Pinterest Adds Business Insights API to Select “Marketing Technology Developers”

After another $200m funding round for Pinterest on May 15 (there were two others in 2013), Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said “Pinterest has a vision of solving discovery and helping everyone find things they’ll love. This new investment gives us additional resources to realize our vision.”

Five days later on May 20, software engineer Steve Cohen announced on the Pinterest blog that seven “Marketing Technology Developers” would receive access to a digital pipeline known as the Business Insights API (Application Programming Interface).

What this means in English is that we can expect a significant advancement in the way businesses can analyze metrics on Pinterest.

What’s New

While traditional Pinterest metrics will still be offered for free, you’ll likely have to pony up for the additional services of Salesforce, Hootsuite, Spredfast, Percolate, Piqora, Curalate or Tailwind.

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The difference lies in what’s currently offered vs. what the API has the potential to uncover. As of now, your business is free to look at very basic statistics on Pinterest – the number of pins, pinners, repins, repinners, impressions, reach, clicks and visitors per day are all available (however, this information is based on data from your website, not content published to the channel).

With Business Insights, brands will be able to clearly see the most repinned & liked pins, improved demographic data, how repins extend outwards to thousands, and perhaps most importantly, which pins are trending, driving reach on the channel, and the largest traffic to your website. In addition, brands will also have the capability to gather more insight in to how their brand compares to other competitors.

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What Does It Mean for Brands?

Considering Pinterest will likely have 40 million monthly active users in the U.S. by the end of 2014, this is a great way for brands to target their content to resonate with Pinterest’s audience – of which, 30 million were women at the end of 2013. Insights will give brands the ability to see what’s most viral. It’s also been noted that Pinterest generates more traffic as well as four times more money per click than Twitter despite Twitter’s current 255 million active users.

The addition of business insights is key for brands on Pinterest, as brands utilizing the tool will have a way to understand which content will catch consumers eyes, and potentially drive more than the 41% of e-commerce traffic the channel generated last year. This may also mean that Pinterest is far from its original intent of being a “discovery network” and instead becomes the largest e-commerce traffic driver of the future – especially considering Pinterest is on pace to pass Facebook for revenue per visit.



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