Are you creating a lot of pins and not getting much traffic from Pinterest?
Maybe you are doing something wrong! Today I'll show you how many clicks I get from my
pins and how many you should expect on your account IF you are doing everything right.
And if you are making any mistakes, you will find out about them from this video!
So this is my Pinterest stats for the last month, I've got about 80k
outbound clicks to my site from Pinterest.
Do you want to make the rough calculation with me of my average CTR in the past month?
You can do it on a free site like this - CTR
calculator. You can just google and find lots of similar sites.
So I had about 80k outbound clicks and 14 Million impressions which gives us a CTR
of 0.57%. That's the average for my account. Now, want to take a part in a quick research?
Open the Business hub on your account, get the stats for the last 30 days like this.
Calculate the CTR for your account and let us know in the comment below what's your CTR!
I am really curious to see what you all get on your accounts!
Now, if your CTR is too low, I think we need to brainstorm together all
possible mistakes you could be making that don't allow you generate a good amount of
traffic from Pinterest. And the first mistake is
#1. Posting Ugly Pins
Yes it might sound a bit bold but just don't make ugly pins on Pinterest.
If you invest any efforts into this platform, you should think about the aesthetics.
Pinterest is a platform for people who like nice-looking things, it's a visual
search engine and people who spend time on Pinterest they are visual searchers,
so the visual appeal is important for them.
No one wants to save an ugly pin to their board beucase it's THEIR board
and when they look at the pin, they want to like what they see.
Let's take a look at this comparison I searched for some bedroom cleaning tips
and found 2 pins to show you as a contrast. Are we going to argue which pin here is
pretty and which is … well, kind of ugly? I think we can all agree that the pin that has
only some text on a dark green background, using many different text colors that don't match each
other, doesn't look very inviting for you to click on it and without any photo on the background that
would show we are talking about a bedroom, why would want to save this pin or click on it, right?
You might still argue that this was an extreme example and that beauty is in the eye of beholder
but the truth is there are some aspects of pin design which define a low-quality image. So what
are the aspects? My next tip is
#2. You should use high-resolution images
You shouldn't take small images and put them in a bigger size of the pin. It's quite common for
product photos, you might take a small square image of a product and when you place it in
the pin that has a resolution of 1000 by 1500 pixels, your product will be pixelated
or blurry. Like you can see with this pin, the background photos are quite pixelated.
Yes 1000 by 1500 pixels is the minimum recommended image size for pins. And if
your original image was smaller and you try to stretch it, it will look bad. You should ideally
use original images of higher resolution to get the best quality possible as the end result.
If you ignore the quality requirement, you will waste your time creating pins
and when you have enough of these low-quality pins on your account,
Pinterest will collect negative engagement data for your pins and will lower their distribution.
So if you don't have a quality image in the first place, you are better
off not making pins at all. And if you do a quick search for any keyword on Pinterest,
you will rarely find blurry pins at the top of search results. They don't normally rank well.
#3. My next advice is if you use Canva templates for creating pins,
try to not ruin them when you edit the pins.
So you probably know that Canva is an online graphic design tool,
you can start a free account through my link anastasiblogger.com/canva.
It has a ton of free templates for Pinterest and other social media.
And what I mean here is that usually Canva templates already include the best color
combinations, the best fonts for the text overlay and when you make your changes,
unless you have graphic design skills, you will hardly be able to pick better colors, better fonts
than what was suggested in the template. Like here say they use this font and you might think that a
script font would look better here but it doesn't! It's much harder to read the text with a script
font and it doesn't match the rest of the pin. I have another video tutorial on how to design
pins in Canva, I'll give a link to it in the descirpiton below.
#4. Use the Best Image Ratios
The next thing that is very common for accounts that don't get much traffic from Pinterest is that
people ignore the recommended best ratios for pins and upload whatever they had on their website.
Say, you have a lot of horizontal photos on your website. You might think I can
start the easy way - just by saving those horizontal pins with links to my site.
Wrong! How many horizontal pins do you see in the top search results on Pinterest? Maybe one
or two pins here and there and normally not before you scroll down the screen a few times.
So these pins don't make their way to the feeds and to the top of
search results. If they do anything it's more likely to be giving some
negative data to Pinterest algorithm about user engagement on your pins.
If you don't want to create vertical pins for the platform, you are better off posting
nothing at all than posting the lazy way by sharing any horizontal images from your site.
So what is the best image ratio for Pinterest?
The platform recommends for static image pins a ratio of 2:3.
In terms of resolution, your Pinterest should be at least 1000 pixels wide
and so it would be 1000 by 1500 pixels.
And you probably heard about these ratios many times but not many
people mention what's the best ratio for video pins and Idea pins, right?
If you check the official guidelines for video pins,
they say it clearly that pins should be shorter than 1:2 ratio. For video
pins they say you can use all sizes including square video, 2:3 ratio and 9:16 ratio too.
And for Idea pins Pinterest recommends a ratio of 9:16 and the image size should
be 1080 by 1920 pixels which is a little bigger than they recommend for image pins.
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#5. Increase CTR with Text Overlay!
So let me say it - text overlay is a must because it will definitely improve
your Click-through rates, meaning will drive you more traffic from
Pinterest. Text overlay is what you add on top of the background image.
If you are saving pins without any text overlay,
you might get quite a lot of saves and engagements but your CTR will suffer.
So I searched for "farmhouse living room ideas" and selected these two pins for you to compare.
They both have nice background photos, very similar colors and everything. But
which one is inviting you to click and see the rest of the ideas on the site?
The pin on the right! The pin on the left just shows you ONE idea and if you like it,
you probably will save it to your board. But you don't have any
reason to click to the website and check if there are any other ideas.
The whole point in having text overlay is to make your pins more click-worthy. Think
of pins as of magazine covers. Or since we are on Youtube, think of the thumbnails.
Your text on the thumbnails is not less important than the image itself. Low
click-through rates can ruin your video's performance. The same applies to your pins.
I often have to use a lot of convincing with my
clients and students of my course when it comes to text overlay.
Especially in some niches where creators value their images so
much that they refuse to add text overlay - niches like home decor,
art, sometimes recipe bloggers also think their food photos will do better without text overlay.
And they might even have a reason for these doubts because it's quite common in these
niches when you do a search to see quite a lot of pins without text overlay ranking high. See
like in this case for livingroom decor we can find a handful of pins without any text.
But you see, the problem is they might even rank up here but we don't see the detailed stats for
these pins. I can assure you that pins with text overlay always get higher clith-though rates.
You can't see these stats on the pins of other people but you can check stats on
your own pins. If you open a particular pin, you'll see some data right away and
you can click here to check even more detailed stats for the last month.
If you think about the user who likes to save lots of images to their boards,
those images that have no text overlay. Well, that user might have saved 50 different kitchen
decor ideas to her Pinterest board and she can get back to it and look at the
images later. But why would she need to click on any of these images and
check what's more on the source site? If nothing on the pins tells her why she should click on it!
So what kind of text overlay will actually help you get clicks?
Should you just copy and paste your the entire title of your blog post?
No! Usually it's very counter productive because the text overlay is supposed to be short! And the
title of your blog post can have about 70 characters, that's a lot for a pin image.
You need to use large, bold and very clear fonts.
The text on your PIN has to be easily readable on any kind of devices.
Keep in mind that most of the Pinterest users will look at your pin on a mobile device.
Look here, this is from the Pinterest's audience Insight for the entire userbase,
I highlighted here all the mobile phone users and that totals about 90% of the Pinterest users.
So when you create your pins in Canva on desktop, you probably are not thinking how
this text will look on a mobile. But you should think about it and test your pins on your phone.
Again, the text overlay must be short because you want to use a large font.
But what else is
important for a text overlay? A Hook! And you should think of a hook and let
me just show you a few examples of hooks that I found by searching for Office Decor ideas.
On this pin you will find at least 3 elements that make it really click-worthy. First you see
they use a number, and that's great because Pinterest audience is normally looking for a
bunch of ideas, they are not looking for one specific answer to their question.
And numbers just attract more attention. Then they added this note in the round
frame explaining that these ideas are budget-friendly. So this means it's not
just a bunch of random ideas but they vetted these ideas to help you save money on office decoration.
And they also used a third element which is this arrow pointing to the round frame.
That's something visual that helps you point to a certain area in the pin and when you do so,
it can also help you get more clicks. Here is another example on how you can
use the arrow and and an additional promise of something that will make users click and visit
your site. They use an arrow and point to this free printable included on tha page, so here
users have a clear reason to visit the site! So that leads us to my next tip #6 which is
#6 Use a Vistual Call to Action
It's important to have a call to action on the pin image itself check out this
example it's my own pin about my Pinterest SEO Checklist. It shows the PDF itself but
also I have here this large green text saying FREE Download. By the way you can
download it I'll give you a link up there and in the description below the video.
Here is another example of a great call-to-action on a SEO
Cheat Sheet. It has this additional note promising that it's made just for you.
Or here you have two mild ways to increase the click-throughs
without literally telling you to click on it. See here she added this äctionable steps included!
And she also makes an additional promise that you will see some improvements in 30 days only.
So it's not just a statement that you can get more traffic to your website like in
this pin for example. By the way, if this pin looks pixelated that's not my editing it's the
original pin as it was. Remember we started this video talking about resolution and image size?
This is all very important and can ruin all your efforts if your pins look like this one.
Now I need to make quick note here about Idea pins. Only a few users have a beta
feature that allows adding links to their Idea pins. This might change any time soon
but as I am recording this video, I don't have a field to add a Destination URL to
Idea pins and I'm sure most of the users currently don't have it too.
That's why when you open the detailed stats for Idea pins, you don't see the number of
outbound clicks. You only see the number of pin clicks. That's not visitors to your
site. That's only people who saw the pin in the feed and clicked ot look at it closer.
On this Idea pin for example I have 775 impressions, 19 pin clicks,
6 users visited my profile from this Idea pin and one followed my account.
Again, getting back to the stats of my outbound clicks I wanted to show you a
stats which you are looking for and probably you didn't even know Pinterest analytics has
this number. So if we go here to filter the stats by Outbound click rate you will
see that on my account I usually have a range of rates from 0.5% ot about 0.7%
which is about the number I mentioned in the beginning of the video right?
But you need to understand that this number is an average for all pins,
including video pins and Idea pins and they obviously get a lot more impressions that
static image pins, and fewer clicks. See here when I check the rate only
for Standard pins it's close to the account average. Then for Idea pins it's very low,
sometimes close to zero. And for Video pins it's a bit better than Idea pins
but not even close to Image pins. You should know that videos drive
less traffic than image pins because they get more impressions and fewer clicks.
Idea pins drive the least amount of traffic compared to the number of impression you can get,
because you currently you can't link from them. So all of this leads to my next very important
high-level tip that will affect your Pinterest strategy overall.
#7 Create the Right Amount of Different Pin Formats
What I mean here is that you shouldn't focus only on creating Idea pins or only Video pins. I've
seen this in the past year a lot more because of the popularity of short form video content.
People just take their videos from other platforms like Tiktok, Instagram reels or Youtube shorts and
reupload them on Pinterest in huge volumes but they don't bother creating any image pins.
If you do that, you will likely see a very high monthly viewers number and a lot of impressions on
your account but then don't come to me complaining that Pinterest doesn't drive any traffic.
It doesn't drive it to your account because you ignored the Static image
pins and they are the biggest traffic generator for all established accounts.
See this account with motivational quotes for example. You can see they get a pretty
high monthly viewers number around 1 Million and then you check their boards,
they barely have any boards at all, and their pins look all the same - just a quote on a
black background. And even more importantly, all their pins are basically Idea pins. They
uploaded images and saved them as Idea pins so all these pins are not linked to
a particular page on their site. They can't get much traffic from Pinterest using this approach.
Does it mean you shouldn't create any Idea pins? No, and I will attach a link up there and in the
description below to my video where I've shown how Idea pins helped me boost my account and get more
traffic from Static image pins indirectly. Open that video and I'll see you there!