Guest room: Three hacks to access your site’s Pinterest statistics
Birmingham blogger Rachel Callahan returns for a second guest post!
Her funny personal blog Grasping for Objectivity in My Subjective Life shares stories from her busy life as an accountant, a wife and a stay-at-home mom to two children.
She also created Alabama Bloggers, which features bloggers and their sites throughout the state.
Her post below digs deeper into Pinterest, giving you ways to access the numbers hidden until now. Learn how you can determine how and how much your blog posts are pinned on this social network.
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By Rachel Callahan
Pinterest is one of the most powerful social networks for bloggers to date. However, it’s still a limited platform, especially when it comes to metrics.
The developers seem to be constantly monkeying with their coding and platforms, making it tricky to navigate and track with any degree of accuracy. Plus, Pinterest hasn’t released its API for developers to make third-party applications.
Being a stats geek who makes blogging decisions based on those statistics — I use StatCounter primarily, with Google Analytics in a far second — it annoys me that I can’t access my Pinterest metrics.
Fear not! I’ve shown you how to use images to help your blog posts stand out on Pinterest. Now, I’ve created three hacks to help you find your Pinterest stats: an easy hack, an intermediate one and a difficult one.
The Easy Hack: Your Pinterest Source Page
Pins for posts from Grasping for Objectivity in My Subjective Life
Every website featured on Pinterest has a source page which shows all of the first-tier pins from your site (no repins, though).
Second-tier pins, repins directly from the original pin, can be seen in a count underneath the photo. Third-tier pins and beyond are not visible from this page.
Example: If Annie pins something from your site, it will show up on your source page. If Betty then repins Annie’s pin, it will show up as a count under Annie’s original pin on your source page. If Carol repins Betty’s repin, you have no way of seeing that from this page.
- http://pinterest.com/source/yoursite.com
Examples:
- http://pinterest.com/source/graspingforobjectivity.com
- http://pinterest.com/source/birminghamblogging.com
- http://pinterest.com/source/jamiebg.blogspot.com
This hack can be unstable: Pinterest often delays updating these source pages, and last week, it limited the historical reach, showing the last few dozen pins from your site. Hopefully, this minor bug will be fixed soon.
Intermediate Hack: How to Get Your Pinterest Pin Count Back
The Pinterest “Pin It” Button is supposed to have the optional feature of displaying pin count. It’s the only way to see the comprehensive total of all pins on all tiers.
A few months ago, the code quit displaying those numbers. After studying the code, I figured out how to get the counts back.
1. Go to Pinterest’s Pin It Button Page.
- Scroll to the “Pin It Button for Websites” section.
- Enter the URL of your post, the URL of the image to be pinned and the pin description.
- Select “Horizontal” for the Pin Count drop-down box.
2. Copy the code it gives you, then go to your post and paste it into the HTML view. For example:
- URL of page to pin: http://www.graspingforobjectivity.com/2012/05/read-aloud.html
- URL of image to pin:
http://www.graspingforobjectivity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/215-Read-Aloud-Books.jpg - Description: 215 Read Aloud Books!
The code is:
<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.graspingforobjectivity.com%2F2012%2F05%2Fread-aloud.html&media=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.graspingforobjectivity.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F06%2F215-Read-Aloud-Books.jpg&description=215%20Read%20Aloud%20Books!" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="horizontal"><img border="0" src="//assets.pinterest.com/images/PinExt.png" title="Pin It" /></a>
3. Add the following snippet to the end of that code:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>
This will include the pin count with your button.
Difficult Hack: Creating Your Own Pinterest Tracking Page
After studying the code to create the pin count hack, I realized that the HTML of the code wasn’t location dependent. That means you can place the Pin It button for a specific post on any page you like.
You can create your own Pinterest tracking page, showing pin counts for multiple posts in one location. I created a tracking page for all my pins.
Grasping for Objectivity’s Pinterest Tracking Page
I copied the Pin It button code from each post and use them all on one page. For example:
<a href="www.graspingforobjectivity.com/2012/05/read-aloud.html">Read-Aloud Books</a>
<a class="pin-it-button" href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.graspingforobjectivity.com%2F2012%2F05%2Fread-aloud.html&media=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.graspingforobjectivity.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F05%2F101-Read-Aloud-Books.jpg&description=101%20Read%20Aloud%20Books!"> Pin It</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>
I can track pin counts for my favorite posts on one page. The downside is that the information is just a real-time snapshot: No Pinterest API means no (easy) way to collect this data over time.
Your only option is to plug in those numbers once a day, week or month in a spreadsheet.
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If you have questions, comment below or email Rachel at graspingforobjectivity@gmail.com.
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Rachel’s previous guest post: How Graphics Can Help You Win Awards and Go Viral
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Follow Rachel online …
Birmingham Blogging Academy 
Great info! I’m pinning this! 🙂
Thanks, Beth!! Anything pinned by you is sure to be successful. You’re my inspiration! (Cue Cheesy Song Here)
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing Rachel!
Thank you so much! I hope it was helpful!
Thank you! Thank you! This is one of the best blog posts I have read. So handy and informational. I will use it all!
Excellent!! I hope it works wonderfully for you!
Hi there, so I figured out how to do the advanced hack and it works. But I have a quick question. I have a pin and a while back the pin counter and another site gave me a certain number of re-pins. And then it just went away and and started from zero again. So I know that my pin number for this re-pin is like really high but I have no way of proving it other than the fact that my stats show all the referrals I get from pinterest. Have you ever had that happen. Like a pin number re-set and go back to zero?
My first thought was: has the URL changed on your post? Did you change your domain? Was there something small that changed, like, for instance, having the # sign at the end of the URL?
I haven’t had it happen before without there being some sort of cause. Can you give me the URL and let me try it on my end to see what I come up with?
I can’t get my pin counts to show up no matter what I do. I copy and paste the codes into post just like the instructions say, and the button works just fine, but I can’t ever get the count to show up. Really frustrating. Any suggestions? I use Blogger.
They have changed their code multiple times, and it is much less stable than it used to be. I now get my pin counts from the SexyBookmarks plugin for WordPress, and it’s stable, but when I’ve tried to install individual pin count buttons, it’s hit or miss. Unfortunately, I do not know of a perfect solution for Blogger.
With that being said, here’s Pinterest’s help page on adding a pin it button. This should have their most recent version of the code:
https://help.pinterest.com/entries/21101982-Add-the-Pin-It-button-to-your-website