Understanding Pinterest Traffic Sources

Getting traffic from Pinterest? You lucky blogger you!

Pinterest is one of my favorite traffic sources, but sometimes it can be a little confusing where the traffic is actually coming from on Pinterest.

When you look at your overall traffic, you might see Pinterest showing up in a variety of places and with different sources/mediums.

This post will clear things up and help you understand where your traffic is coming from.

I will also answer the most common question I get asked or see asked in Pinterest groups: What does it mean when I get traffic from pinterest.com/

It looks like this:

Pinterest Traffic without a slug

Let’s talk about what it means when we get traffic from pinterest dot com without a direct Pin URL.

There are a few answers

If it has the slash (or on some Google Analytic screens you will only see a slash) and shows up under referrals then it is most likely traffic you are getting directly from a Pinterest Feed.

On desktop, Pinners can click directly from the Pin to your blog, without going to a close up of the Pin.

This is great news! It means that people are seeing your Pin in a feed (home, related, or search) and clicking directly to your post. 🙂 You can add a secondary dimension of LANDING PAGE to see which posts these clicks are going to.

Here’s a little Facebook video explaining this:

Understanding pinterest.com/ traffic

Most common Pinterest Google Analytics Question I answer:What does it mean when I am getting traffic from Pinterest.com annd not a specific PInterest URL?Answer in the video! (Switch to HD or 1080 for best quality)Interested in your Pinterest Stats? Get my Pinterest Dashboard for Google Analytics – over 2,000 bloggers are using this to check their Pinterest traffic.https://kristiehill.com/pinterest-dashboard/

Posted by Kristie Hill on Monday, February 18, 2019

Pinterest traffic with varying source/medium

Many social sharing plugins or scheduling tools add campaign parameters (commonly referred to as UTM links) to your post URLs in order to help you better track your conversions.

The default source/medium from Pinterest traffic is pinterest.com / referral.

Naturally, you’d think that all of these plugins and tools would use the default but for whatever reason they chose to make up their.

The problem with this is that there isn’t consistency in your Pinterest traffic AND that you might have more Pinterest traffic than you realize if you are looking in the wrong spot.

For example:

• Tailwind Tribes and Smartloop set the source/medium as pinterest / social.
• Buffer sets the source/medium as pinterest.com / social

I know that sharing plugins like Social Warfare add their own parameters too.

Have you seen any of these show up in your analytics?

If you are looking at your Pinterest traffic by navigating to Acquisition > referrals > Pinterest.com you are probably not getting the whole picture of how much Pinterest traffic you actually have!

One of my readers is getting an insane amount of her Pinterest traffic from Tailwind Tribes and Smartloop traffic. If she were only looking in referrals, she wouldn’t see over 27,000 sessions from Pinterest to her blog!

Where to look instead:

You can look at the Pinterest Dashboard to give you a better idea of all of your Pinterest traffic. It’s a nice, quick glance.

If you haven’t signed up for the dashboard yet, you can get here.

You can also find your total Pinterest Traffic by navigating to Acquisitions > Social > Network Referrals > Pinterest. For whatever reason, Google Analytics is able to compile all of the various Pinterest sources here. You’ll get a better idea of your overall Pinterest traffic here.

Hopefully this post clears up any Pinterest traffic questions and helps you see all of your Pinterest traffic!
You might be getting more Pinterest Traffic than you realize.

Go check and see for yourself!