Pinterest today launched an analytics system to measure how much interest and traffic the red-hot scrapbooking network is sending to other websites. But Pinterest knew the answer before a question had even been asked: Pinterest is driving loads of traffic, and money.
By showing other sites just how valuable it is to them, Pinterest is wisely laying the groundwork to sell advertising.
The “Pinterest Web Analytics” product announced by the social sharing platform today provides a very modest amount of data, showing owners of other websites how many people have pinned to Pinterest from their site, how many people saw those pins, and how many people clicked out from Pinterest to their site. In addition, site owners will get to see which items on their site have been pinned most frequently and most recently.
There have been plenty of indications that, in aggregate, these numbers will show Pinterest to be a robust driver of valuable traffic. A survey last year by e-commerce backend RichRelevance found that Pinterest users were the second biggest source of social traffic but drove by far the largest orders, spending nearly twice as much as Facebook users and more than twice as much as Twitter users. Bottica.com, a network of independent jewelry and fashion sites, similarly reported that Pinterest brought in a higher proportion of new users than Facebook and that those users spent more than twice as much on average. Cosmetics retailer Sephora, meanwhile, this year said that Pinterest users spend 15 times more than Facebook users.
Yet Pinterest is not making any money off the value it creates, and only began to make revenue a priority last month after raising $200 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. An early step down the road to profit appears to be the analytics. By providing engagement metrics to less sophisticated e-commerce sites, Pinterest can create more true believers like Sephora, true believers which are in turn potential advertisers. “We’re building the foundations to monetize,” CEO Ben Silbermann told The Wall Street Journal last month, prior to the analytics launch.
In another, more modest move to lay the foundation for revenue, Pinterest in November rolled out special accounts for businesses, complete with verification badges and “pin-it” buttons.
For now, Pinterest seems content with such baby steps; showing off the size and eagerness of its ready-to-shop community is a natural opening gambit. But it won’t be long before for Pinterest asks business owners to take out their wallets. Being the coolest social network is important to Pinterest's owners primarily as a means to becoming the richest.
