Pinterest Statistics – Use and Result for Travel Bloggers

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UPDATE 2021 -

Since entering on the stock exchange, Pinterest has completely changed strategy.
They want to keep users on their platform and not send them on our blogs.
They are moving away from being a search engine to being just another social media platform.

The following article was not updated following that change, since I consider Pinterest is not worth the time anymore, not bringing much traffic.

Pinterest Statistics Overview

Here is the deal:

Comparing yourself to other is generally not a really good idea.

However -

When it comes to Pinterest algorithm, we are mostly in the dark. And it is difficult to know if we are doing the right thing and getting the results we should be getting.

So I started an analysis and a survey to get a better understanding of how Travel Bloggers use Pinterest and what kind of results they get.

More detailed information are provided after this infographic.

Pinterest Penetration in Travel Blogging

Let's start by having a look at how many travel bloggers use Pinterest to market their content.

Top Travel Bloggers

From the list of top 50 travel bloggers established by The Expeditioner (Q1 2017), I checked the presence of a link to a Pinterest account and the results are:

Overall Travel Bloggers

And using a random sample out of all niches from the big list of travel blogs compiled by Jaoleitao:

Not surprisingly, women travel bloggers use Pinterest more than men. However, men should consider it, since the percentage of men is increasing for new Pinterest account.

The remaining of this article is based on a survey I conducted with almost 100 travel Blogs participating. Those blogs were found on Pinterest discussion groups and general travel blogging groups for variety of levels.
They cover a wide variety of Pinners from various country and different levels of experience on Pinterest

Pinterest Set-up for Travel Bloggers 

This section highlights how Travel Blogs have set up their Pinterest account and their Pinterest strategies regarding their own content.

Boards

• There is a great variation in the numbers of Travel Boards per account reported: from just a few a more than 100 and up to 228! 
• 92% of Travel blogs focus their Pinterest account on travel with only 8% reporting having many boards which are non travel related

Keep reading for correlation between number of boards and traffic.

Rich Pins

• 81% of travel blog Pinterest accounts report having enabled rich pins
• Out of the others, 13% do not know the what 'Rich Pins' are

Rich Pins are great to attract the Pinterest user's attention. Learn more about Rich Pins in the 101+ Pinterest Marketing Tips article

Pin Design

Number of Pins per article

Since Pinterest is often considered like the other social media networks, most blogger are still creating only 1 pin per article.

However, Pinterest is more of a search engine and to collect ideas. You don't know what is going to be shown via the algorithm and what picture might attract more. So one of the top Pinterest Marketing Tips is to publish several Pins per article.

Pins design

Pin design is one of the most critical aspect of Pinterest success - I am still surprise to see people forgetting to write the country or writing too small. Learn more in the Pinterest Tips article

Pins in article

I know that the vertical format of Pins bother a lot of people, so I asked them if they included their pins in their articles. The answers were as follows:

• 50% display one pin in the article
• 26% display all their pins in the article
• 11% add the Pin image in the article but hide it (so that people clicking on the Pin button get the image to pin without messing the blog layout)
• 14% do not include their pin in the article, they load them directly inside Pinterest

Pinning Process 

Number of Pins per day

There is a really huge variation between travel bloggers in regards to how many pins they add per day to their Pinterest account from less than 10 for 22% of them to over 100 a day for 6% of them.

Pin repartition

Out of this quantity of Pins, most people apply the original 'rule' of 20% my own content versus 80% content of others. It is not surprising considering most travel bloggers create only 1 pin per article... they have limited content! 
However, things are shifting, and this is not a rule anymore. It depends on how much content you have to share

Pinning Process and Tools

Like with all social networks, some people like looking for things to share, while other find it tedious. Batching the work is helpful but it requires paying for some tools. Here is how travel bloggers pin or schedule:

Pinterest Marketing Strategies

Pinterest SEO

I am glad to see that most travel bloggers surveyed understand that Pinterest is a search engine and that Optimization should be implemented for long term strategy.

• 44% report that they implement Pinterest SEO
• 39% are trying but not sure they are doing the right thing (after all, the Pinterest algorithm is even more obscure than the Google one...)
• 17% report that they don't know about Pinterest SEO

FB share Threads

Facebook group dedicated to Pinterest sharing are quite popular. 

They allow you to get a high number of shares on your pin, but that means you have to pin content that you might not like and it takes a lot of time.

Group Boards

Group Boards have often been seen has the sesame to growing your Pinterest account, but they have been loosing grounds recently, especially with the creation of Tailwind Tribes which have better statistics.

But group boards are still great to get access to another audience than yours.

• 50% of the Travel Bloggers surveyed participate in more than 10 group Boards
• And only 4% do not participate in Group boards at all

However I doubt about the quality of many group boards. This is why I asked how many where parts of a group board with more than 100,000 followers which means access to a lot of people! The results was:

• 49% are part of a Pinterest Group board with over 100,000 followers. And yet, 10 of those still get less than 1,000 visits a month on their blog...

Tailwind Tribes

Tailwind tribes are the new kids in town. They offer access to different audiences, allow you to monitor your reach and that people are participating by sharing the content of others. And it allows you to quickly schedule content in advance.

• As you can see, they are off to a good start with 73% participating in them

Pinterest Ads

In some countries, it is possible to pay in order to boost the visibility of your pins during searches. However only 2% of the bloggers surveyed are promoting their pins with the ad function.

Pinterest Blog Traffic

Before we discuss potential correlations between all those settings and strategies and Pinterest success, let's see what kind of traffic we are talking about:

Monthly Traffic

Pinterest is giving plenty of metrics, but the only one worth looking at is actually in the blog Google analytics to see how many visits it gets per month from Pinterest. (Note that clicks in Pinterest analytics does not mean click to you website, they also include clicks to enlarge...)

% of Blog Traffic

For 29% of Travel Bloggers, Visits from Pinterest represents more than 50% of their overall traffic. 
Below are the survey answers that Bloggers gave for the month of May 2017:

Correlation Analysis

As expected, I can't really find any obvious correlation to help us get ahead... -sad face- The algorithm is too complicated, the sample is too small and it depends a lot on Pin design quality which I cannot include.

But at least it was a start, a way to understand more about how travel bloggers use Pinterest. Many will criticize, but it is easy to criticize when you don't do 🙂

However I can still give you a few pieces of information from the analysis:

Impact of number of Followers

Impact of group boards

Impact of numbers of daily pins

Impact of Share Threads

From the most successful

Out of all the Pinterest account for which I had an answer, we were 8 account able to get between 10,000 and 50,000 visits from Pinterest with less than 5,000 followers and being on Pinterest for less than 2 years.
Here is what they have in common

• All have rich pins enable
• All have somewhat a template for their Pins design
• They had text on Pins most of the time or systematically
• They try implementing Pinterest SEO, as far as they understand it
• All are participating in FB sharing threads

However

• Some create only 1 pin per article others many
• 2 pin manually, while the other mix the use of Tailwind and Manual
• Some pin less than 10 a day others Over 100 a day
• Only half of them participate in a large group board (over 100,000 followers)

Of course, Pin design and Pinterest SEO are amongst the most critical elements and cannot be evaluated. Check out the more than 101 Pinterest Tips or consider learning more with the Pinterest Traffic Avalanche Course

Is Pinterest one of your blog focus for this year?

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