicks / Total Impressions
Saves / Total Impressions
(Close-Ups + Link Clicks + Saves) / Total Impressions

What's your average engagement rate for the last 30 days? How is this engagement split among Close-ups, Link clicks and Saves? Keep track of these numbers in a monthly log and use them as a benchmark to improve upon.

Engagement rates vary enormously and depend on the quality of your Pin image, the keywords you use in the Pin title and description, how well the Pin meets expectations once the person gets to your website, and even the quality of your website. If someone clicks through and finds that your website is slow to load or not mobile friendly, they may decide not to save your Pin to one of their boards.

Do a monthly check and test new tactics to try and increase engagement with your pins.

Top Pins

Top Pins on the Analytics Overview page give you a good idea which of your pins resonate with your Pinterest audience. You should regularly check this data to check how your pins are doing and adjust your tactics whenever necessary. Identify which of your own pins are most popular. You could share these more often. Create new images for blog articles to give them a fresh look and feel and share them again.

Check Top Pins for all the content you shared (i.e. your own and 3rd party pins). Do you mainly see other people's pins here? Take a closer look and try to identify why they are doing so well. Is it possible to apply this to your own pinning strategy?

Are you using the right keywords, so that your pins turn up in the desired search results?

Get down to the detail in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is also an excellent source of information to help you analyse how Pinterest is driving traffic to your website. There is so much information that it can be a bit overwhelming. You can start by looking at the following reports:

Acquisition > Social to look at number of sessions generated by Pinterest. A session is a given time frame during which a user is active on your website (e.g. browse pages, download resources, etc). What percentage is this of the total traffic you get on your website?
Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals gives you more detailed information such as new users and average number of pages viewed during a session. It also shows you which Pinterest feeds are sending you traffic (pinterest.com, pinterest.ca, pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.fr,...) If you are targeting a specific territory, this is interesting to know.
Acquisition > Social > Landing Pages > At the top of the table, add "Source" as a Secondary Dimension to the report. You now have a list of your most popular web site pages and the source that sent this traffic to your site.

Rather than closely observing the number of monthly unique viewers on your Pinterest page, analyse the actual traffic Pinterest is sending to your web site. So, whether your monthly viewer number is high or low, it is important to understand that this is NOT a good measure of your success. Instead you should...

Regularly check actual traffic via Analytics on Pinterest and Google.
Check Pinterest Analytics to see which pins bring in most traffic.
Check the keywords for your pins and update if necessary.
Share more of what's working.
Create new images for existing blog articles.
Learn from successful pins.

For more Pinterest Marketing tips visit marylumley.com.

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Monthly views on Pinterest – are they important? Some accounts have millions of monthly viewers. It looks impressive, but it's actually not that important. Find out which key Pinterest metrics to focus on instead! | Mary Lumley – Conversion Focused Pinterest Marketing