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Pinterest Stats Tanked Starting August 9th

madincrafts
Just visiting

All of my Pinterest stats fell off a cliff on August 9 (Impressions, Clicks, Engagement, etc.). I am also seeing a corresponding dropoff in my GA analytics for my website. Pinterest Help says there is nothing flagging my site, and that this is the normal ebb and flow of traffic, but I can't imagine that is the case.

I'd so appreciate any insight or help anyone could offer!

 

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JanaOMedia
Marvel

Hi @madincrafts! Welcome to the PBC! 

It is true that ebbs and flows are quite normal. But Pinterest has also changed so much in the past few years...

The way platform works... the way users use Pinterest... the types of calls to action that work well on our pins... the types of creative that performs well... just to mention a few things that have shifted a lot. 

It's probably time to re-assess your strategy. A few suggestions:

  • Lean more into the Creative best practices that Pinterest shares with us (especially for Idea pins - one big tip would be to use more video, especially on slide 1 of your pins). 
  • Learn more about what calls to action (CTAs) are working these days with Idea pins, and how the "pinner journey" works with Idea pins... (meaning that Idea pins help us grow our Pinterest accounts; they aren't really designed to drive traffic to our sites). Diversify the CTAs you're using. 
  • Be sure your profile is optimized for search and for also visually-optimized for next steps that you want them to take. Idea pins often lead people to our profiles, so from there your pinners should be able to tell what to do next with you! 

Here are some good resources for you - so you can get up to speed on current best practices: 

Creative Best Practices: 

https://business.pinterest.com/en-us/creative-best-practices/ 

How to grow / build and audience on Pinterest:

https://business.pinterest.com/en-us/blog/how-to-build-audience-pinterest/

How to grow with Saves: 

https://business.pinterest.com/en-gb/blog/ways-to-grow-your-audience-with-saves/ 

 

I hope these help you re-calibrate! Welcome again to this space. We are here to support, so feel free to post questions as you go. 

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14 Replies
JanaOMedia
Marvel

Hi @madincrafts! Welcome to the PBC! 

It is true that ebbs and flows are quite normal. But Pinterest has also changed so much in the past few years...

The way platform works... the way users use Pinterest... the types of calls to action that work well on our pins... the types of creative that performs well... just to mention a few things that have shifted a lot. 

It's probably time to re-assess your strategy. A few suggestions:

  • Lean more into the Creative best practices that Pinterest shares with us (especially for Idea pins - one big tip would be to use more video, especially on slide 1 of your pins). 
  • Learn more about what calls to action (CTAs) are working these days with Idea pins, and how the "pinner journey" works with Idea pins... (meaning that Idea pins help us grow our Pinterest accounts; they aren't really designed to drive traffic to our sites). Diversify the CTAs you're using. 
  • Be sure your profile is optimized for search and for also visually-optimized for next steps that you want them to take. Idea pins often lead people to our profiles, so from there your pinners should be able to tell what to do next with you! 

Here are some good resources for you - so you can get up to speed on current best practices: 

Creative Best Practices: 

https://business.pinterest.com/en-us/creative-best-practices/ 

How to grow / build and audience on Pinterest:

https://business.pinterest.com/en-us/blog/how-to-build-audience-pinterest/

How to grow with Saves: 

https://business.pinterest.com/en-gb/blog/ways-to-grow-your-audience-with-saves/ 

 

I hope these help you re-calibrate! Welcome again to this space. We are here to support, so feel free to post questions as you go. 

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madincrafts
Just visiting

Thank you for taking the time to respond!

This is not a normal lowering of engagement, etc. All of my stats dropped 90% over the course of one day, from August 5th to August 6th, and have stayed down. My traffic was fine (not great, but okay) leading up to August 6th, and I have not changed anything in regard to my Pinterest strategy that would correspond with a sudden drop.

I am not sure how to share images here, but you can see the dramatic drops on this page I put together. Please take a look to see what I am talking about.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFLvufZWq4/oivc8CXgjcGsHkeixdcJDg/view?utm_content=DAFLvufZWq4&utm_cam...

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sarawatsonim
Just visiting

@madincrafts 

This absolutely happened to me on the same date. I posted about it a couple of weeks ago here and got the same canned responses as you both on here and through the help. No one is helping or acknowledging there is an issue. It is not ebbs and flows, I have been on here 10 years and am aware of ebbs and flows. It was like an 80% drop immediately and getting lower every day. It wasn't a viral pin. My GA analytics show a massive decline in visits, and when I use my daughter's Pinterest account to search my pins they do not come up in the search. Even when I search my website name, other people's pins come up instead, or if they are my image, it is something someone stole or a pin that does not go to my site. If Pinterest is a search engine and I am literally typing the keyword of a post title plus my website name, good user experience tells me that my pin should show up first or at least near the top. Not someone else's on a topic that I am not searching for. That defeats the point of searching something. It is crazy that no one is acknowledging this, and now that I see yours happened on the same date I am starting to wonder what took place to basically push us out of the search. It is devastating to my website and all the thousands of pins that I provided on this site.

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JanaOMedia
Marvel

@madincrafts - thanks for sharing the screenshot. I agree that those are big drops.

Please note that I don't have any "insider info," as I'm a Pinterest Creator and marketer like you are. But I've seen a LOT of accounts, and I stay on top of up-to-date strategies, etc. So my goal here is to do my best to help you think through this - so you can make an action plan. 

And I do think you may want to consider changing some things about what you're doing on Pinterest.

You mentioned above that you haven't changed anything - but the stats have dropped. And I soooooooo get that that is frustrating, because it has happened to clients and students of mine, too. But when we DO make changes to their strategies and start leaning more into current best practices on the platform, we have seen improvements. 

So, I still would encourage you to consider some of my suggestions above (video, higher Idea pin ratio, more up-to-date calls to action, etc) - and see if making some changes will help you see your metrics increase.

Keep in mind, you may not see them go back up to what they were... and it may take time to experiment with layering in new, updated tactics and strategies. So, it may be a process. But I think it will be well worth it! 

Good luck! 

 

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terezatoledo
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

Hi @madincrafts and @sarawatsonim , seeing those drops sure is frustrating.

As Pinterest Pioneers, we wish we had access to inside info, specially info related to what's happening on the back end of the platform. But we are in the same boat as you. 

like many people here, I'm noticing view drops, but I'm also noticing some stats not dropping as much. Aside from waiting to hear back from support (there's no way around it), I'd take a look at wich content is dropping views.

In the past I've seen this happening to one account and was able to find out that the loss of views was because of some very old pins that used to have lots of views and all a sudden not anymore. The newer content was taking over, but at a slower rate.

I'm not saying that this is the case here. I just wanted to illustrate that there are a lot of things out of our control.

There's also user behavior, content fatigue, new trends and of course, Pinterest changes.

As @JanaOMedia said above, it's always a great idea to observe what Pinterest has been telling us in terms of content and platform changes. Things that used to work as a charm before, don't work anymore. Images, content,  pin style do get overused and sometimes outdated. All of this is from observations and watching multiple accounts over the last 6 years. 

As of how pin distribution works, it's always a good idea to take a look at what Pinterest tells us here: https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/pin-performance-and-distribution 

What I'm doing for myself, clients and students, is to look deeper and lean into revamping my content and content delivery instead of recycling the same content. This may not have an immediate effect, but it's showing overall results.

 

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sarawatsonim
Just visiting

I get that things change. I adopt the best practices and follow the trends. I don't recycle old content, I put out new content several times a week for each and every single new blog post that goes out. I even do the idea pins each time as well even though they don't direct website traffic. This wasn't people getting bored or looking for new things, this was literally getting thousands of website visits per day from Pinterest, tons of follows, likes, and comments to literally 23 visits a day within a 24 hour span where is has been staying since August 9th. This is about my pins no longer being found in a search in a matter of 24 hours. It wasn't from lack of interest and a slow dwindle. It was boom, no one was seeing my stuff anymore. My followers on Instagram say that they can no longer find my pins unless they go directly to my account so that right there is the problem. There was some shift at the beginning of August that obviously pushed us out of search. When I search my stuff I get results that aren't what I asked for, and that are many years old, so if they are trying to improve user experience, that isn't the way to do it.  

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JanaOMedia
Marvel

@sarawatsonim - I'm sorry you're frustrated with what you're seeing. I wish I had all the answers!  

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chillnglow
Posts regularly

Hi @madincrafts and @sarawatsonim 

Sorry you both had to get caught up in this problem. You're certainly not alone here. 

This thing has been happening for a while now, and everyone, both here and in support, seem to care more about denying it, than actually looking into the issue. 

My account got hit with this issue since march 13... I've lost over 90% of my traffic and impressions, still trying to recover. 

It seems we're being de-indexed for some reason, or maybe no reason at all. I've tried to brainstorm and troubleshoot the cause of the problem, all to no avail. 

It's certainly not fresh content. I used to pin ONLY fresh content, and I used to do that every day.. and I still got hit. 

It's certainly not ebbs and flows. I know what ebbs and flows look like.. and they certainly don't lead to a 90% decline in stats, especially for big accounts, having millions of monthly viewers.

It's not seasonal content or trends either. I've seen both your profiles, and you're well aware of trends and use them to your advantage. 

Whatever the problem, or lack thereof is, it's not in any way obvious, and yet we're still being punished for it.

The most annoying part, is the fact that the actual spammers, that steal our pins and redirect to either smore, medium or some other generic site, are outranking us. It makes absolutely no sense. And I wish Pinterest would actually look into this issue, rather than trying to play it off as something else that it's not.

Whatever their plan was, it's ending up negatively affecting the people who actually care, and want to contribute something to their platform.

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sarawatsonim
Just visiting

That is exactly what I think it is @chillnglow it is a deindexing for some reason. It almost feels like gaslighting when I message help and they reply with, "there is nothing wrong, and here are the things you can do to make it better." They are taking the onus off of them and putting the burden of their error on our shoulders. There is very obviously something wrong when my pins are not showing up, but I am getting recommended my own pin images that people stole from me.

So, I am not only not showing up in searches but people that are ranking for what I used to are using my images to get traffic to their site (so it is obviously not the images not drawing interest like they are trying to tell me). I don't even understand how they can't figure this out. I can't spend hours each day filing DMCA's, when they aren't willing to help me. It is ridiculous. They also need to find a way to get rid of the images people incorrectly post from your website that go nowhere, just to an image page. It is a terrible user experience on all ends. 

When I use a search engine, I expect to find what I am looking for, not given suggested options that I am not interested in. 

I feel so defeated and done with them. It was a great tool when it worked how it was supposed to, but they have just been going downhill at a rapid rate.

It was built from the free contributions of content creators, and yet they aren't will to help those same people when their system screws up.

I went from almost 15 million monthly impressions (and growing) to 2.6 and dropping daily. People aren't fickle like that. They just don't decide in a 24 hour span to stop searching a topic. Disinterest is a slow decline. When your stats look like they fell off the edge of a cliff, all website developers will tell you that something very specific happened on that date to cause that issue.

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