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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!

SEO-friendly Web Page Redirection: Notes from Google

September 19, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

At a Google Webmaster Tools hangout with Google’s John Mueller over the summer, we learned of some changes to how Google handles page redirects. This affects recommended SEO best practices for redirection … read on to learn the latest!

For many years, one of the strongest and most consistent recommendations we’ve made is to create a server-side, 301 redirect from old URLs to appropriate new URLs any time a page location changes. This often occurs during site redesigns, but may also be a recommended tactic to handle discontinued products or other removed content. With a 301 redirect in place, Google and other search engines would follow the redirect and replace the old URL with the new URL in its index.

This recommendation continues to hold true for one-to-one redirects from an old URL to the new URL. However, redirecting en masse from multiple old URLs to a single destination page may no longer carry the same authority transfer.

In a Google Webmaster Tools Hangout, webmaster evangelist & Googler John Mueller informed the participants that Google will now detect mass redirects and consider them a soft-404 instead of a 301 redirect. This effectively means Google will not transfer power from the old URLs to the destination URL. Although the desired effect is no longer accomplished by masse redirects, this action will not lead to any penalties on the site.

We recently had an experience of this when a client was unable to create one-for-one redirects to roughly a thousand pages when switching to a new CMS. Our “plan B” recommendation was to redirect these pages to a main category page so users could easily find the new page without much hassle.

Not long after our client implemented the mass redirects, we saw a warning from Google Webmaster Tools saying it had detected an “Increase in soft 404 errors.” When digging into the soft 404 Crawl Errors section in GWT, we could see these URLs listed which all had a 301 redirect to a single category page.

Note that Google suggests that this “creates a poor experience for searchers and search engines.” This may be the case for some instances of doing mass 301 redirects, but in our case, we considered it to be the best available option for the user experience. Since there is no penalty for mass redirects, they continue to be an option, on a case-by-case basis. However, passing SEO authority from a set of multiple URLs to a single destination page is no longer an option – at least on Google.