Pinterest Pins Drive 25% More Sales Than a Year Ago [New Data]

Do you know how much one pin on Pinterest -- yep, one measly pin -- is worth to your company's bottom line? I'd place a bet that most marketers don't. Most marketers (especially those in the B2B sector) are worried more about the overall growth and success of their Pinterest strategy -- not the unit economics of each pin. And even if marketers did want to track success back to individual pins, Pinterest has notoriously strict rules about putting tracking codes at the end of pin URLs, making individual pin ROI nearly impossible. 

Luckily, with new data from Piqora, we now have a pretty concrete idea of the value of a pin: One pin brings in $0.78 in sales on average -- and that figure's growing. Compared to data pulled a year ago, the value of a pin has grown nearly 25%. 

Almost a dollar per pin? That's pretty exciting ... but that's not all the Piqora found out in its study. Pins are evergreen -- even months after they've been pinned, they're driving traffic and sales. Half of sites visits happen after 3.5 months of the original pin date, and half of the sales happen after 2.5 months of the original pin date.

Yup, that means your Pinterest strategy is just like your blog content: It can drive traffic -- and sales -- back to your website loooong after it was original posted.

To be fair, your results will differ based on what you're pinning and what kind of business model you have. For example, an ecommerce business with a largely female audience will probably get more than $0.78 per pin -- and probably get higher returns over time. (And hey, if you're one of those ecommerce marketers, check out our ecommerce section on Inbound Hub.)

Still, Piqora included a variety of brands (not just ecommerce business), so this data can actually be useful for the rest of us marketers, B2B and B2C alike. So how do we make the most of this data in our day-to-day marketing?

How You Can Use Pinterest to Make Money

Funny enough, this data doesn't mean you should automatically just pour all your resources into the Pinterest bucket. You don't need to pin all the things: You need a solid content strategy that is supplemented with some pinning of your own to help drive and sales back to your site. Why? Because you need something to pin in the first place.

For ecommerce folks, this most likely includes your products or other content to help make a decision to purchase. For B2B folks, this is lead generation content -- ebooks, blog posts, templates, guides, etc. that someone can download for free from your website in exchange for their contact information. The pin itself is only the medium by which people find your content -- you need to have solid content in the first place. 

Once you have content set, you should start adding pins to your own Pinterest account linking back to your products and content, as well as some other content that may not even be about your business. Need some help figuring out what to pin? Check out this ebook.

If you don't have the time our resources to developing a Pinterest page on your own, at the very least, make sure that other people can pin your products and content anyway by including Pinterest social sharing buttons. That's a huge part of driving sales from Pinterest -- you've got to rely on your fans and customers to pin on your behalf. 

And of course, you should track your Pinterest efforts and tie them to your bottom line with closed loop analytics. While you may not be able to track your leads and customers back to individual pins, you will be able to see how your overall Pinterest strategy is paying the bills -- something you and your boss will be excited to see.

How well does Pinterest work for your company? Share your experiences with us in the comments.