Pinterest traffic drop related to website change?

[andythorntonltd]

I've experienced something like a 90% drop in traffic from Pinterest since we replatformed our website.

We run ads and there's a massive discrepancy between the number of clicks ads is showing too (I know not all clicks will make it to the website, but we're talking GA shows about 2 a day, where Pinterest analytics has outbound clicks at about 40/day. 

Tag manager code seems to be installed fine and I am searching for 'pinterest' in referrals in GA rather than source.

Anyone have any ideas what it could be? I know we will have lost some of our traffic from old links, but it can't be the whole reason.

Thanks for your help, this is driving me a bit mad!

[naturalpetshq]

I don't have an answer for you but I have read that Google Analytics sometimes reports Pinterest clicks as "direct" traffic. 

[andrealidesigns]

@andythorntonltd 

Sorry to hear about your traffic drop. I completely understand your frustration.

A couple of things that may be worth considering:

• When you re-platformed your site did you create redirect URL's?
• Are you creating UTM links for all of your published pins.
• Are you on Universal or GA4? GA4 is built much differently than Universal to future-proof the platform due to all the privacy issues and runs on machine learning to gather trends in your data. Due to this the time frame to view results is longer and the numbers are less precise, making discrepancies more obvious. 
• Pinterest had a recent glitch in analytics reporting that seemed to affect profiles on the account level who were not pinning fresh pins daily that caused huge drops in traffic. There could be some lingering effects if your account was affected.

If you would like support to look into this issue you can submit a ticket here.

I hope this helps!