Pinterest is an ever changing platform that always seems to keep us guessing. But here are a few lessons I learned as I saw 40% of my traffic come from the Pinterest search engine!
If you’ve been on Pinterest for a while, at one time or another you’ve probably experienced a huge “drop” in the traffic they are sending your way.
This past year many in the blogging world felt this keenly as they saw up to 70% less traffic, myself included! It was a huge shock and thankfully my SEO efforts picked up the slack so my page views remained about the same. This event also gave me the opportunity to reflect and learn from the experience.
What I Learned from the Latest Pinterest Update
This list isn’t about how to make the best Pinterest images, or how to find the best group boards. No, these lessons are much more important than that!
Hopefully after reading this list you’ll have a new appreciation for your Pinterest efforts going into the next year!
Number One:
Pinterest is fickle. Seriously, you never know what you’re going to get when you log into your account, or try to pin from the mobile app. You might see the same setup you’ve been using for the last 3 months, or it might be completely different.
Likewise, you cannot count on the algorithm to stay the same like you can for the most part with SEO traffic. Instead, Pinterest is an ever moving target when it comes to what works.
Which leads me to number two.
Number Two:
What works for someone else (or a bunch of someone elses) may not actually work for you and your niche. Every niche is different and it may take you a while to find what works.
But it’s worth the effort to find out what DOES work for you. Even if it might change next week, Pinterest is worth working with since it drive so much traffic (even during the down times).
In fact, I saw a huge jump in traffic from just a few simple changes in the way I was creating my Pinterest images!
Currently I am using a manual pinning technique that has increased my Pinterest traffic by 46% on one site and 90% on another!
While manual pinning sounds like a huge time drain, I’m able to manually pin daily in less than 15 minutes TOTAL for all 3 of my sites. Totally worth it!
This is the system I have been using, it’s a really affordable resource, and I highly recommend anyone who wants to increase their Pinterest traffic give this system a try!
Number Three:
People ARE going to steal your best images and redirect them to their own sites.
This happens so often it’s ridiculous! I had several pins suddenly stop sending traffic altogether and when I looked into it, I found that they had been stolen and completely redirected to a non-relevant (and not mine) website!
So while some traffic drops from Pinterest may be due to algorithm changes and whatnot, sometimes you’re just facing a pin thief!
This video is a bit long, but it has all the info you need for finding out if this is happening to you, and how to deal with it if it is!
Related: How to make amazing Pinterest images (with ready to use templates!)
Clicking will not stop the video.
Number Four:
You shouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket. When it comes to bringing in traffic for your site, you really do need to make sure you are diversifying your efforts.
When I first started A Modern Homestead, over 98% of my traffic was coming from Pinterest. Frankly, that scared the you-know-what out of me! I know that I never like to have all my money coming in from one source (though sometimes it happens), so I knew that the same idea needed to apply to my traffic.
So what can we do??
How to Deal with Pinterest Traffic Waves
The first thing to do is take a deep breath. I know it can be terrifying to log into your account and see drastically less page views on your blog that day compared to the day before.
In reality, blogging is a year to year game. You really need to be comparing this January as a whole to last January as a whole. Only then are you really comparing apples to apples.
So taking that into account, check out your year to year performance (if you have that data available) and see how you’re really doing.
Here’s a good article on how to compare year to year in Google Analytics if you’ve never done it before!
Then it’s time to diversify your traffic sources. Here are a few ways to do that…
1. Start working on your SEO traffic. With just a few hours of effort I was able to increase my search engine traffic by over 2,000% last year.
2. Get more involved in Facebook with your page and especially with groups. You can now create a group page and link it to your business Facebook page so your followers can join!
Here’s a free group that talks about the current best practices for getting Facebook traffic.
You have to join the email list to get into the Facebook group, but you can unsubscribe right away!
3. Branch out to other social media platforms like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and even Linkdin. This is something I really need to work on, but my friend Anna has done amazing things with these platforms!
Bottom line: Pinterest is basically a moody teenager. You never know what you’re going to get and most of the time you just have to roll with it.
Don’t look for your blog worth from the way Pinterest treats you and start diversifying your traffic sources now to help pad any Pinterest changes that may be coming down the line!
Want to turn your blog into a business and real income source for your family? I created this just for you!
PIN THIS FOR LATER
Most Tips for Better Traffic:
John says
From several years of pinning experiences, I confirmed you are right that Pinterest is a moody teenager. The problem is that moody reneger caused so much financial loses over the years. I have seen what worked in 2017 didn’t worked in 2018 and so on. So, traffic diversification could be the best technique. That’s why start doing SEO.
Thanks for sharing such a great advice.
Jenna says
Hi!
I know this is an old article, but ugh, we’re going through a massive drop, and are freaking out. For the past 8 months our pinterest engagement had been steadily growing along with our followers. Seemed to totally make sense – followers gradually increasing and impressions and engagement as well. We were up to about 15,000 followers and 8 million monthly viewers. Then suddenly on May 24th last month we had a sudden drop off of 1 million viewers – in one day. And then since may 24th we’ve lost over 3.5 million more – going from 8 million to 4.5 as of today – in one month! Even more confusing is that our followers have doubled in that same exact time going from 15,000 to 32,000. But our engagement is tanking at a massive rate. This week and a half alone we’ve lost almost 2 million viewers – it’s been a drop of 200,000 per day for over a week.
We finally contacted Pinterest to see if we had done something wrong because the drop is insane – especially when our followers are rapidly increasing. They gave us the run-around about how it was a normal traffic fluctuation. NO WAY. That’s a completely abnormal drop rate. They also immediately suggested that we should do paid ads. We find that incredibly suspicious. It seriously seems like our account was doing incredibly well organically, and they saw that, and are intentionally limiting our visibility in order to force us to buy paid pins. SO frustrating. We called them out on that and then they finally responded by saying that our account had several pins marked as “sensitive and that is what was wrong”. We seriously pin completely “PG” content – cute outfits, positive quotes, home decor, recipes, etc. Literally NOTHING we pin is “sensitive” in any way. So we emailed back saying we have NEVER gotten a single warning about any of our pins so we have no idea what they could mean. And then we asked them to provide some examples of our pins that were marked “sensitive”, and they haven’t responded.
Anyone else have this issue on a business account. We can’t think of any other thing going on other than pinterest is limiting our account in order to manipulate us into paying for ads.
Victoria says
Hi Jenna! I’m so sorry for the delay… your comment was marked as spam and I’m just now seeing it! 🙁
I would ask about your page views… what happened to your actual page views during that time? Did they stay the same, rise, or drop?
Because the impressions within Pinterest is just how many eyeballs see the pins you are pinning across your entire account (your pins and other people’s pins). It has nothing to do with how many people are actually clicking or saving the content from your domain.
So, if you have ONE viral pin for someone else’s site… that is going to DRASTICALLY skew the impression.
Instead of using Pinterest impressions to gauge your Pinterest growth or success, look at the page views that Pinterest is driving to your site by examining Google Analytics.
I’m happy to help you figure that out if you need it! Let me know! 🙂