Hello fellow readers, bloggers and social media lovers! As I stated in a recent post, I will be blogging every now and then (not too often) about social media and blogging in general. I will discuss everything from blogging tips I’ve learned, blogging statistics and social media tips, tricks, and stats in these posts.

I think I am a bit of a statistics nerd even though I hated it at school 😅 I honestly never used to care one iota about stats or social media until the day I noticed my Pinterest posts were blowing up and I couldn’t figure out why. I blame that day entirely for piquing my interest in social media, trends and stats and I’ve been trying to learn about these topics intermittently ever since.

So today, I want to focus specifically on Pinterest’s new method of creating metrics for your pins and content. I have only just seen their update (it was updated today, in fact) so I think it’s important to talk about that today since it is a HUGE update.

This is a long (ish) post so bear with me while I delve into the world of Pinterest.

What has Pinterest changed?

Previously, Pinterest would collect data on everything you pinned to your account, and this includes all pins added from other sites (so using the Pinterest save button). The change they have made is quite a significant one because you will no longer receive stats for pins that you have not pinned from accounts that you own (they call these claimed accounts). This essentially also renders the Pinterest save button “useless” with regards to stats and analytics.

A claimed account is basically any domain (site, blog etc.) you own and link to your Pinterest account and any other social media account (so far they only offer options to link Instagram, Etsy and YouTube accounts). So you share all the pins that are linked to Pinterest from these accounts.

If you make a lot of your own pins instead of just pinning from other websites, you shouldn’t notice much of a change in your stats. My primary concern with this is that most Pinterest users will only use Pinterest to pin from other sites – this is their “bread and butter” way of getting users to continue using Pinterest. Most pinners “pin” as they go which is almost everyone! So any stats that you would normally get from any pins not linked to your claimed accounts will no longer show as “monthly views” under your profile pic.

This is what I mean here as an example:

You can see where it says “monthly views” – that is only views on pins I have made myself or pins on any of my linked accounts which is this blog and my Instagram account. You might think 2.5 m views are a lot, but before the change happened, that figure was 5.3 m. So “impressions” means each time a pin was seen by someone. That figure now will only represent your own pins connected to your linked accounts. Anything else will not be counted towards monthly views.

***UPDATE*** I just checked my Pinterest account and now it’s showing 5.3m monthly views 😂😲 so I am not sure what’s happening here as it changed overnight. I am going to keep an eye on it in the next few days and see if it reverts back to 2.5m***

You will still be able to see the stats including saved pins in the analytics, but it won’t be included in your profile. I spend quite a lot of time pinning things as I go from other places – I see this as the one thing Pinterest does really well, but now that will change.

Here is the update from Pinterest:

New! Metric updates

21 January 2021

Pins included in your analytics

Analytics will no longer include data for Pins you’ve saved that do not link back to any of your claimed accounts. To see stats as they were, tick ‘Include saved Pins’ in the Analytics filter bar.

Before the update, stats included:	Today, stats include:
Any Pins you saved	Only Pins you’ve saved from your claimed accounts
Any Pins you published	No change. This includes Pins you’ve created by uploading content to Pinterest as well as Pins you’ve saved from your claimed accounts.
Other Pins connected to your account	No change. This includes Pins saved by others that link back to your claimed account, and Pins created from a catalogue feed.

Updated metrics

To ensure consistency, some metrics and their definitions have been updated across Ads and Analytics

Metric	Updated definition
Impressions	The number of times your Pins were onscreen
Engagements	The total number of engagements with your Pins, including clicks and saves
Pin clicks (formerly close-ups)	The total number of clicks on your Pin to content on or off Pinterest
Outbound clicks (formerly link clicks)	The total number of clicks to the destination URL associated with your Pin

Is there an upside to these changes?

However, statistics reflected from your claimed accounts can also be quite nice because the views will only be for content you’re creating yourself or uploading to your YT, Etsy and/or Instagram. Many people on Instagram use their accounts for their own content like artists. But most users upload from other places just like they do with Pinterest.

The other upside is ownership. People who create things often get annoyed when other people randomly “blog” their content without permission. This new change for Pinterest could enforce that in a big way. However, my question is if you only see stats for the pins you save from your claimed accounts, what is happening with the traffic from all the other pins?

I actually create a lot of traffic for anyone I pin from. There used to be a way around it by editing pins, but you can no longer do that (Pinterest stopped it) which means if you pin from somewhere else on the internet that pin’s URL will stay with it forever. So if they already have that in place, I don’t understand why they’ve decided to change the metrics. It’s not like the traffic is going to the wrong source.

What will this mean for the average Pinterest blogger?

Most likely, nothing. Most people who don’t use Pinterest in a big way or only use Pinterest for business reasons and don’t pin from other sources won’t see a huge change. This will only really impact anyone that likes to pin their pins wherever they go on the internet. And most of those people are pinners for fun anyway and don’t care about metrics. So all-in-all, this new change is a positive one, I think. I guess it’s early days yet. Let’s see how things are in a month or so of using the new metrics and whether or not Pinterest has come under scrutiny from its user base for implementing it.

I’ll do a follow up post in a month as I now need to rethink my Pinterest social media usage and my pinning behaviour going forward.

I hope this post has been of some use to you. Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions as I am here to help where I can 🙂

Until next time friends and bloggers!

If you like my blogging and social media posts, you can check out more of them right here.

And while you’re there, why not consider following me on Twitter, Instagram and right here, on WordPress.

Thanks for your support!