Pinterest launches new analytics tool for businesses

Social network will provide information about traffic to company websites and activity on Pinterest

Pinterest is notoriously popular among women, but the social network knows that it will need to branch out if it wants to succeed against other heavy hitters in the social media space, like Facebook; Twitter and LinkedIn. Part of that plan was to launch accounts just for businesses, and introduce new tools specifically for those accounts, last year. 

Now Pinterest is making things even sweeter for its business clients by launching a new tool that will help them see how much traffic Pinterest has referred to their websites, Reuters reported late Monday.

The tool will also be able to provide information to business clients regarding activity on their Pinterest accounts, including how frequently users are clicking on their photos. It will be available for free on Tuesday.

For Pinterest to start giving out more insights and research into the effectiveness of its business pages for those clients could be a signal that the network could be moving toward a monetization model that would involve companies paying for some extra features. After all, Pinterest is basically one big advertisement for those companies, with Pinterest not getting any money for it right now. 

Being able to show businesses how much they are benefitting by putting their content onto Pinterest puts the social network in a better position to negotiate.

VatorNews has reached out to Pinterest to find out more details about the tool, and we will update with any further information.

Pinterest business accounts

Pinterest launched business accounts in November, along with a series of tools specifically for those clients, including a verification badge, which is meant to people identify high-quality sources of content and more easily find the business they want in search results.

There also added new buttons and widgets, such as the Pin It button, Follow button, and Profile widget, which are meant to increase engagement from pinners and traffic back the business website.

Pinterest also established resources, including case studies, a set of best practices examples for businesses to follow, and guides for how to use Pinterest in marketing material.

“Thousands of businesses have become part of our community, giving great ideas, content and inspiration to people on Pinterest," Cat Lee, Product Manager at Pinterest, wrote in a blogpost at the time. “We want to help more businesses provide great content on Pinterest and make it easy to pin from their websites."

The social network has not released any statistics regarding how many businesses have signed up for the service.

Other demos for Pinterest

A recent Pew study revealed that nearly 20% of Internet-using women in the Web are on Pinterest. Altogether, 12% of the U.S. population is on Pinterest, which saw its unique monthly visits skyrocket to 48 million in December 2012 from just nine million the year before, according to comScore.

With the lack of men, other startups have been popping up to fill the void, such as Tapiture, which raised $825,000 in seed funding in February. 

But Rick Heitzmann, Pinterest investor and managing director of FirstMark Capital, told my colleague Faith Merino in a recent interview, "The male user base has increased. The use case might be different. I have a few recipes on there. But it started with women, and women know women.”

About Pinterest

San Francisco-based Pinterest was launched in March 2010. The company has raised a total of $338 million since then.

Last month, Pinterest confirmed that it had raised $200 million in a round of funding that was led by Valiant Capital Management, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. The new round valued the company at $2.5 billion.

In January it was the 38th most visited website in the United States, with around 30 million unique visitors.

(Image source: https://blog.hubspot.com)