How to Use Pinterest Analytics to Skyrocket Your Traffic in 2025

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If you’ve been tirelessly pinning on Pinterest but haven’t seen any significant boost in traffic, you’re not alone.

Many Pinterest users face stagnant growth, often feeling stuck despite following all the advice they’ve gathered from countless tutorials.

The common culprit?

In addition to not executing a proper SEO strategy, often it’s also the fact that they are not paying attention to Pinterest analytics—or misunderstanding how to use the data effectively.

In this guide, we’ll dive into how to leverage Pinterest analytics to increase your traffic and optimize your account.

Whether you’re a seasoned pinner or just starting, understanding your analytics can unlock the potential of Pinterest as a powerful traffic-driving tool.

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Why You Should Use Pinterest Analytics

To scale your traffic or revenue with Pinterest, you need to go beyond simply tracking outbound clicks.

Pinterest analytics acts as a blueprint, guiding you step by step to improve your account’s performance and telling you exactly what works well on your account and resonates with your audience.

By analyzing your metrics, you can identify what works, refine your strategy, and ultimately scale your traffic more effectively.

How to Access Pinterest Analytics

To use Pinterest analytics, first, make sure that you have a business account with a verified domain.

Without a linked domain, you won’t be able to track outbound clicks—an essential metric for understanding your performance.

Access your analytics by navigating to the main menu and selecting “Analytics Overview.”

If you’re just starting out and you create a new account, you won’t see a lot of data in your analytics. Wait at least one month to check it, so you have enough data to work with.

Key Metrics to Track

Focusing on the right metrics is critical to optimizing your Pinterest strategy.

The analytics have a long list of data points you can use, so it can feel overwhelming trying to figure out what is important and what not.

Luckily, it’s not a rocket science and there are only 3 metrics that you need to focus on:

  • Impressions: Track these to measure the success of your SEO efforts and understand whether your content is being displayed to users.
  • Saves: Pinterest values saves as a strong engagement signal, making this one of the most critical metrics for growth.
  • Outbound clicks: The ultimate goal is driving users to your website. This metric indicates how well your pins entice users to learn more.

Metrics You Can Ignore

Before diving into the most critical metrics, let’s clarify what you can safely ignore:

  • Monthly views: This vanity metric includes impressions of your and third-party pins across the platform, offering little insight into your performance.
  • Followers: Pinterest’s algorithm changes have made the follower count less relevant. High traffic is achievable even with a modest following.
  • Engagement rate, outbound click rate, and save rate: These are tied to impressions and do not provide an accurate picture of your performance, which I will explain further down in the article.
  • Audience and engaged audience: These metrics are more general and less actionable for improving your strategy.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of the key analytics, and I will also include tips on how to improve each of them.

Understanding and Increasing Impressions on Pinterest

Impressions may be one of the most misunderstood metrics on Pinterest because nobody bothers to read the full definition of what an impression is.

Impressions are counted in a very different way on Pinterest compared to other platforms, mainly due to its unique layout and interface.

Here is the full official definition from Pinterest’s own pages:

What it means in plain language is that if only one pixel of your graphic is loaded at the bottom of the screen, Pinterest considers that to be an impression, even though nobody really saw the pin or graphic or it wasn’t even fully loaded on the screen.

These are just a few examples of what Pinterest considers an impression. 

Impressions on Facebook, on the other hand, mean that someone would have to scroll past your content and see it in full. 

On Pinterest, just one pixel of the graphic counts as an impression, and keep in mind that there may be 10 other pins loaded at the same time, so the impression value on Pinterest is really low.

Impressions are the main metric that Pinterest uses to calculate other analytics metrics.

One of those is, for example, outbound click rate, which, according to Pinterest, is the total number of clicks to your website divided by the number of times your content was displayed on screen (impression).

How should anyone click on your pin if they only see one pixel of it?

While not the most critical metric, impressions are valuable for tracking the effectiveness of your keyword strategy and Pinterest SEO.

Impressions only give you a part of the picture and you should not consider them in isolation.

How to Increase Impressions on Pinterest

Three main points you need to consider for increasing your impressions:

SEO – targeting the right keywords and using them correctly in the right places. You can check this article which dives deeper into keywords and their role in content discovery on Pinterest.

If your impression is on a downhill, I strongly suggest you check the article and watch my video on Pinterest algorithm and optimization, and optimize your account before you continue adding any more content.  

Posting schedule – its important to keep regular posting schedule and be active on the platform, which will help your content to slowly increase impressions over time.

Best practice guidelines – small things like using wrong content format (landscape vs portrait) and size can lower your impressions, or linking to an external domain which not your claimed domain.

You should focus on mainly posting fresh new content for a variety of different URLs and follow the rest of the best practice guidelines, so your account doesn’t get shadow-banned.

I dive deeper into the topic of impressions and how to improve them in this article.

Understanding Saves and How to Increase Them

Saves are arguably the most important metric on Pinterest – Pinterest considers them the strongest engagement signal on the platform.

For that reason, I don’t pay a lot of attention to clicks or engagement rate. Focus only on the strongest engagement signal = saves.

If there is something I already know about the algorithm, it is the fact that it loves fresh and highly engaging content.

Pinterest is in the business of keeping people on the platform, and the best way to do that is to serve them highly relevant and engaging content.

This works hand in hand with impressions – keywords and SEO will help to get your content discovered, but the engagement will drive your account’s growth.

Content with a massive amount of impressions and zero engagement signals will hurt your account in the long run, so it’s better to focus on creating content that generates a lot of engagement rather than impressions.

How to Increase Saves on Pinterest

The easiest way to increase sales is to create content that people want to save for later; they find it inspirational, and it is highly visual.

You need to be careful about the type of content you post as that directly impacts the save rates.

For example, if you have a roundup post with 30 chicken recipes, people are very likely to save it as it gives them ideas they can execute later.

Roundup posts generally have a higher save rate and also click rate.

On the other hand, if you have an image with a chicken recipe that is not very appealing, with dark color tones and bad quality, it’s unlikely anyone would like to save it for later.

Here are a couple of examples of pins ranking for chicken dinner recipes:

I also recommend creating ‘save only’ type of content as part of your overall content strategy, which will not give you a lot of outbound clicks, but will increase your saves.

One example could be pins where you give out all the content, and people don’t have to click through to read the article. I’ve made a few of these myself, you can see the examples below.

Finally, the easiest way to increase saves is to call to action and ask people to save it.

I use it as a visual button on my graphics but also as part of every pin description, with instructions on which board to save it. Here is what it looks like in my own pins:

Outbound Clicks on Pinterest

And finally, the metric which is the holy grail of all of our efforts on Pinterest – outbound clicks.

Here is a simple formula: 

Outbound clicks = increasing impressions + increasing saves

If you work on those two metrics, your outbound clicks will naturally increase too.

Just keep in mind what I mentioned earlier – people are unlikely to click on your website if they don’t need to. 

Create intrigue and give them a teaser in your title and descriptions, making them more likely to click and read the article.

Please keep in mind that Pinterest differentiates between outbound clicks and pin clicks.

Pin click means that someone clicks on the pin to see it better – they have to click again to navigate to your website.

So many outbound clicks start as pin clicks, but you can also have people clicking directly to your website, which is why the number of pin clicks and outbound clicks won’t be the same in your analytics.

Putting it All Together

Now that we know what to focus on, let me show you how to use the analytics to track these metrics, and what you pay attention to.

Tracking Impressions

I like tracking the overall monthly impressions on the main dashboard but looking at two metrics – all impressions and my pin-only impressions.

Pinterest tracks impressions for pins that rank organically but also third-party pins – that is, someone else saving your content, and you are getting impressions thanks to that.

You should differentiate these two metrics because only the ‘your pin’ section realistically shows you whether or not your seo efforts pay off.

Here is how you filter for your pins only:

  • navigate to Pinterest analytics and on top of the chart choose organic pins only from the content type filter
  • from the pin format, click on image pins and click next to it to see more filters
  • the filters will open up on the right side (on desktop), and click on your domain under the claimed account section
  • from the source pins right under that, select your pins only

I also like to pay attention to which top 3 to 6 boards get the most impressions, as that helps me to understand which content to focus on.

The idea with Pinterest is that we want to create more of what already works, so we want to create more content that gets the highest impressions and saves.

Tracking Saves

For saves, I like to check how the saves look like in the last 30 days and whether or not there are some spikes in the curve.

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

Finally, I also 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. 

What you also want to do is to compare how the boards with top impressions compared with the boards with the most saves – are they the same, or is there a gap?

Can you find a way to improve the content with the most impressions to increase the saves?

Tracking Outbound Clicks

This one is pretty easy, you want to track the monthly outbound clicks, and I also track the top boards with outbound clicks and compare that with my boards for top saves and impressions.

If I see a board is getting a lot of saves but not a lot of clicks, I would try to create new pins that would encourage more outbound clicks.

I also use these board metrics to make a decision whether or not I want to merge or archive any boards which do not get any impressions, saves or clicks.

Where To Track & How

As promised, here is a template spreadsheet you can use to track the performance on your account.

Click on the google sheet and make your own copy: get it here.

I have also included two custom metrics you can use, which are click through rate and engagement rate.

I calculate both of these using pin clicks instead of impressions, as they only indicate that someone saw the pin.

So, the click-through rate would be the total number of pin clicks divided by the total number of outbound clicks times 100. 

I do the same for engagement rate, but only use saves as the strongest engagement signal, and pin clicks, and calculate it in the same way, here is an example.

There are formulas in the spreadsheet above which will make these calculations for you automatically.

Final Thoughts

I hope this was all easy to understand and you are now confident that you know what you’re supposed to do.

I know I covered a lot in here, so I created a little cheat sheet that summarizes the information in one handy format – feel free to download it and use it as a guide.

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Check out also these articles which you might find useful:

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Author
Lucia is a senior marketing professional with over a decade of experience in digital marketing. She is dedicated to helping bloggers and business owners grow their revenue through strategic and data based marketing strategies. Her areas of expertise include SEO, Pinterest marketing, branding, social media marketing, and e-commerce.

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