We have been using Pinterest for some time now for our craft site BUT we haven’t been at all serious about it. It’s just been one of those things that we add to whenever we upload a new video to YouTube, assuming we even remembered to do it.
So when we create the thumbnail for the YouTube video, we also create a smaller version to place on the blog post for that video and that image is the one we post to Pinterest. As you can imagine, the thumbnail for YouTube videos is rectangular – wider than longer, and if you have been over to Pinterest lately you will notice that just about all of the images are taller than wider.
Hmm, you’d think we would have caught on sooner that we weren’t quite doing the right thing when it comes to posting on Pinterest. It was only when we were checking out Google Analytics and we noticed we were getting a decent amount of traffic from Pinterest that we thought we had better get a better handle on this Pinterest stuff. I mean, despite posting images that weren’t the best, we still managed to get around 300 to 400 visitors a week from Pinterest. We knew we had to get serious about it.
It was time for some research which brings me back to the image size, which according to most Pinterest experts, was extremely important and it was one of the most obvious things we could change. So change them we would, but to what size? Good luck with that one. Everyone had a different opinion on this and really odd numbers too like 736 x 1128 or 564 x 1692. Meh, I would never remember those sorts of figures. I personally went with 800 x 1200. Nice clean and simple and they look good. I could even make it longer than that if I wanted but basically I kept the images taller than wider.
UPDATE April 2018
Pinterest now recommends creating images at 600×900 and state that those longer than 1260px will be cut off. They also suggest that a square 600×600 can work well too.
So what were the results?
I created about 10 different images in total and staggered them out over a period of about 5 days. I didn’t really take much note as it didn’t look like anything was really getting pinned but I know now that it can take a couple of days for Pinterest stats to start showing up.
Also and this is important, the number of clicks (visits to website) that Pinterest shows up for the image in my stats only refers to the clicks from the image that I personally uploaded. If that image is re-pinned by others then that image can also get clicks through to my website. The more people that re-pin your pin, the more likely you will get more traffic.
You can see the jump in activity in the Pinterest stats from around the 29 January.
How Much Traffic Did We Get to the Website?
According to Google Analytics, we received 7280 visitors from Pinterest to the website for the period Dec 28 to Jan 5, that was just for 10 images. And just as a comparison, for the week prior to that we received 359 visitors from Pinterest.
Sound good? I think so.
Before and After Examples of our Pinterest images
- Notice the landscape version for the Before image. The latest one is taller. And here’s some stats for you:
- The Before image – posted on September 23, 2017 – 13 total engagements, 12 closeups, 0 clicks, and 1 save.
- The After image – posted on December 30, 2017 – 174 total engagements, 117 closeups, 21 clicks and 36 saves.
- With this one, again we have the difference in landscape vs a taller image. The After image is only very simple but it exploded and resulted in a ton of traffic.
- The Before image – posted on September 27, 2015 – 72 total engagements, 44 closeups, 8 clicks, 20 saves.
- The After image – posted on December 28, 2017 – 539 total engagements, 343 closeups, 155 clicks, 41 saves.
I think it’s fair to say that the taller images do so much better.
Will it Continue?
It’s only been a week or so, so anything can happen at this point. It might be a case of initial traffic and then it trails off over time. However, we have over 250 posts on that craft blog and not all of them have been pinned to Pinterest and those that have were in the wrong size. So I think we have plenty to work with. We will see how it goes.
Let me know in the comments if you are using Pinterest and what works for you.
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I haven’t concentrated that much on Pinterest either and that’s one thing I want to do this year. I do make a pinterest image for all my blog posts and make sure they are the long kind and I do pin them once but that’s about it.
Also, if you haven’t already done so, add Rich Pins to your Pinterest posts. You only have to do it once and then all of your images will have extra info attached to further promote your website. I will do a blog post on it in the future but in the meantime just search for “adding rich pins to pinterest using the yoast plugin”.
I am so happy to you are working on this blog again! You two are my favorite affiliate bloggers and I missed you so much.
This is good information about Pinterest. I am finally getting my camping site up and running and Pinterest is a large part of my marketing plan.
I could see it working really well for a camping site. There’s lot’s of different camping tips so that should keep you quite busy. I can think of so many ideas for pushing products too like ‘The Top 3 Tents for Cold Weather, or the ‘Top 5 Accessories to Take Camping’ or the ‘The Lightest Backup Ever’.
Good Day!
I have been working on Pinterest for years and got traffic as much as I needed, I always use it for blogging purposes but changing in policies effect on traffic as well.
I recommend your great article to all the newbies. Thank you for sharing.
~Christina
Yes, that’s the problem with relying on one source of traffic. When they have a change in policy or a change in their algorithm, anything can happen. Best to make use of their traffic while you can and set up an email list to grab as many visitors so even if you eventually lose that traffic you have your list to market to.
Nice post. Sharing infographics on Pinterest generates more traffic as infographics tend to attract more visitors.
Thanks for sharing the article
Thanks Wasim. Infographics is something we are definitely looking at doing. We are only pinning images with text at the moment so we need to take a look at some infographics to see how they go.
Tailwind is a powerful tool, but it only works if you’ve already done your part to make sure your profile stands out among the thousands of bloggers out there.
Yes, we’ve just started using Tailwind – just the free version at this stage to see how it works. Not sure yet whether to continue with it or not as I am seeing a number of blog posts where people are saying that you shouldn’t use schedulers for Pinterest. I will be attending a webinar next week and someone from Pinterest will be discussing this so it will be good to hear whether it’s okay to use them directly from the horses mouth.
[…] You will also see real life examples. So as we implement things that were successful, we will show you what we did. You can see an example of the type of post I am talking about here – How We Tripled Our Pinterest Traffic. […]