Pinterest in gas

The Pinterest section in the left-hand menu sums up how your Pinterest profile is doing and how individual pins perform. It covers both the organic and the advertising side: besides the profile overview and the list of pins, you also find paid campaigns here, if your plan includes them. This article describes what each page of the section shows and how to read its numbers. Signing in to Pinterest and picking a profile is described in the article Connecting a Pinterest account.

Before you start

• A Pinterest profile has to be linked to the customer account. Until it is, the Pinterest item still appears in the menu, but when you open it you see a red warning No profile.
• gas downloads the data on its own, several times a day. You do not have to start anything.
• The advertising part depends on your plan. The Ad campaigns submenu appears only if your plan or a purchased add-on includes it. If you do not see it and you do advertise on Pinterest, write to us through the contact form.
• Every role in the customer account may view the data, so Administrator, User and Viewer alike.

At the top of every page in the section there are controls that apply to the whole page:

• The profile switcher next to the page name. It decides whose numbers you see. On the Pins page and in the lists in the advertising part you can select several profiles or accounts at once.
• The period selection (Last 7 days, Last 28 days, Last 90 days, Custom range and others).
• A button to reload the data, and for graphs a choice of step (Day, Week, Month).

Overview

The Pinterest → Overview page is a dashboard made of tiles. In the default layout there are three tiles with a single number (Followers, Engagements and Pins, meaning the number of published pins) and two tiles with a graph for the selected period (Impressions and Saved).

You can adjust the layout. In the actions menu in the top right corner you add a tile with the Add widget button (you pick a metric, a profile and whether it should be shown as a Value or as a Graph), the Edit layout button lets you move tiles around and Reset to default layout restores the original arrangement. gas remembers the setting for your user account.

Profile metrics

Below the overview the menu offers four separate pages, each with one profile metric, a graph of its development and summary cards (Total or Average, Short-term trend and Long-term trend). The graph can be exported to an image, PDF or a table.

• Followers is the number of people who follow your profile. It is the state on a given day, not the increase, so the curve usually just rises slowly.
• Engagements is the number of interactions with the profile's pins as Pinterest itself reports them (saves, click-throughs and other reactions together).
• Impressions is the number of times the profile's pins appeared on people's screens. Careful, on Pinterest this figure does not mean the number of different people.
• Saved is the number of times someone saved your pin to their own board.

Pins

The Pinterest → Pins page is a table of pins published by the selected profile. The columns are Name, Campaigns, Impressions, Saved, Reactions, Comments, Clicks, Click through and Creation time. Through Table view settings you can also switch on the hidden Description column, sort and filter the table and export it to CSV or Excel. Right at the bottom there is a Summary row with the totals for the pins shown.

Clicking a pin name opens its detail in gas, the icon next to it opens the pin directly on Pinterest.

Two things explain most questions about this table:

• The selected period filters pins by publication date, not by when they collected their numbers. If you set Last 7 days, you see only pins published in the last seven days. An older pin that still keeps collecting impressions will not show up in the list. For a broader view choose a longer period or Custom range.
• The numbers for a pin are a summary for the last 90 days, not for the selected period and not for the whole time since publication. Pinterest offers two summaries for every pin: a rolling one for the last 90 days and a lifetime one for the whole existence of the pin. gas shows the rolling 90-day one, because it lets you compare the performance of pins with each other. A more detailed breakdown over time is on the pin detail.

The Campaigns column shows the gas campaigns the pin has been assigned to. The assignment happens automatically based on the campaign hashtag in the pin description and on whether the pin was published during the campaign period. Tourism customers also get a Destination column, which works the same way, just with the destination hashtag.

Pin detail

You open the detail by clicking a pin name in the table. It consists of these parts:

• The pin preview, loaded directly from Pinterest.
• An information panel with the profile, the publication date, the content type and a View on social network link. There are also tags of the linked campaigns and destinations.
• Cards with numbers: Impressions, Saved, Clicks and CTR. Next to CTR there is a question mark explaining that it is the ratio of link clicks to impressions.
• Metric timeline, a graph of daily values. Impressions and Saved are visible right away, and in the legend you can click on further series (Clicks, Click through, Reactions, Comments).
• Daily metric development, a table of the same values day by day. It can be exported.
• Target link with the Open target page and Open pin on Pinterest buttons. When the link contains UTM parameters (tags that tell analytics where a visit came from), gas lists them separately under Link UTM parameters.

The detail can be printed with the printer button in the top right corner.

Ad campaigns

The Ad campaigns submenu is the paid part of Pinterest. It works with an ad account, not with a profile, so it has its own account switcher. Unlike in the organic part, the default period here ends today.

Overview

The same dashboard as for the profile, only with advertising metrics. In the default layout there are two tiles with a graph (Impressions and Spend) and three tiles with a single number (Reach, Conversions and Video views). Reach is the number of people who saw the ad, whereas Impressions is the total number of times it was displayed, so it tends to be higher.

Campaigns

A table of the ad account's campaigns with the columns Name, Impressions, Reach, Spend, Conversions, CTR and Start time. You switch on the hidden End time and Creation time columns in the table view settings. When you have several ad accounts selected in the switcher, a column with the account name is added.

A campaign does not have its own detail page. Clicking its name takes you to the list of ads narrowed down to that campaign.

The numeric columns are summed up for the selected period, and the list shows campaigns that started during the selected period.

Ads

A table of individual ads with the columns Name, Campaigns, Impressions, Reach, Spend, Conversions, CTR and Creation time. You switch on the hidden Status and Creative type columns in the table view settings.

When you get here by clicking through from a campaign, above the table there is a bar Showing only ads from campaign … with a Show all ads button that removes the restriction.

Ad detail

Clicking an ad name opens its detail. It looks the same as a pin detail, only with advertising numbers: Spend, Impressions, Reach, CTR, Conversions and, for videos, also Video views. Then follows the Metric timeline graph, the Daily metric development table and the Target link card.

The preview shows the pin the ad promotes. Pinterest does not release the ad's own image through its interface for applications, so the promoted pin is the only thing that can be displayed.

Next to CTR there is a question mark explaining that it is an average of the daily values reported by Pinterest. Pinterest does not provide the number of clicks separately, so CTR cannot be recalculated from the number of impressions. Small differences from the figure in the Pinterest interface are therefore to be expected.

Where the numbers come from

All the numbers in the Pinterest section are sent by Pinterest, gas only stores and displays them. That has several consequences that are often mistaken for an error:

• Today is missing. The day that is currently in progress or has just ended is still being processed by Pinterest, which marks it as incomplete. gas stores only days that Pinterest marks as finished. The Pinterest help states that loading the data can take up to 48 hours. That is why the default period in the organic part ends three days back.
• The history goes 90 days back. In its interface for applications Pinterest releases daily statistics for the last 90 days at most. gas keeps storing them, so over time you will see a longer series, but for a freshly linked profile the history starts roughly 90 days back. Older numbers cannot be filled in, Pinterest will not release them.
• Days are counted in universal time (UTC). For Pinterest the day boundary is midnight UTC, which in the Czech Republic is one hour earlier, and two hours earlier in summer, than our midnight. Anything that happens shortly after Czech midnight still falls into the previous day for Pinterest. You will not notice it in weekly or monthly totals, but when comparing individual days it explains small differences from the Pinterest interface.
• The summary for a pin and the daily series are two different numbers. The summary in the table column and on the detail cards is a rolling one for the last 90 days. The graph and the daily table on the detail show values day by day. For a pin older than 90 days the summary will therefore never reach the lifetime figure that Pinterest reports about the pin in its own overviews.

Common problems

I can see the Pinterest section, but instead of data there is a No profile warning

No Pinterest profile is linked to the customer account yet. The section always appears in the menu, even without a link. Linking is done in Settings → Connected services → Pinterest accounts; the procedure is described in the article Connecting a Pinterest account.

I cannot see the Ad campaigns submenu at all

The advertising part depends on your plan. If neither your plan nor an add-on includes it, the item does not appear in the menu, even if an ad account is linked. Write to us through the contact form and we will advise which plan includes it.

A profile is greyed out in the switcher and cannot be selected

Your plan has a limited number of profiles per network and this profile no longer fits within the limit. Either unlink a profile you do not need, or contact us through the contact form about raising the limit.

The Pins table is empty even though we do have pins

The selected period filters pins by publication date. If a short period is set and you published nothing in it, the table is empty. Switch the period to a longer one, for example Last 90 days, or use Custom range.

The numbers for a pin do not match what Pinterest shows

For a pin, gas shows a rolling summary for the last 90 days, whereas Pinterest in its own overviews often shows the total for the whole time since the pin was published. For pins older than 90 days the two figures therefore diverge, and the difference grows over time. It is not an error, they are two different views.

The last one to three days are missing from the graph

Pinterest is still processing these days and does not release them through its interface for applications. They will fill in by themselves as soon as Pinterest closes them, usually within two days. That is also why the default period of the organic part ends three days back.

A campaign is missing from the list even though it is running on Pinterest

The campaign list follows the selected period and shows campaigns that started within it. A long-running campaign launched a year ago will therefore not appear in the Last 7 days period. Set a longer period or a Custom range that includes the start of the campaign.

A campaign or an ad shows nothing but zeros

The numeric columns are summed up only for the selected period. If the campaign was not running or spent nothing in it, the values are zero even though the campaign has results otherwise. Widen the period.

The data has stopped completely

Most often the access to Pinterest has expired or been revoked. In Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts such an account has a Paused tag. Click on it and then on Reconnect; that signs you in again and the downloading restarts. If you do not restore the connection, gas will also warn you with a notification, and once the period stated in the notification has passed it will delete the related data.

The pin preview does not appear, there is only a grey frame with a button

The preview is loaded directly from Pinterest, which may use third-party cookies for it. Until you give your consent, gas will not load it. Click Show preview and the preview will appear.

The graph and the daily table are missing on mobile

Both the pin detail and the ad detail show the graph and the daily table only on a computer, on a phone they would not fit on the screen. Instead, on a phone there is a note asking you to open the page in a browser on a computer. The cards with numbers and the target link are available on a phone too.

I cannot find an older pin in the list

gas downloads the profile's pins in batches and skips pins you saved from someone else (repins), because they are not your content. Pins published long before the profile was linked therefore do not have to appear in the list. If a specific pin is missing, write to us through the contact form and we will look into it.

A campaign has not been assigned to a pin

Pins are matched to gas campaigns by the campaign hashtag in the pin description. When the hashtag is missing from the description, is written differently, or the pin was published outside the campaign period, the Campaigns column stays empty. Check the hashtag on the campaign and in the pin description.

I do not have the Destination column in the table

The Destination column appears only to tourism customer accounts that have destinations set up. For other accounts only the Campaigns column makes sense.