analytics

Pinterest is one of the most addicting networks out there (I swear I don’t have it open in a second window as I’m writing this post…), but while it functions well for hobby pinners, it doesn’t give content creators many options for tracking Pinterest marketing efforts. Enter Pinerly. This Pinterest analytics and marketing site received 36,000 signups within one week of launching and, so far, its 500 beta testers (of which I am one) have created over 1,000 campaigns to track pin performance.

Pinterest is an AMAZING marketing tool for digital content creators (and we’ll actually be releasing a free ebook covering that topic soon – stay tuned). Pinerly is part of that equation, at least in my opinion. So I sat down with Pinerly’s Rick Kats to talk more about this site and how it can help pinners build a bigger following on Pinterest, drive more traffic back to their content, and more.

Allison: For people who don’t know, tell us a little about yourself and Pinerly.

Rick: My name is Rick Kats, CEO of Pinerly. Pinerly is an analytics dashboard for online visual content sharing platforms – starting with Pinterest. We provide tools to allow users to post content and easily compare the virality, reach, and engagement of each campaign. Designed with the simplicity to make it “just work,” Pinerly allows brands, bloggers, marketers, sellers, and agencies to focus more on their customers/content while optimizing their posts to increase on their returns.

How did you come up with the idea for Pinerly?

The inspiration behind Pinerly came about when we were using Pinterest to market our old business (www.setnight.com) and noticed that our traffic increase by 30%. We really loved Pinterest from day 1 and enjoyed how friendly the demographic that uses it really is. Although it was a lot of fun, our biggest pain was trying to measure the amount of traffic brought to us from certain pins (ROI – or return on our time). This is the fundamental reason why we started Pinerly. There is a nice phrase that we saw some time ago “if you cannot measure it, then it’s just a hobby.” We believe that it’s completely true and are creating the tool that we wished we had for ourselves when trying to get more exposure to our brand.

I think the “Pinalytics” section is extremely helpful for online content creators who want to see how well their links are doing. I love how it shows your total reach, based on others who have also pinned it. Can you talk to me a little about how the Pinalytics section works and how content creators can best use it?

The campaign and pinalytics is certainly one of the most compelling features on Pinerly. What we allow you to do is easily measure click-throughs, re-pins, and likes on a pin that is pinned through Pinerly. In a similar process to Pinterest, you select an image or input a URL to fetch the images, add a description, add a destination URL and then post the pin onto Pinterest. Once you do this, you are able to easily compare the campaigns against each other and see which work better and try to understand why. Although this may seem like a simple concept, there is a lot that we (and other brands) have learned about our posts and now do more of to optimize on our postings. We talk about some of these things here. There is certainly a lot to be understood in terms of times, descriptions, images and boards to find out what converts best and why.

My First Pinalytics Campaign

The ability to schedule pins is something I think a lot of pinners want, especially people who are using Pinterest to market their content. When will this feature be available?

For the scheduling feature, we are completely dependent on the release of the Pinterest API – ability for third party services to post data to Pinterest. As soon as Pinterest publicly releases its API we will be able to flip the switch and enable this feature.

One of the most important things about Pinterest is to disperse the pins over time. So instead of just pinning everything at once, it would be great to have a way to spread content throughout the day so that even when you are away from the computer, pins that you may have found earlier in the morning will be posted to keep your followers engaged. We hope that this will allow many avid pinners do all of their pinning in one time and concentrate more on the things that matter (spend time engaging with their followers, customers, users, or even with their family =) )

I also noticed in a recent email you sent out, you mentioned a Pinerly button. What can you tell us about it? Will this be similar to the current Pin It button that a lot of people already use?

Yes! But even more exciting, it’ll be a “Pinerly It” button that will now allow you to pin things at the same ease as the Pin It button and will tie directly into your pinalytics so that you can basically create campaigns on the fly. We’ll also be tying in other cool features like the scheduling into this as well.

Currently, Pinerly is not open to the public, but you do allow people to get access sooner by promoting it to their friends. You’ve come under fire for asking people to promote in order to move up on the waiting list. What is your response to those critics?

I think it’s really easy to forget that there are real people behind Pinerly and that sometimes there are things that you really just can’t expect. We wrote a full response with all of our thoughts here: http://not99.posterous.com/all-cards-on-the-table.

What else can we expect from Pinerly in the future?

We’ve really got some really really exciting things in the works (and I’m not just saying that =) )

1) Pinerly Bookmarklet: Discussed above.

2) Scheduling: Also discussed above!

3) Multiple Accounts: Ability to manage multiple Pinterest accounts through Pinerly. The idea is to provide a seamless way to control multiple business accounts or personal accounts simultaneously and easily switch between them to making posting content even easier.

We’ve also got things like monitoring, campaign analysis and recommendations, and a lot more coming… so stay tuned!

Thanks all of the great information, Rick! I’m super excited to see how Pinerly keeps evolving, and I hope you’ll keep us updated!