Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Does Pinterest drive sales and traffic?
Today someone on Twitter was asking for data about Pinterest driving sales. I did what he could've done in the first place: Fired up a search and wrote in some magic words.
The results of my search were much more interesting than I thought. According to different sources of data Pinterest was driving e-commerce sales and giving bump in traffic.
I've noticed the similar effect: Pinterest does drive traffic even to my small blog. The pins don't even have to be repinned over and over again, it's quite enough I share my blog posts to those who follow my boards on Pinterest.
Pinterest driving traffic to your site
A study says Pinterest drives more traffic to women's sites than Facebook. Unfortunately for advertisers and website owners trying to sell the ad space it appears that Pinterest users are less likely to click ads.
Shareaholic reported last year that Pinterest drove more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. During their study period the referral traffic from Pinterest was on a rise.
Alexandra Samuel gives a summary of tactics to drive sales through Pinterest on Harvard Business Review.
According to Samuel it's all about personal pinning (vs. brand pinning), engaging with recent pinners, pinning deals and packing the pinned images with information. Similar tactics would possibly help with simply driving traffic to a blog.
Pinterest driving in-store sales
The most surprising thing is there's a study that suggested Pinterest also drives sales for offline retail stores. How Pinterest Puts People in Stores tells that 21% of Pinterest users they surveyed had bought an item in a store after pinning it.
The study showcases user stories, where pinners use their and other's boards for finding things they want or stumbling upon things they later get from stores. Over a third of surveyed pinners said pinning the items influenced their purchase a lot and over 40% assessed that pinning influenced their purchase a little.
Pinterest driving web store sales
A popular web store service Shopify had collected data from 25 000 stores.
After analyzing the data it was clear to them: Pinterest was driving not only traffic but also sales to Shopify stores. Throughout the time analyzed referral traffic to stores was as high as from Twitter, yet much less than from Facebook.
What's more interesting is that the average order price was highest for referrals coming from Pinterest. Buyers finding the stores and items through Pinterest were spending $80 per order, when Facebook referrals got only $40 on average.
That said Pinterest referrals were much more profitable than any others.
Last year Boticca.com, a fashion accessory store, revealed statistics about buying habits of Pinterest users vs Facebook users.
According to their study Pinterest users were high spenders. On average they were buying things for a hefty $180. At the same time Facebook users weren't spending even half of that.
Pinterest was influencing 10% of transactions, beating Facebook with a couple of percents. Pinterest was also bringing Boticca much more new customers than others.
Pinterest appears to be introducing new customers to retailers rather than only enhancing previous buying habits.
However Boticca's data also shows Pinterest users aren't perfect customers. They were less engaged and spent very little time on the site. The conversion rate was lower from Pinterest than any other channels and the bounce rate was higher.
What to take out of this
Pinterest isn't perfect nor the only way to drive sales or create traffic for you website. That said it appears to have been an effective in both accounts and needs not to be ignored.
Additionally Pinterest can help getting in-store sales, as the pinners find items to purchase later.
According to all this different data most sales are found from other people's boards, rather than brand's own pins. However pinning your own articles and items have proved to be effective too.
As any other popular social media site Pinterest has potential of helping your website, web business or even offline business. It's not magic and it requires your own effort too.
Edit 18.10.2013: Oct 15, right after I published this post, Shareaholic published a study saying Pinterest referral traffic has risen way over 60%. This suggest that Pinterest drives even more traffic now than in past. Check out the full report for more interesting referral traffic stats.
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