How To Increase Saves on Pinterest? Expert Guide for 2025 [Free Cheat Sheets]

As you probably already know, saves are the most important engagement signal on Pinterest.

Everyone talks about growing traffic from Pinterest and SEO, but engagement is a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Getting this right is going to be the key to your account’s growth.

In this article, I will explain why focusing on saves is the key to growing your traffic, include seven hacks for increasing your saves, and provide helpful cheat sheets you can reference anytime you need.

Let’s jump in!

No Time to Read? Save it for Later.

Why Focus on Saves?

Pinterest tells us that saves are the ‘best bet for tracking your success.’ Here is the full explanation directly from Pinterest pages:

‘There are a lot of metrics to keep track of as a creator. But if you really want to understand how people are engaging with your content on Pinterest, here’s a little secret: Saves are your best bet for tracking your success.

On Pinterest, saves are a sign of intent. People save Pins because they want to revisit them later and actually try them—not just ‘like’ them. When someone saves your Pin, that’s a really, really good sign. It means that your idea is resonating, and people want to try it for themselves.

That’s why the Pinterest algorithm pays attention to saved content. And the more people that save your ideas, the more they’ll show up for other, new audiences all across Pinterest.’ (source)

As you can see, this directly confirms that to grow on Pinterest, you need to focus on increasing the number of saves, as that will improve your other performance metrics.

How to Increase Saves on Pinterest

The simple way to increase saves is just this = focus on creating content that people want to save.

But there is a lot more that goes into it.

You need to think about your audience (their intent), the seasonality, format of the content and pay attention to what value do you actually offer in the pin itself.

I’ve been growing accounts on Pinterest for over 10 years, and these seven tips work like magic every time!

Let’s check them out.

PS: You don’t need to remember all of them, I will provide a handy cheat sheet at the end of the article.

1. Analyze What Already Works

Before you do anything else, you should analyze what already works on your account, by reviewing your Pinterest analytics.

Your analytics contain valuable data that will tell you what your audience likes and what works well on your specific account.

For saves, check the main timeline graph and choose saves from the filter. I like to pay attention to any spikes or fluctuations.

I also like to compare them with pin clicks to see if there are any huge gaps or irregularities.

Ideally, you want your pin clicks to be lower than saves, as that tells Pinterest that people really LOVE your content. If you have high amount of pin clicks but not enough saves (or a huge gap between the two), that probably means people click to see the image but don’t find it valuable enough to save it, so they navigate back to the search.

It’s kind of like pogo-sticking in organic search – if people don’t find your content answers their question, they navigate back to the search.

This is just my theory, I didn’t find any documentation to support this yet, but I noticed a lot of the accounts with healthy growth have a very similar ratio of saves vs pins as shown below.

I also like to check which pins created in the last 30 days got the most saves. This helps me understand what content resonates with my audience the most so I can focus on creating more of it.

Finally, I record which boards got the most saves for the same reason – these topics get the most engagement, so I want to measure and track that.

With the boards, I like to take it a step further and calculate a save rate for each board – you can do that by downloading the data from dashboard and calculating a save rate in a google sheet like this: save rate = number of saves / number of impressions x 100.

The save rate is a more accurate representation of how the boards perform as it will express what % of the content with impressions also gets saves. You might have a board with a lot of saves, but it will not be the one with the highest save rate, so its good to keep that in mind.

Here is what my board analysis would look like (I use yellow to mark top performers and red for worst performing):

I have also created a short cheat sheet which you can keep handy and refer back to it when you need to remember what to track.

From personal experience, its best to have one google sheet where you track these metrics on a monthly basis, and then review the progress every three months.

2. Add Call to Action

One of the fastest and easiest ways to increase your save rate is asking people to save the pin!

You want to tell people what exactly they should be doing – and that’s by adding a CTA (call to action) button to the pin, but also adding it to the description.

I like to take it a step further and also suggest which board they should save the content to, which makes it very specific but also more SEO optimized.

Here is an example description I would use on a pin image:

📌 Save for later! Paper plate crafts for kids are an easy way to spark creativity! These fun projects are great for toddlers and perfect for spring, summer, or fall. Save this pin to your craft ideas board and check out the full list!

3. Schedule Ahead of the Season

Pinterest is a platform where long-term planning is key to success. Pinterest data shows that people go there to save ideas way ahead of the event or season, to compile a mood board of inspiration that they can revisit later.

What this means for us is that we need to be saving seasonal content well in advance, ideally 3 – 6 months, so we can maximize our chances for our content to be seen.

Having content available way ahead of the season also means that there is less competition, and people are much more likely to click save, rather than visit the website – which is a good thing in this case.

4. Spy on Competitors

Another great way to increase saves on your account is to create more of the content that works for your competitors.

And let me be clear – that doesn’t mean copying what they do, but using it as an inspiration for creating your own content.

Here is how you do it.

You want to use a tool like Pin Clicks or Pin Inspector, add a relevant keyword, and then sort the results by the amount of saves. This data is extracted through Pinterst API, so its real time data from the platform.

Pin Clicks is very user-friendly but has a monthly fee, while Pin Inspector is a very affordable one-time investment. At the very minimum, I recommend having a Pin Inspector for analyzing Pinterest data.

Analyzing top competitor pins for a specific topic will give you a good idea about the different headlines that resonate with the audience, colors used, layout options, typography and everything else.

Get Pin Inspector with $20 OFF

Use discount code PIN20 at checkout!

GET IT HERE

5. Create ‘Save-Bait’ Content

In the same way click-bait content is supposed to attract clicks, I like to use the term save-bait for pins designed to attract saves.

So the goal is not to generate traffic to your website, but artificially increase the amount of saves on your account by providing a graphic that contains everything the audience needs to know.

For every article I’m scheduling to Pinterest, I like to add at least one save-bait type of pin that will help me to boost saves for that specific URL. If you can’t add one to existing article, it’s worth researching some options for creating dedicated articles that will be designed as save-bait only.

I know this may sound the opposite of what you’ve heard everywhere else, but as long as you keep only a tiny fraction of your pins in this style, they will naturally increase the save rate of your content.

So what could these pins look like?

I used two in this article – two cheatsheets which will tell you how to track saves and how to increase saves, added at the beginning and end of the article.

They don’t have to be visually appealing, but they have to contain useful and actionable information that the audience can revert back to later.

6. Use Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends is a feature that shows what topics are currently popular on the platform.

I like to use it to research new topic ideas, and the main idea is that these are trending topics that don’t have that much competition or content on the platform so that you can get a lot of engagement much faster.

Make sure that the content aligns with your overall strategy.

In the trends tool, you can find these topics using the general interest filter, you can see below:

Or you can also type in very generic keywords to get more ideas:

Even if the trends are very seasonal, Pinterest right now loves fresh content, so you can pin seasonal content even a month before the event, and it will get traction.

7. Get the Basics Right

Now all of the tips above will be completely useless, if you don’t get your basics right.

And by that I mean: sharing content in the right dimensions, right format, correctly optimized for SEO and posting on a regular basis.

That’s because people can only save content they can see and discover, and to discover your content it needs to be optimized for Pinterest SEO.

Here are a few articles that will explain that in more detail, and at the end of the article you will find a link to my free mini course.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a Pinterest beginner, focusing on saves is the key to unlocking the platform’s full potential.

I hope this article answered all your questions about saves on Pinterest and how to use them to your advantage.

If you have any questions left , leave a comment below and I will happily answer!

Free Cheat Sheet: How To Increase Saves on Pinterest

Want to Learn More?

This PDF guide will give you a crash course in Pinterest Marketing – plus I included access to my free AI tool for creating SEO optimized titles & descriptions.

Love it? Save it for Later!

Save these for later so you can find this article when you need to refer back to it. You will also find lots of practical tips and guides on my Pinterest profile, so don’t forget to stalk me there.