How to Add Pinterest to Google Analytics

Wondering if your effort on Pinterest is actually driving traffic to your website? The best way to know for sure is by tracking its performance directly in Google Analytics. This guide will walk you through exactly how to add Pinterest to Google Analytics, so you can see which Pins and boards are sending qualified visitors to your site and what they do once they arrive.

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Why Track Pinterest in Google Analytics?

By default, Google Analytics will probably show some traffic from "pinterest.com," but it groups everything together. You can't see which specific Pin, board, or campaign is working. Setting up proper tracking unlocks a new level of insight, allowing you to:

• Measure True ROI: See exactly which Pins drive not just clicks, but also on-site engagement, email sign-ups, and sales. This helps you justify the time and money spent on your Pinterest strategy, especially for promoted Pins.
• Identify Top-Performing Content: Discover which Pin topics, visual styles, and Calls-to-Action resonate most with your audience. You can stop guessing what works and double down on the content that delivers results.
• Understand the Full User Journey: Follow the path a user takes from seeing a Pin, to clicking through to your site, to becoming a customer. Did they visit a blog post first? Did they look at multiple products? These answers are in your Analytics data.
• Optimize Your Pinterest Strategy: When you know your most valuable boards and Pins, you can focus your efforts there. It's the difference between randomly pinning and executing a data-driven content marketing plan.

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The Key to Tracking: UTM Parameters

The secret to connecting Pinterest activity to Google Analytics is using UTM parameters. This might sound technical, but it’s actually a straightforward concept.

UTM parameters, also known as UTM codes, are simple tags you add to the end of a URL. These tags don't change the destination of a webpage to the user, but they pass extra information back to Google Analytics, telling it exactly where the click came from.

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for Pinterest, you'll mainly focus on three:

• utm_source: This identifies the source of the traffic. For tracking Pinterest, you’ll always set this to pinterest.
• utm_medium: This identifies the marketing medium or channel. For organic Pinterest content, you might use social or organic-social, or if it is for a promoted pin you could use cpc or paid-social.
• utm_campaign: This lets you track a specific campaign or promotion. For example, fall-collection-launch, pinterest-blog-traffic, or the name of an influencer outreach effort.

You can also use two additional optional parameters for more granular tracking:

• utm_content: Use this to differentiate between different pins linking to the same URL within the same campaign. For instance, you could describe the Pin creative like video-pin-style-1 or pink-background-graphic to A/B test your designs.
• utm_term: This is less common for social media tracking and is typically used for tracking keywords in paid search campaigns. You can safely ignore it for Pinterest.

When you combine these parameters with your website link, it will look something like this:

https://www.yourstore.com/new-product?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=holiday-sale

The most important rule for using UTMs is trustistency. Decide on a naming convention and stick to it. For example, always use lowercase letters (pinterest is different from Pinterest in Google’s eyes), and use hyphens instead of spaces. This organization will prevent your analytics reports from becoming messy and hard to read.

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Step-by-Step: How to Create UTM-Tracked URLs

Manually typing out these long URLs is an invitation for creating broken links from errors. Thankfully, there are free tools that make building them easy and error-free. The most popular one is Google’s Campaign URL Builder.

Using Google's Campaign URL Builder

The Campaign URL Builder is a web-based tool that generates ready-to-paste tracking links. It's the perfect entry point for starting with UTM tracking URLs.

1. Navigate to Google’s Campaign URL Builder You'll see a simple form to fill out where you'll describe your new link.
2. Enter your destination URL. In the website_url field, input the URL you want to link to. This could be anything on your site, such as a new product page, a blog entry, or a sales page.
3. Fill out your source, medium, and campaign parameters. Provide specifics for Google Analytics about the Pin you will be posting, including:
4. Copy the generated URL. The tool will create a long URL containing both your original URL and the added tracking UTM parameters. Just click the "Copy URL" button when you're ready to use it on Pinterest.

Building Trackable URLs in a Spreadsheet

When you start creating a lot of UTM links, managing them in a spreadsheet can save time and ensure consistency across your Pins and campaigns. Create a Google Sheet or Excel file with columns for the original URL, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, and final_URL. In the final_URL column, you can use a simple formula to automatically combine everything.

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Adding Your Tracking Links to Pinterest

With your new URL ready, it's time to put it to work. This is pretty simple:

1. For New Pins: When creating a Pin, instead of using the original link you plan to share, use the full UTM URL in the 'Destination link' field.
2. For Your Pinterest Bio: On your Pinterest profile, you can track the link in your bio by using UTM parameters like utm_source=pinterest and utm_medium=profile to see how many people click through from your profile page.
3. For Existing Pins: You can go back and update the 'website-link' of existing Pins. It's worth doing this to make important and popular Pins get more accurate data going forward.

Find Your Pinterest Data in GA

You've done the setup work! Now let's find this data in your Google Analytics (GA) account.

When you visit your data in GA, it will show up in the following reports:

• Navigate to 'Reports' > 'Acquisition' > 'Traffic Acquisition'.
• This report gives you an overview of how people are finding your site and shows which channels are driving the most traffic. You’ll see a primary dimension called 'Source/Medium'.
• Scan for "pinterest". Scroll down until you find pinterest or whatever naming convention you've chosen for your UTM parameters. You'll see numbers such as users, sessions, and engagement, as well as conversions for traffic from that source.
• Drill down to more campaign-specific data.
• To see your campaign data, click the 'Secondary dimension' dropdown and add a dimension like 'Campaign'. This will break down the Pinterest traffic based on your utm_campaign parameter, so you can see if something like holiday-sale or content-promotion campaign is performing.

Final Thoughts

Using UTM parameters lets you gain insightful data about your Pinterest performance and transfer that activity from buttons to your business traffic numbers inside Google Analytics. It's a simple and powerful way to make smarter decisions about your social media strategy.

Manually building URLs and diving into the GA reports takes time. Platforms like Graphed simplify the process. By connecting your analytics and social media actions, you can create and see where your campaigns excel each month. Choose to focus on areas driving the most traffic and conversions, then refine strategy accordingly.