What’s wrong with Pinterest URL tagging?
People are exceedingly pinning on Pinterest and it is rapidly becoming a competitive source of traffic in the social media world; there must be something seriously important going on down there.
As a business owner and marketer, you shouldn’t ignore the power of this tool for acquiring traffic, and when it comes to that, I love to set up marketing campaigns tracking all the pins’ URLs.
A strong policy I follow is that no posted URL goes on Pinterest before I create a tracking campaign, so the first time I used Pinterest, I tagged all URLs before pining, saved, and wops! it wasn’t there. I tried again, thinking there might be something wrong with my URLs, well, you never know, right? Then I tried the Pin It widget, and Pinterest bookmarklet, and yet it’s not there; what’s wrong with Pinterest?
I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a security mechanism, but whatever the reason it makes it impossible to track campaign efforts on Pinterest. URL tagging is a technique to pass specific information about a campaign to Google Analytics or another analytics tool. Read more here.
After a few thousand tries on Pinterest, seriously! I finally came to the conclusion that only utm_source can be used for URL tagging as long as the value is “pinterest”. Well, not bad progress; it helps to know the source of traffic is Pinterest, but on a campaign level there is no information, nada!
Finally I decided not to tag URLs on Pinterest, and use Social report in this case. I have explained all the details in my previous post here. But it’s still not an acceptable approach in a world that needs everything measured. So I am hoping the awesome Pinterest developers sort the issue out for an Analytics buff like me very soon.
During the restlessly web surfing hoping to find an answer for the problem, I ran into PinReach, It acts like Klout for Pinterest, is open for everyone to create an account and best of all, it is free. If you decided to take my advice and use it, make sure you use your Pinterest username to open an account in there. And last but not least, it takes time for PinReach to grab all the data, so give it a time to score your Pinfluence.
About the Author:
Behdad Barati, a business systems analyst, blogger, author, wisdom seeker and digital analytics enthusiast. He loves to share his experience, to teach, speak and change mindset and that’s exactly what he is doing at Cyberlitix (www.cyberlitix.com), where he helps online business owners to achieve the highest of their online presence.
Behdad Barati – who has written 14 posts on Owen's Byz Blog.
