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Extreme drop in impressions around March 13, 2022 (this can't be normal)

lifesavvysite
Just visiting

PLEASE HELP!

On March 13, 2022, our Pinterest account experienced a very sudden and extreme loss in performance. Based on the graph below, you can clearly see that something major occurred to our account in the 24-48 hrs leading up to March 13, 2022:

screenshot-analytics.pinterest.com-2022.06.23-16_28_51.png

All of our key performance metrics (impressions, engagements, outbound clicks, engaged audience, etc.) have all completely tanked 😳 and our account has been suffering for months now! We are following all of Pinterest’s best practices and recommendations, and publishing new and fresh content every day. But all of our new pins are getting extremely low impressions (20-50). Are we stuck in Pinterest's Spam filter?

Are there any other reasons you can think of? 🤔

I reached out to Pinterest support for a second time today. Their first response was basically their canned response saying this was due to "ebbs and flows” with content distribution. This can NOT be the case based on what I'm seeing in the data. I would love someone else's take on this - do you think this sudden drop in performance looks normal?

Our Pinterest account is very young, we launched in August 2021 and within 8 months grew our impressions and traffic by over 256%. Everything was going great until this happened.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue and successfully resolved it? Or does anyone have any recommendations on how I can solve this besides me contacting the Pinterest support team every single day? Here's our Pinterest profile if that helps. Thanks in advance for any support!

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1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
bodymindmood
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

@lifesavvysite 

Hi there glad you made it to the PBC!

I read your post and looked at the photo you posted - I am sorry that your having these problems - know that you are not alone.

What I can tell you from my own experiences and other Pinterest Users I know here in the PBC and on Pinterest is that it truly is 'normal' there are these up and downs and we all have experienced them in one form or another. I have reached 1 million impressions to all of sudden drop down to 30,000 impressions for no reason. I have personally experienced drops in impressions and within 3 to 4 weeks the impressions come back up and to be honest I have never reached out to support on this issue as I have found that the issues tend to fix themselves without intervention. No, I don't believe you are caught in a Spam Filter or Shadowbanned whatever that is.

I think your account is experiencing what a lot of us have experienced in our time here on Pinterest and I honestly would do a wait and see or the other alternative is to keep a line open with Support to see if there is something they can help you with.

I would also suggest running one ad with an Idea Pin - I have just started yesterday on an Idea Pin that I created a while ago and so far response has been really good I have to wait and see the stats which takes a day or two to roll in but I already see a big uptick in impressions.

Let me know your thoughts and I am tagging in a few other people to hear their thoughts on this perhaps they can provide some good insight on this. @simplepinmedia actually did an instagram today my time (UK) about impressions and frankly being wonderfully honest about the fact that impressions go up and down for everybody.

@michaelbliss @pinterestmarketingexpert @everydaylifewithlaura @terezatoledo @andrealidesigns @thehalcyonhive @simplepinmedia 

Lisa

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15 Replies
bodymindmood
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

@lifesavvysite 

Hi there glad you made it to the PBC!

I read your post and looked at the photo you posted - I am sorry that your having these problems - know that you are not alone.

What I can tell you from my own experiences and other Pinterest Users I know here in the PBC and on Pinterest is that it truly is 'normal' there are these up and downs and we all have experienced them in one form or another. I have reached 1 million impressions to all of sudden drop down to 30,000 impressions for no reason. I have personally experienced drops in impressions and within 3 to 4 weeks the impressions come back up and to be honest I have never reached out to support on this issue as I have found that the issues tend to fix themselves without intervention. No, I don't believe you are caught in a Spam Filter or Shadowbanned whatever that is.

I think your account is experiencing what a lot of us have experienced in our time here on Pinterest and I honestly would do a wait and see or the other alternative is to keep a line open with Support to see if there is something they can help you with.

I would also suggest running one ad with an Idea Pin - I have just started yesterday on an Idea Pin that I created a while ago and so far response has been really good I have to wait and see the stats which takes a day or two to roll in but I already see a big uptick in impressions.

Let me know your thoughts and I am tagging in a few other people to hear their thoughts on this perhaps they can provide some good insight on this. @simplepinmedia actually did an instagram today my time (UK) about impressions and frankly being wonderfully honest about the fact that impressions go up and down for everybody.

@michaelbliss @pinterestmarketingexpert @everydaylifewithlaura @terezatoledo @andrealidesigns @thehalcyonhive @simplepinmedia 

Lisa

4 Kudos
terezatoledo
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

@lifesavvysite , welcome to the PBC!
Thanks for the tag @bodymindmood 
Aside from fluctuations and drops happen (I've seen many across different niches and times), It's hard to tell what's happening from the screenshot and without taking a look at the account.

Things to consider: are you pinning your content only or content from other creators? What's your niche? Are people currently searching for what you offer (seasonality counts)? Are you repinning content to different boards or creating unique fresh images? Did you have pins that went viral and then died off? Has your website been unclaimed? Have URLs changed?

I understand your boss wants you to fix the issue, but it may not be that simple.

Meanwhile, the best practice would be to look into these factors and continue creating new and high quality content consistently.

1 Kudo
chillnglow
Posts regularly

@terezatoledo @bodymindmood 

I understand a fluctuation for 3 weeks. But 3 whole months? That's a whole different story. 

Plus, a lot of us who are affected by this actually follow the best practices, like pinning more of our own content, creating fresh pins daily, and even limiting repins or avoiding them altogether. 

The most painful part is that spam accounts seem to rank higher than the original content creators. Most of our original pins get relegated, only to be replaced by stolen versions of those pins, which link to spam sites. 

We've been optimistic for the past 3 months, and nothing seems to be changing. Even the Pinterest help center refuses to acknowledge our issue, and dismisses it as just "ebbs and flows", when we know it's not. 

I'm sorry for the rant, but the situation is really frustrating. 

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andrealidesigns
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

Hi @lifesavvysite @chillnglow,

I completely understand your frustration. I hope to give you some actionable ideas to test and to help thwart your boss's scrutiny. 

It sounds like your account was affected by the March 13th analytics glitch. Everything you're reporting on how your account was affected syncs with others in a similar boat. Mainly that traffic has dropped 70-90%, their pins have disappeared from search results and some niches have been overrun by stolen spam pins.

It's likely this was caused by a ranking update where there's a new parameter set to the ranking algorithm. An example of this is the more efficient distribution of fresh pins where we saw repins lose their ranking in search results. 

However, this update seems to be at an account level, not a pin level. You mentioned that your account is still fairly new so my suggestion to you is to start over with a new account. While you're optimizing the new account, unclaim the old account and wait 5-7 days before claiming your website on the new account. This way you should be able to tell if unclaiming the old account affects traffic at all. 

A new account should bring back ranking pins once you claim your website again. Just be sure you're pinning fresh pins daily to the new account.

I sincerely hope this helps to resolve your issue. 🤓📌

2 Kudos
CulinaryHungary
New member

@andrealidesigns @chillnglow  @lifesavvysite 

Hi there,

The same happened to me in May. I have to admit that I was not active back then, but it dropped from almost 500 000 to 28 000.

I kept pinning in the last 1-2 weeks but nothing happened. I pin my original pins and other people's pins too, I am a food blogger. 

Also, I logged into my personal account and checked my business account (Culinary Hungary ,4.8 k followers), this is what I found out:
1. I searched "Hungarian recipes", I marked "people" and it did not show my business account, looked like it did not exist.
2. I searched for "Hungarian recipes", I marked "pins" and my recipe pins did not show up. Many of them was No.1 in search results and now cannot even find them.
3. When I searched for my popular recipes using my keywords, they did not show up. Previously they did.

It is just unbelievable. 

@lifesavvysite  Did you experience any increase?

Thanks!

1 Kudo
andrealidesigns
Pinterest Pioneer
Pinterest Pioneer

@CulinaryHungary, I'm sorry that your account was affected by the March 13th glitch.

Unfortunately, at this time, the best advice I can give is to move forward with a new account. 

While you're optimizing the new account, unclaim the old account and wait 5-7 days before claiming your website on the new account. This way, you should be able to tell if unclaiming the old account affects traffic at all. 

A new account should bring back ranking pins once you claim your website again. Just be sure you're pinning fresh pins daily to the new account.

I hope this helps! 🤓📌

1 Kudo
chillnglow
Posts regularly

@CulinaryHungary It really, really sucks. 

I used to primarily pin original content, and fresh too. Hardly ever any repins, and i still got hit. 

Recently, there's been another glitch, and people are complaining about static impressions again. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared or bothered by this. Because you never know what the new glitch might bring along. 

In terms of a solution, I've been searching for one for months. Nothing seems to work. And Pinterest support isn't being very helpful either. It's really, really sad. 

1 Kudo
lambertslately
New member

Count me as one of the victims of the March 13th glitch too. Going on 5 months of abysmal traffic (I went from around 2,000 hits a day for at least 6 years, consistently, to maybe 100 a day since then). It's obviously a shadow ban but Pinterest's help desk refuses to admit anything (I've gotten the canned "ebb and flow" response probably a dozen times now). I'm really about ready to just start over with a new account (with 40,000+ followers, but what's the point if I'm getting 100 impressions on a pin?). Beyond frustrating. I've attached my google analytics from Pinterest - I don't think I've ever seen a more obvious shadow ban.

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lifesavvysite
Just visiting

@lambertslately @chillnglow

 

RESOLVED! 🙌 Hi everyone - just wanted to give a quick update on my original post. Thankfully, the issue has now been resolved and I'm seeing huge improvements in my Pinterest performance (starting to get back to where it was before March 13). As I suspected, our account was wrongly caught in Pinterest's spam filter. I emailed Pinterest support every day for almost a week and was eventually able to get a human from Pinterest to look at our account. They confirmed that our account was mistakenly caught in their spam filter which can sometimes happen, unfortunately. They said we should start seeing improvements in 5-7 day (we started seeing improvement almost immediately).

So if anyone is experiencing a similar issue, my recommendation is to keep reaching out to Pinterest. Do it every - single - day, until you hear back from a real human.

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