Blog - Page 21 of 92 - Gravity Search Marketing

Pinterest Analytics 101

October 23, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

Social media site Pinterest announced Pinterest Web Analytics for business pages in March 2013. We previously blogged about how to activate Pinterest Web Analytics. Here’s a quick walkthrough of the available information in the tool.

Upon activating Pinterest Web Analytics and waiting a few days for data to populate, business page administrators will have access to data on four tabs, as follows. We’ll talk about each of the four tabs below.

Site Metrics
Most Recent
Most Repinned
Most Clicked

Site Metrics

Site Metrics include pins, pinners, repins, repinners, impressions, reach, clicks and visitors. Of these metrics, we find clicks and visitors to be the most useful, because a business can quantify how its Pinterest efforts are directly impacting website traffic. The other metrics may be useful for monitoring increased Pinterest engagement over time, or tracking the efforts of a social media push.

Most Recent

The Most Recent tab displays the most recent pins from your site, and we like that business page administrators can drill down to a single day, if you so choose. This tab might be helpful for tracking a site’s seasonal or holiday images. In addition, the Most Recent tab may help you learn if any new site images are picking up traction amongst your Pinterest followers.

Most Repinned

The Most Repinned tab displays the images most repinned from your site.

It may be safe to assume that direct pinners are already familiar with your brand, having visited your site and pinned an image. But repinners may possibly learn about you for the first time via a friend’s pin, so you may want to familiarize yourself with the most re-pinned images. They may be responsible for additional brand awareness.

Most Clicked

The final Pinterest Web Analytics tab is the Most Clicked tab. As we stated above, clicks and visitors are particularly helpful metrics when business page administrators are looking to quantify Pinterest efforts. The Most Clicked tab enables you to find out which of your images is most effective at driving traffic back to your site.

Have you been using Pinterest analytics to gain insight? Let us know in the comments!

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: Google Display Network Preview

September 25, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: Hi, I am running online advertising for a client and am using Google’s Display Network. I have the client asking for verification that the display ads are running, but Google does not provide an ad preview tool. How can I preview Ads for my client in order to send them a screen grab?

A: Unfortunately, Google does not provide an Ad preview tool for the display network as it does for search, nor are we aware of a third-party tool for this job. Below are two possible workarounds:

(1) AdWords “Preview”

To “preview” the Ad within AdWords, you’ll be confined to looking at just the ad itself without the context of placement in the display network. For basic text ads, this will involve taking a screen clipping of the ad itself. Since one normally uploads image ads, there is no reason to take a screen clipping of this within AdWords as it will be the same as the one you uploaded. If you are using animated ads, you may have an additional option to preview: In the “Ads” tab click the “View Full Size Display Ad” link beside an ad and then in the pop-up click “Create External Link” button which you can send to your client to preview the ad(s).

(2) Live Verification

If your client needs to see the ad in context of a website, you’ll need to view one live. To see the list of sites that are showing your ad, visit the “Display Network” tab and then “Placements.” This section of AdWords will tell you most of the sites that Google is showing your ad on. Visit the sites and refresh the page repeatedly until you see an example of your ad on display. You’ll need a bit of patience as the ad may not show immediately. Also be aware of the following factors:

If you are only running remarketing campaigns, be sure to visit the page(s) that contain the remarketing code so you become a member of the audience, otherwise the ad won’t display for you.
If you are using geo-targeting and you are not in a targeted location, you’ll either need to broaden the target for a brief period, or attempt to “fake” your location for Google. Google determines a user’s location for the display network using several factors. There is one that you can easily control: If you have a Google account, you can change your declared location and you may be served ads from that location. You can change your Google account location by clicking this link.
Be sure when checking for the ad that your budget did not max out for the day.