Tuesday 27 November 2018

Learn how to improve on Pinterest with your very own free personalized action guide

Edited Dec 24th 2020:
WITHDRAWN - Pinterest changed their stats approach
Edited Nov 28th: 
It just keeps getting better! Version 5.1 is out and gives you links that let you get related pins from Pinterest and see related boards. You'll find them in your tailored guidance section and they'll help you mold and massage your boards into better shape.


Find out how to improve on Pinterest with advice personalized to YOU. It's free and there's no registration, nothing to sell, you're welcome! You must have a Pinterest business account for this to work.

The online Nifty Pinterest Tailored Action Guide is now at V5, with a newly added csv export gizmo, so you can easily keep a history of your performance improvements.

This blog post explains how to use it and gives some tips to get the most out of it.


When you first visit, this is what you see. It's filled with generic advice, not yet personalized for you:

http://www.kdl.to/nifty-pinterest-action-guide.html?src=raza
Until you paste from your Pinterst Analytics to personalize the guidance, this is what you see


To get personalized guidance tailored to you

Visit your Pinterest Profile Analytics page and select and copy the whole page (right-click, select all, right-click, copy) and then paste where indicated (the large box, currently displaying instructions and a screenshot of it in action).

Once you paste, you see your equivalent of the following:

after pasting your Pinterest Profile Analytics page into the box



Do you see the "Get tailored guidance" button in the screenshot above? Give it a click and your personalized guidance will appear in a tan color in the paragraphs that follow. Here's the first few of mine:

the first few paras of the tailored Boards guidance I got - note the new buttons at the top



Here's the most part of the tailored guidance for my pins:

the most part of the personalized guidance I got for my pins



Pinning more of the same

If you happen to be a Zazzle artist / affiliate or a Society6 artist / curator, then you'll appreciate the links included in the tailored guidance that bring up matching products you can easily pin.

The words in the board name are used as search terms, so might need some adjusting when you get to the rapid pinning tool page. Here's the results of clicking the link given in one of my pin guidance paragraphs:

the rapid pinning tool, waiting for the search terms to be adjusted to get more results


..as you can see, there's only one result for the search terms used from the pin name. A simple adjustment of those terms will bring up plenty of similar designs to pin. The Society6 link given in the guidance paragraph leads to a similar page using Society6 as the source.



Investigating in more detail

When you clicked the "Get tailored guidance" button, more buttons appeared:

summary Board and Pin buttons



The summary pop-ups let you check things out in more detail and explore your options. Both the summaries work the same way. Here's my Boards one:

what you see when you first click the button



You can see there are various buttons surrounding the table. You can sort by any of the columns by clicking the relevant button at top or bottom of the columns. This answers the types of questions you might have like, which boards...
  • ..have the best click through rates?
  • ..require the least pins in order to get a click?
  • ..gain the most impressions for every pin?

Those are the most important because they're all about effective use of time spent pinning. If you want to see the actual values in addition to what's already shown, click the "show more" button at top right. You'll then see something like:

After clickng the "show more" button at top right



You now see three additional columns, Impressions, Clicks and Saves appearing on the left of the exisiting ones, as well as the totals for each column where totals make sense.
Again, you can sort with the buttons at the top and bottom of the new columns.

Although you might be tempted to be guided by the clicks and saves alone, just remember that they give no indication of pinning efficiency. Focussing your pinning on those boards could be much more inefficient than pinning to a board with a better pins-to-click ratio.


As mentioned before, the Pin summary table is pretty much identical in looks and how you use it, so I won't repeat myself.


When would I use the ignore buttons?

Sometimes you find that a board with a seasonal nature is in the top three, but the date for the event has passed. You're not really interested in that board anymore but you get tailored guidance for it.

The solution is simple, ignore it! When you click the button, everything to do with that board disappears from the action guide, leaving the other boards to vie for the now vacated spot. That way, you'll get tailored guidance for the one that wins (assuming it ends up in the top 3 when sorted by board value).

In my example, the Diwali and Thanksgiving events have now passed, yet there their boards are in the top three and I'm getting unwanted guidance for them. I want to focus on the future, not the past!


Watching your performance improve

You can export the contents of the summary tables with the "Export tables to CSV file" - a CSV file is a standard used by spreadsheets everywhere. Using this option allows you to keep a history so you can watch your performance on Pinterest improve as time goes on.

If you don't want to use a spreadsheet, just copy from the pop-ups instead and paste into your favourite notepad application. I find a spreadsheet easier because of the rows and columns grid you get.

Feedback and questions as comments, please. Thanks!


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I hope you agree that it's rare to get such great value out of a free tool! Why not try it for yourself right now?
Enjoy 😎