Tag: Pinterest Search

Can You Capitalize On This New Pinterest Feature?

For users, Pinterest is becoming a better and better place for shopping, and for businesses, that means it’s becoming a better place to showcase products. One new feature gives users a chance to find even more products specifically catering to their interests.

Have you so far found Pinterest to be a meaningful component of your strategy? Let us know in the comments.

Pinterest announced the launch of a new visual search tool that enables users to zoom in on specific objects in a pin’s image and get results for visually similar pins. The company says this is aimed at giving users a new way to discover ideas and products.

“Discovery on Pinterest is all about finding things you love, even if you don’t know at first what you’re looking for,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews. “Visual search is search without the text query.”

To use the tool, users can simply tap the search tool in the corner of a pin when they see something they want to take a closer look at. Then they can select the part of the pin that is of interest and Pinterest will display visually similar objects, colors, patterns, etc. Users can also filter results by topic.

“Visual search not only helps you discover new ideas and products you may not have known existed or knew how to describe, but it also helps you find similar products at different price points and where to buy products that otherwise would have been just static images in a bigger picture,” the spokesperson says.

The features presents some interesting new search opportunities, and it helps to look at Pinterest as a search engine rather than a social network. For example, if a user is looking at an image of a room and they like the way a particular light fixture looks, they can select the area over that light fixture, and Pinterest will seek out other pins that feature similar light fixtures.

It’s not difficult to see how this could lead to more light fixture sales given this technology in addition to other recently added capabilities including promoted pins and a buy button. Obviously this spans well past light fixtures and pretty much into any imagery that you might find on Pinterest.

If nothing else, the feature further highlights the need to optimize for Pinterest search, use great product images your own pins, and offer great content outside of Pinterest with images made easily pinnable. At the same time, this combination of features points to Pinterest being a better shopping destination at large, and businesses stand to gain a great deal from that.

It’s interesting to see Pinterest continue focusing on new ways for users to search as it’s positioning itself as more of a search service than a social media service, which is often thought of. This is especially true when it comes to recruiting advertisers.

Back in the summer, Pinterest added a handful of new features to make its regualr search tool smarter, including a new typeahead experience, more filters, autocorrect, trending searches, and displaying verified accounts in search results.

This new visual search feature actually appears to be the final version of the “Flashlight” search tool the company has been working on, which we also reported on in June. This was demoed about an hour and twenty-six minutes into the following video.

Pinterest gets into the technology behind the new tool here.

“Pinterest’s new visual search initiative indicates just how persuasive visual images can be for consumers,” says Jordan Slabaugh, Vice President of Marketing at social intelligence firm Wayin. “In general, social is becoming more visual across all platforms. Earlier this year, for example, we saw how Facebook’s new algorithm change boosted more visual posts in a given user’s feed instead of text-heavy ones. Over the years, this transition to more visual media will only continue to evolve.”

“More visual social posts spark more engagement overall, and brands can capitalize on this by incorporating a social display into their current campaigns,” Slabaugh adds. “This can range from dynamic displays on branded websites to in-venue screens during live events and more. Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have put user-generated content in the spotlight, and brands can use this content to enhance their marketing tactics. Overall, consumers are looking for brands that their peers recommend, and integrating social display is an easy way brands can tell their story authentically.”

The feature is rolling out globally across the web and Pinterest’s mobile apps.

Do you see Pinterest’s combined efforts culminating into a major channel for ecommerce? Let us know what you think.

November 9, 2015
Flashlight For Pinterest Will Be An Awesome Search Feature If It Launches

Noted Pinterest marketer Vincent Ng (whom we recently spoke with about Pinterest marketing tactics) is pointing out that Pinterest is testing a new feature called Flashlight for Pinterest, which he says “will change the way that Pinterest works and the world of visual search discovery”.

The company quietly announced the feature at a conference back in February, and Ng thinks its still in the alpha stage of testing. We reached out to the company for more info, but they didn’t have much to say about it.

A spokesperson told us, “As mentioned in the visual search announcement a few weeks ago, we’re experimenting with many different uses for visual discovery technology, but it’s too early to share any further details.”

The announcement the spokesperson is referring to deals with experiments Pinterest is doing with real-time related pin recommendations and object recognition. More on this here.

So what is Flashlight? You can actually get a look at it in this video from Pinterest Engineering toward the end at about an hour and twenty-six minutes in:

As demonstrated, you can click the flashlight feature at the top of the screen and crop any part of an image, and in real time, it displays search results on the right side. It’s pretty cool.

According to the presenter, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Very interesting stuff on the horizon from Pinterest as it moves toward more of a shopping experience.

In other Pinterest news, the company just announced expanded gender options and will soon roll out Buyable Pins.

June 5, 2015
How Ranking Works In Pinterest’s Guided Search

Pinterest launched Guided Search last April as a new way to help users discover content with some nudging in the right direction. It’s basically Pinterest’s way of suggesting search refinements as you browse. For example, if you search for “pasta,” you might be presented with options like: recipes, dishes, salad, packaging, one pot, shrimp, sauce, chicken, etc. If you click sauce, for example, you’ll get results that are pasta sauce-based, but also a new set of guides, such as: homemade, recipes, with fresh tomatoes, olive oil, healthy, easy, creamy, etc. And so on, and so on.

“Guided Search helps Pinners refine and discover more relevant results for the answers that differ from person to person,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells WebProNews. “As we build a discovery engine, searching is a key way for Pinners to find and save ideas Pinned by others. Searches derived from clicking on guides is one of the major sources of our search traffic, with guide clicking up 3x over the last 6 months.”

Guided Search Ranking Factors

Pinterest is now sharing some information about how guides for Guided Search are generated and ranked. Again, this is guides, not pins. They use the following signals: interests to guides, quality of results of composed queries, location, gender, current trend, and spam detection.

Interests to guides looks at how users click each guide of a query. The more interest the user shows in a guide, the higher that guide is ranked. Quality of results of composed queries refers to how confident Pinterest is with the search results after the user clicks a guide. Confidence is calculated based on how users click the result pins and how often they add them to their boards. It also takes into account the quality of third-party web pages that the result pins link to. The more users like the results of a particular guide, the higher the guide ranks.

Location is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s effective. Pinterest started using it as a ranking signal last month, and says it has seen a 5% to 10% increase in guide clicks in some countries as a result. Guide location scores factor in how much interest users from various countries show in each guide.

Here’s a look at the same query in both the U.S. and U.K.

“In general, male Pinners have different interests in guides than females, and so we rank guides differently based on what’s trending for each group. Gender scores are orthogonal to location scores in ranking. For example, male users in Mexico see guides ranked specifically for their demographic,” says Pinterest software engineer Kevin Ma. “We built a time sensitive scoring function to detect the current trend of users’ interests in guides. This function applies a recency boost to guides that have a momentum in ranking. If a large number of Pinners are interested in a guide in a short amount of time, this guide becomes a popular guide. Popular guides can be boosted to a higher rank for days. Once they lose their momentum, meaning less people are engaged to this guide, the function quickly ranks the guide to a later position.”

The spam detection signal just means Pinterest removes any spammy Pins it finds from guide ranking.

How People Are Using Guided Search

On average, Pinners click 3.6 guides daily when using Guided Search, Pinterest says. Interestingly, men are more likely than women to click guides, and often do so on topics related to Art, Cars, Fitness, Health, Men’s Fashion, Outdoors and Shopping. This is good news for Pinterest, which recently shared some other stats about how it’s growing its male user base, which grew 73% year-over-year in the U.S.

Pinterest also recently announced additional search improvements aimed at better targeting of search results based on gender.

“We’ve already seen these improvements result in a double digit lift in engagement, similar to recent updates to the new user experience which show trending interests for each gender to choose from as they get started,” Pinterest told us.

Women Pinners apparently use guides most when they’re searching in categories like Food and Drink, Home Decor and Technology.

Pinterest says users outside of the U.S. use guides more often than U.S. users, with the highest click rate occurring in Mexico. Pinners in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines and the U.K. are also more likely to click a search guide than those in the U.S., according to the company.

The company says fitness-related searches also get some of the highest click-throughs of guides.

“Guided Search launched on mobile first and was designed with a small screen in mind and optimized for tapping instead of typing, so it’s no surprise guides are clicked more often on mobile than web,” the spokesperson says. “Pinners on iPhone are 50% more likely to click a guide than those on web.”

Pinterest finds that users are more likely to click guides during weekend rather than weekdays.

Guided Search Helps Pinterest Understand Intent

PInterest revealed earlier this month that since adding Guided Search, the average number of searches per person grew by 25%. At the time, the company explained that it’s getting better at understanding search queries. For example, with guides in action, it learns more about intent, and can better deliver on something like turkey recipes vs. Turkey the country.

“The more people search, the better we can suggest results,” wrote Pinterest software engineer Dong Wang. “From the previous example, we can guess that the next person who issues the query ‘turkey’ may also be interested in the ‘turkey recipes.’ The information extracted from previous query log has shown to be effective in understanding the user’s search intent. Search context such as adjacent queries in the same search session and clicked Pins after submitting a search query can help us improve the discovery experience for future searches. To capture the information about a search query and make it available for other applications to process, derive signals and build features on top of it, we designed a data collection called QueryJoin.”

QueryJoin contains the search query (which is its identifier), demographic stats (gender, country, language), adjacent queries, and pins. Each pin comes with aggregated data from “PinJoin,” which is a data collection of a cluster of pins with the same image signature and info). It also looks at engagement stats like number of clicks, repins, and likes. More on QueryJoin here and PinJoin here.

“Guides change based on engagement, so the more people search and pin, the better the experience gets,” says Ma. Check out his blog post on the Pinterest engineering blog for a deeper dive into how guides are created on the back end.

What Does Guided Search Mean for You?

Pinterest obviously offers websites some traffic opportunities. According to Shareaholic, it’s the second biggest driver of social media traffic referrals behind Facebook.

In a recent article, we looked at some ways you can optimize your own content and pins for better performance in PInterest search. This includes tips directly from Pinterest, as well as some insight from an ebook written by Pinterest marketer Vincent Ng. In short, you need to optimize your pins as well as your website for Pinterest sharing.

We also interviewed Ng about how businesses can get more out of their PInterest marketing efforts. Among other things, he talked about Guided Search.

“Guided Search allows for businesses and marketers to see what other topics or products people may be interested in,” he said. “For example, you may be in the business of selling wedding dresses, but you’re not too sure what dresses are popular. When you use Guided Search, it tells us that people are looking for princess wedding dresses, vintage wedding dresses, and lace wedding dresses and so much more. Now you can create boards and pins around those specific topics and keywords. You don’t have to guess what people want. Guided Search will tell you what people want.”

Pinterest says it will continue to work on making Guided Search more personal and localized with additional updates planned for throughout the year.

Image via Pinterest, Shareaholic

January 30, 2015
Pinterest Marketing Tips From A Guy That’s Been Doing It For 5 Years

Pinterest may have plateaued as a driver of traffic to websites, at least for the time being, but it’s still number two in that department behind Facebook, according to data from Shareaholic. The firm released a report this week finding that Twitter, StumbleUpon, reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined represent roughly a third of the traffic Pinterest sent to publishers in December.

If you want to get web traffic from Pinterest, you’re going to want to optimize for the Pinterest search experience.

Is Pinterest search optimization part of your online marketing strategy? Do you intend to focus more on it going forward? Let us know in the comments.

We recently looked at some ways you can do that. In that article, we referenced an eBook on the subject written by Vincent Ng, a marketer who has been engaging in Pinterest marketing since 2010, and runs a Pinterest marketing agency.

Ng, who goes specifically by “Pinterest marketer” as opposed to online marketing consultant or something like that, has now shared some additional insights into Pinterest search and marketing with WebProNews.

How has Guided Search changed Pinterest marketing?

Last year, Pinterest launched Guided Search, an enhanced version of its search feature enabling users to find things they didn’t necessarily know they were looking for. You can start with a relatively vague keyword, and get additional options to add to help “guide” you in different directions.

“Guided Search allows for businesses and marketers to see what other topics or products people may be interested in,” Ng tells us. “For example, you may be in the business of selling wedding dresses, but you’re not too sure what dresses are popular. When you use Guided Search, it tells us that people are looking for princess wedding dresses, vintage wedding dresses, and lace wedding dresses and so much more. Now you can create boards and pins around those specific topics and keywords.”

“You don’t have to guess what people want,” he adds. “Guided Search will tell you what people want.”

Pinterest Analytics

Last summer, Pinterest made its “new and improved” analytics offering generally available. The company described it as a “smarter tool to help businesses worldwide continue to improve how they work, with meaningful insights about what their customers are interested in.”

The company recently made a new video primer available:

“There’s a lot going on with Pinterest analytics,” Ng says. “The first thing is to ensure you have verified your Pinterest account with your associated website. You will know it’s verified once there’s a red check mark next to your website. A verified Pinterest account gets you analytics of pins that are coming directly from your site as well as pins that direct back to your site.”

“The area known as, Activity on (your website), will give you data on which pins are getting the most repins, the most clicks and the most impressions. And this is a great starting point to know how what pins are most engaging,” he adds. “And what’s great about that data, is that it shows you pins from other people as well. The best performing pins are not always going to be the one that you originally pinned. It could be from one that’s been reshared onto an influencer’s account. And if it is, you may want to contact that person and send them a thank you note or special offer if she happens to have pinned one of your products.”

How Can Using Rich Pins Help Bloggers Drive Traffic?

Pinterest, as you may or may not know, offers something called Rich Pins. There are several types: Product, Recipe, Article, Movie, and Place. These allow you to make pins more useful, and add relevant information. For example, article pins include a headline, the author, and a story description.

“Rich pins for a blogger is a must, because rich pins are a factor in search rankings for Pinterest. Pinterest prefers to show blog posts or pins that are rich pins,” says Ng. “On top of that, rich pins also have more credibility and authority because rich pins for articles show off, in bold text, the title of the blog post article and the meta description when clicked through.”

“I worked with a hairstyle blog on improving their traffic, and we were stuck at getting 30 referral visits a day from Pinterest,” he adds. “The moment they were approved for rich pins, the traffic spiked up within two days to 70 referral visits from Pinterest.”

Making Your Site More Pinterest-Friendly

There are things you can do besides using the Pin It button and rich pins to make your site more Pinterest-friendly.

“One of the ways is to ensure that you have a vertical image that people can pin,” says Ng. “This is because vertical images stand out more on Pinterest’s feed. A person who does a really good job of creating blog images is Donna Mortize from Socially Sorted.”

“The other way to make content Pinterest friendly is to use more than one pinnable image,” he adds. “Just like the idea of a click to tweet, when you create snackable content that’s pin friendly and you have two or three of those spread out in a blog post, then readers can choose the one that resonates with them the best that they want to pin.”

The Messaging Feature

Last year, Pinterest launched a new messaging feature allowing users to reply to people when they shoot them a pin. You can reply back with text or with another pin. You can even send pins and messages to multiple people at once.

“For marketers, it’s a great way to contact some of your most influential followers and engagers and begin a relationship,” says Ng. “As long as a person follows you, you can contact him.”

“If you happen to sell a product then send your fans a link for a discount,” he says. “As a blogger myself, I’ve sent messages thanking people for being gracious in pinning my content. But I also ask for their e-mail in Pinterest messages. After that I will then send them a free copy of my e-book that would cost close to $25, free of charge, because they were such great fans.”

Interest Following

Pinterest also launched interest following last year. Marketers may find some opportunities here as well.

“There are some steps you can take to increase your chances of your pins showing up within interests on Pinterest,” says Ng. “First, try to ensure that your boards are in the correct category of the interest. For example, if you happen to sell comic books, then your best category would be geek. Second, in the pin descriptions, use the search terms that are the exact match of the interest, and/or ensure you use words associated with that interest. If the interest is Marvel Comics, then use words like Spiderman and Mary Jane, as long as it’s relevant.”

“Another aspect that will help is to look at the images that are being used in interests, and see if there is a pattern,” he adds. “Pinterest’s visual recognition isn’t perfect, but it is getting better at putting the right pins in the right interests based on the image itself.”

Does Time of Day/Week Matter?

Asked if he believes if there are times of the day and/or week that are better for pinning content than others, Ng says, “I do and I don’t. And that’s because every business is going to be different and every customer is going to use it at different times. For example, you may want to post in the evening and weekend if you’re selling women’s fashion. However if you’re a blogger that’s focused on stay at home business moms, then you may want to pin early in the morning when mothers are getting up.”

“The challenge is that not all pins show up at the moment you pin,” he says. “It could be hours, or even days before someone is exposed to it due to the new Pinterest smart feed changes.”

What Does Pinterest need?

Asked if there’s one feature that he’d like to see Pinterest add that it doesn’t already have, Ng says, “I think it would be great if Pinterest added a sticky pin feature. If Pinterest allowed you to keep one pin at the first position when a board is clicked on, that would be amazing.”

More Men Are Coming Around To Pinterest

Pinterest’s latest search-related announcement was the addition of gender-based filtering, enabling men to have a better search experience on the service, which has a reputation for being much more woman-oriented.

“I think the new search feature that customizes results based on whether you’re a woman or a man will be good in terms of driving more men to use the site,” Ng says. “Before, when men searched for pins on Pinterest they were getting a lot of irrelevant pins.”

“For example if you typed in watches, if you were a man, you would get a lot of watches that were for women,” he adds. “But now as a man, when you type in watches in the search box on Pinterest you get watches that are designed for men. And that’s a great way to encourage more men to use it, and to help male/female products be exposed more to the right audience.”

A Pinterest spokesperson tells us, “We’ve already seen these improvements result in a double digit lift in engagement, similar to recent updates to the new user experience which show trending interests for each gender to choose from as they get started.”

They also shared some new growth stats with us. For one, Pinterest’s male user base in the U.S. grew 73% year-over-year.

Suffice it to say, the second leading driver of social media referral traffic is growing its audience and improving its search functionality. This is good for websites.

Do you get significant traffic from Pinterest? Is this an area where you plan to put more of your focus? Discuss.

Images: Shareaholic: MGNG Marketing, Pinterest

January 27, 2015
Pinterest Search Gets Better For Men (And Some Growth Stats Regarding The Male Gender)

Last year, Pinterest launched Guided Search, a revamp to its search feature enabling users to find things they didn’t necessarily know they were looking for. You can start with a relatively vague keyword, and get additional options to add to help “guide” you in different directions. It’s essentially a nice way of presenting search recommendations.

The company has been hard at work on improving Guided Search, and on Friday, revealed some of what it has been working on.

Pinterest has famously been seen as a more female-oriented service. While there are plenty of men using it, there’s no question which way the gender needle slants. The number of men has been growing, however, and improvements to Guided Search are reflecting that.

“If you do a lot of searching on Pinterest, you may already have noticed the results you’re seeing are better than ever,” says Pinterest engineer Pei Yin in a blog post. “For example, say you’re looking for a new watch. Before when you searched Pinterest for ‘watches,’ your results would include mostly women’s timepieces. But now, men will see Pins and guides inspired by what other guys have Pinned, and everybody’s results should feel a lot closer to what they’re looking for. Of course if you ever want results for another gender, like if you’re shopping for a gift for someone else, you can always use the guides to fine-tune your search.”

“These customized search results appear for thousands of different search terms,” Yin adds. “The next time you’re on Pinterest, try searching for hair, shoes or health and see for yourself how spot on your results are.”

As the company notes, if you’re not getting content for your gender, you may want to check your settings and make sure you have the right one selected.

A Pinterest spokesperson tells WebProNews, “We’ve already seen these improvements result in a double digit lift in engagement, similar to recent updates to the new user experience which show trending interests for each gender to choose from as they get started.”

They also shared some new growth stats with us. For one, Pinterest’s male user base in the U.S. grew 73% year-over-year.

“We’re not only growing among males, but on the coasts, where monthly active usage is much higher than other parts of the country,” the spokesperson says. “For example, New York is growing 50% faster than Minnesota, and DC 78% faster than Utah. The fastest growing states are Hawaii, New Jersey, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island.”

On the gender note, the top interests followed by men include (in order): men’s apparel, technology, travel, gardening, recipes, gadgets, design, luxury cars, tattoos, and camping. Trending searches by men include: men’s short hair, cinema 4d, ham radio, cool watches for men, mens tattoo ideas, fixed gear, shoulder tattoo men, hifi, rat rod, and kayak fishing.

Pinterest also shared some high-growth categories (% from 2013-2014):

Geek: 175%
Cars & Motorcycles: 134%
Men’s Fashion: 122%
Architecture: 119%
Gardening: 91%
Humor: 88%
Health & Fitness: 84%

% growth in categories from 2012-2014:

Geek: 1414%
Cars & Motorcycles: 844%
Men’s Fashion: 787%
Architecture: 657%
Health & Fitness: 531%
Gardening: 572%
Humor: 427%

Pinterest says it has a lot more improvements to search coming soon, and now that Promoted Pins are out (and doing well apparently), it’s certainly in Pinterest’s best interest to improve its search feature as much as possible, now that it’s being monetized.

This week, the company announced that it has acquired the team and technology behind recommendation and commerce startup Kosei, which it will use to accelerate its discovery and monetization efforts.

“The team includes some of the best minds in machine learning, data science and recommendation engines, who’ve created a unique technology stack that drives commerce by making highly personalized and powerful product recommendations,” Pinterest told us. “Among Kosei’s accomplishments is building a graph that understands more than 400 million relationships between 30 million products.”

Asked about how the acquisition will affect Pinterest’s efforts in search and advertising, Pinterest said, “Over the years we’ve been building a system for helping people discover the most relevant Pins, and the Kosei team is a great complement to our existing technology (see how we’ve been using machine learning here). The acquisition of Kosei will enable us to move faster in our efforts to provide relevant recommendations across the service, as well as in ad targeting and measurement as we roll out Promoted Pins.”

As Pinterest continues to grow its user base, it opens up more marketing opportunities for businesses on both the paid and organic levels. Read this for some insight into optimizing your content for Pinterest’s search feature.

Image via Pinterest

January 23, 2015
Pinterest SEO: Things To Consider

A lot of website owners and marketers are still trying to crack the Pinterest nut. If Facebook referrals start evaporating, that will no doubt be the case even more. Currently, Pinterest is second behind Facebook for driving website referrals as far as social networks are concerned.

Promoted Pins will be a big storyline this year, and search is a big part of that. But what about simple organic Pinterest SEO? What can you do to get more out of Pinterest, and its search feature in particular?

Do you currently consider search optimization techniques for Pinterest as part of your online marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments.

Pew just released some new Pinterest growth stats. Men in the U.S. using Pinterest jumped from 8% in 2013 to 13%. 42% of online women are Pinterest users. It’s more popular than Twitter, according to the firm. 21% said they use Pinterest, up from 15% last year., compared to 18% for Twitter.

Pew tells us, “In 2014, the number of men on the site doubled, and we see that growth continue today – ⅓ of all signups are men (50/50 men/women in markets like India, Korea and Japan). In the past year, monthly active users outside the U.S. grew by 150%. Since launching Guided Search nine months ago, the number of searches per person has increased by 25%.”

What Pinterest Says About SEO

First, let’s look at what Pinterest itself says about search visibility: “Search is an important way for Pinners to find content from your business. If you use Rich Pins and have a verified account, your Pins appear higher in search results. Another crucial way to improve your appearance in search results is to sharpen your Pin descriptions.” Emphasis added.

Pinterest gives some helpful tips right in its official business guide:

Note that they’re giving you a specific example of an account that’s doing it right – Tory Buch. You can peruse their pins and descriptions here to get a feel for how they do it.

Pinterest goes on to give some additional tips about descriptions. For recipes, you would describe the main ingredients and how to cook the dish. For fashion, you would include the type of clothing, the designer, and/or the season. For travel, you would include the location and the kinds of things you can do there. For DIY, you would describe the project, and how to make it, as well as the materials needed to get the job done. For photography, you would name the photographer, the year, the subject, and/or the publication. For design, you would mention the designer, medium, publication, etc.

Basically, regardless of the type of content you’re pinning, you want to be as descriptive as possible and include all of the relevant keywords. Pretty straightforward. Note in the image above, however, that they advise against just dropping in keywords or hashtags. It’s unclear if this is actually detrimental on an algorithmic level, but either way, you probably just don’t want to do it that way.

Another key to making your content more easily found in Pinterest searches is to make it easier for people to submit the content to PInterest in the first place. This means taking action on your own site by using high-quality images (ideally at least 600 pixels wide), including the Pin it button, and using rich pins (Product Pins, Article Pins, Place Pins to automatically include information like price, availability, ingredients, location, etc. This is done by adding some meta tags to your site. Pinterest points to Lowe’s as a good example of a a site well designed for Pinterest. They added a “Pinterest-friendly” section for creative ideas, with at least one project that has been pinned over 200,000 times.

“The more people Pin your content, the more discoverable it becomes,” Pinterest says. “To encourage more Pinning, make it easy to Pin from your website and emails. Promote your Pinterest account on social channels, packaging and advertising.”

You should use Pinterest Analytics to see which pins are popular, and which ones are driving the most traffic to your site. It will also show you which boards your content is appearing on and how others have described it, which could lead to some helpful revelations.

“All of these insights will help you make smarter choices about your merchandising, product development and marketing strategy,” Pinterest says.

It’s probably a good idea to use your Pinterest account well, because it might help you gain some credence when it comes to search result ranking (I’ve not confirmed this, but it’s something to consider). The company does suggest pinning at least once a day so followers get fresh content, and not just pinning your own stuff.

“You can tell a richer story by adding Pins from others,” it says. “You could partner with bloggers and lifestyle websites to Pin their content. Your followers will appreciate the Pins, and bloggers will appreciate the referral traffic.”

Engagement with other users through follows, repins, likes, and comments, is also recommended, as is creating group boards and inviting people who “love your brand” to contribute.

Keep in mind, you can optimize your actual boards to some extent. Give them clear, relevant names. They should be kept to 20 characters or less. Otherwise they can get cut off. Also include descriptions of the boards, again, using relevant keywords. You can choose a cover pin, so you should choose one that’s relevant, enticing, and will make the user want to follow that board. You might consider using the one with the most repins.

Pinterest recommends putting your most relevant boards at the top of your boards page. You can easily drag and drop them.

The company also gives a helpful tip you might not have considered: “Try Pinning a handful of Pins at once that together tell a story and capture the imagination. For example, a Pin of a patterned dress next to the place that inspired it is more compelling than just a product photo.”

If you want to look at an account that gets boards right, check out The Container Store. Pinterest points out how they create boards with pins organized to appeal to different audiences.

On a side note, unlike the direction that Facebook may be going in, Pinterest actually encourages linking out. In its business guide, it says, “For example, a movie Pin should lead to the trailer or a review, and a product Pin should lead to where a Pinner can make the purchase.”

Pinterest, at least for now, wants to send you traffic.

People Search Pinterest With Intent To Buy

Vision Critical published a study that found that 28% of Pinterest purchasers say they were searching for the item they pinned and purchased or for an item like it. In the health and beauty vertical, the number is 47% (it goes down to 17% for food and drink purchasers). As Pinterest continues to grow, and attracts more people, it stands to reason that the number will grow for additional verticals. In fact, the survey used for the study is nearly two years old anyway, so it’s likely already grown, particularly as Pinterest has put more emphasis on search in the past year.

For comparison 47% of purchasers said they just happened upon the item they pinned without searching for it. Interestingly, that number goes down for technology purchases and up for food and drink purchases.

Other Factors To Consider

Vincent Ng, who was early on the Pinterest marketing train says in his eBook How to Search Optimize Your Pins and Boards For Pinterest and Search Engines, “You also want to make sure that your business pins show up as frequently at the top of search results as much possible. It’s better to have five pins for a specific term show up instead of just one, or worse yet, none. It’s just too easy for one pin to be lost in an ocean of millions of pins.”

Ng recently appeared on the Social Media Examiner podcast. He talked a little about how Pinterest is getting better at image recognition, and applying that to search.

“What’s really fascinating is that Pinterest is starting to have visual recognition engines, so they recognize certain colors and certain patterns refer to a coffee table [for example], so even though a picture in the pin description may not say ‘coffee table,’ if enough people in the past have referred to that image as a coffee table, you might see a pin that is a coffee table, but that doesn’t use that kind of description.”

Still, I see no reason not to include good descriptions.

Ng also noted that more people are starting searches on Pinterest rather than Google for certain types of searches – typically lifestyle. The biggest mistake people make when it comes to losing traffic, he says, is not making sure the pin goes to the right URL. You should always check the source of a pin, and edit accordingly.

In his book, Ng makes some good points about keywords on Pinterest. For one, you can find highly searched keywords by starting to type in the search box, and seeing what comes up:

He also suggests that putting keywords early in the description can help, though doing some random searches, I get the idea that this might not be as big of a factor now as maybe it was when the book was written. Exact keyword matches work best, according to the book, but again, the evolution of Pinterest search may have downplayed this.

The number of repins does appear to be a major factor, which makes perfect sense, though freshness shouldn’t be counted out. In the example below, the pin in the top right has less than 40 repins, yet it is among others that have thousands, but it is only two days old, while the others have been around for much longer.

As noted, a lot has happened with Pinterest’s search feature over the last year, so let’s circle back around to advice Pinterest itself is giving out. Search Engine Land shared some tips from Anna Majkowska, a software manager on Pinterest’s search team, back in October. These boil down to optimizing your profile, verifying your site, installing pin it buttons, writing strong descriptions, using rich pins, checking your links, getting more followers, and finding your niches. Maybe not all that much has changed after all, from an optimization standpoint.

What tactics have you seen work for increasing Pinterest effectiveness. Please share in the comments.

January 9, 2015
How Pinterest Is Thinking About Search

Most people probably think about Pinterest more as a social media site/app than a search engine, but search is increasingly the direction it is moving in, which not only makes sense for its loyal user base, but also as a monetization strategy as it gets going with its Promoted Pins ad product.

Pinterest, lets you connect with friends, and that’s what keeps it in the realm of social media, but as co-founder Evan Sharp explains, it’s more about you than it is about your friends. It’s about finding stuff for life – discovery – and bookmarking that stuff for future reference and/or showing off your interests. Finding often means searching, which is why Pinterest has launched things like Guided Search and its enhanced recipe search functionality. Last month, it also upgraded its Place Search feature to make it faster and smarter.

The Atlantic has an extensive interview with Sharp, who discusses how he views Pinterest versus how he viewed it back when it started (hint: it’s much more about search and discovery), among other things. Here are a couple snippets of what he had to say about search:

Guided Search just says, when you search, what are the other things that people add to this search to help you understand the other possibilities. I only point this out, not to market it, but to highlight that the way we think of search is fundamentally different. It’s not just here is my query; it’s a process, a journey. You’re having a kid. You’re getting married. I don’t know what to do, I’ve never had a kid. Type in parenting, and you start to learn, what’s the language of this? On search engines, in general, the relationship to language is very different. You start with the words and you say I want to find these words. When you’re discovering something, we’re helping you figure out the language. If you are interested in discovering something new, you might not know what to type in. Here, the language is the end state…We’ve solved all sorts of discovery problems that people hadn’t even thought about, all kinds of information database problems that have never been thought about.

…when people think of search they think of words, but there is all sorts of cool computer science you can build with just media, just the images, or just the user graph. And the combination of all that is going to be very interesting. The words are just one signal. They’re super important and we’ve got better words than anybody, but there is all kinds of stuff people don’t even think about because their tools are constrained by language….Search for most people is web navigation. It stitches together the human information on web pages. It’s also a tool for answering questions. We weave them together, but you could decompose those in an interesting way if you were interested in solving search as a problem.

A few months ago, Pinterest raised a new $200 million round of funding. Making Pinterest better for search and discovery is to be the primary focus of how to use that money.

CEO Ben Silbermann said at the time, “Pinterest has a vision of solving discovery and helping everyone find things they’ll love. This new investment gives us additional resources to realize our vision.”

Last week, the company announced its acquisition of Icebergs, a service that lets users organize and share content for creative projects. They’re shutting the product down, but that gives you an idea of what the deal means for Pinterest.

Icebergs’ team said in a blog post:

We are thrilled to be joining forces with the talented Pinterest team in San Francisco. Pinterest is a visual discovery tool people use to discover, save, and act upon the things they love, which makes it a perfect home for our experience in product and design, and in building Icebergs.

On Pinterest, there are tens of millions of people using the site to discover more than 30 billion Pins every day, and we can’t wait to use what we learned building Icebergs to help make their experience even better.

As Pinterest continues to focus on search and discovery, it’s also enabling businesses to get in the action in more ways than one. In addition to the aforementioned Promoted Pins (the do-it-yourself version is on the way), it recently partnered with Shopify to automatically enable rich pins for merchants.

Pinterest also just happens to be the second leading source of social media referrals to websites (behind Facebook).

Image via Pinterest

August 4, 2014
Pinterest Continues To Make Search Improvements

Pinterest has been focusing a lot of its efforts on search lately, and that continues with the announcement of some improvements to place search.

Back in November, Pinterest launched Place Pins for those interested in traveling. The pins provide details like addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Just ahead of the weekend, Pinterest announced that it created a faster and smarter place search feature (so far for iOS and web), making it easier to add a Place Pin to the map. This comes after it already added the ability to place images on maps in the first place and the ability to filter searches by Place Boards.

“People have been mapping Pins for all types of travel plans, such as trips to Australia, places to watch the World Cup, cycling trips, a European motorcycle adventure, best running spots, and local guides and daycations,” wrote Pinterest engineer Jon Parise.

“Even with the growth in usage of Place Pins, we knew we needed to make the place search experience more intuitive, he added. “In the beginning, the place search interface was based on two distinct inputs: one for the place’s name (the “what”) and another for the search’s geospatial constraint (the “where”). We supported searching within a named city, within the bounds of the current map view, and globally around the world. While powerful, many Pinners found this interface to be non-intuitive. Our research showed Pinners were often providing both the “what” and the “where” in the first input box, just like they do when using our site-wide search interface. With that in mind, we set out to build a more natural place search interface based on just a single text input field.”

Pinterest taps into data from Foursquare’s venue search and its open source Twofishes geocoder for its place results. Read the post for a more detailed explanation of how Pinterest uses and ranks data.

Pinterest says it already has over a billion travel pins with over 300 unique countries and territories represented in the system. It even has four million Place Boards created by users, which is pretty impressive considering the feature just launched this past November.

The new place search will hit Android soon.

All of this comes after Pinterest launched Guided Search, a powerful new vertical search feature that makes the site/apps a great deal better at being a place to find and discover things in a variety of categories. Pinterest is also starting to let businesses promote pins in search results.

Images via Pinterest

June 16, 2014
Can Search Improvements Make Pinterest More Valuable To Businesses?

Pinterest is becoming a better search engine, and it’s likely only getting started.

Have you ever used Pinterest specifically to search for something? Do you think it is capable of providing helpful results for certain types of queries? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This week, the company announced the launch of an improved recipe search experience. Recipes are one of the most popular verticals on the site, so this is a great place to start with the search improvements.

“Now when you search for ingredients, say whatever is in your fridge, you’ll see a collection of relevant recipes as well as filters, such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and paleo,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, if you search for ‘avocados, black beans and bell peppers,’ you’ll see recipes for quinoa salad, pork tenderloin with red bell pepper chili rub, and black bean quesadillas.”

“This is the latest update to more useful Pins, which uses structured data, such as ingredients, cook time and servings, to display more information right on the Pin,” the spokesperson adds. “All recipe search results will show this rich information. Food is one of the most popular categories on Pinterest, and the new recipe search makes it easier than ever to find meal inspiration from some of the best recipes on the web, and plan great dishes tailored to your tastes.”

“More Useful Pins” is an initiative the company launched last May. It added more info for product pins (pricing, availability and where to buy), recipe pins (cook times, ingredients, servings) and movie pins (content ratings, cast members, etc.).

You can see where this stuff would serve to make Pinterest more efficient as a search tool.

The new recipe improvements stem from the company’s acquisition of Pinterest-like recipe site Punchfork a year ago. Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller has led the development of this new product.

It’s easy to see Pinterest expanding the strategy into more verticals. Travel, Local and Articles come to mind, given some of the announcements the company made last year.

In November, it launched Place Pins, which show details like the address of a place, phone number, etc.

In March, Pinterest announced its acquisition of Livestar, an app that helped people find local recommendations from friends and others. The product was shut down, and the engineering talent became part of the Pinterest team.

In March, Pinterest launched redesigned article pins, providing more info like headlines, authors and story descriptions.

Search is a popular way to monetize a site, and the more Pinterest expands as a search tool, the better this tool could be for advertisers.

The Wall Street Journal has an interview out with Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. Asked about Pinterest’s business model, he says, “It will be getting them to discover the things they want. And it may be a product that they buy; it may be a service that they use sometime down the line. But it’s not purely transactional.”

Earlier his month, Pinterest announced that it acquired VisualGraph, an image recognition and visual search company, consisting of two people who have joined Pinterest’s engineering team. Both have experience at Google. Kevin Jing began working for the search giant in 2004, and helped build some of its first machine vision applications. David Liu interned at the company, as well as at Facebook.

“The acquisition of VisualGraph will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told us. “By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love.”

“On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday,” said Jing and Liu. “And these Pins are more than just images — they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people’s lives. We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere.”

This technology should only help Pinterest improve its search experience.

Danny Maloney is the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest analytics firm Tailwind. He tells WebProNews, “Pinterest is more of a discovery engine than a search engine, but I believe visual search could be a hidden gem of the Pinterest business model. Just as with Google or Bing, search on Pinterest tends to indicate users have a strong commercial intent. In many cases, search traffic over time leads revenue generated from pins to occur later in the pin’s life, even if it sees a good deal of viral sharing soon after being pinned.”

“The acquisition of VisualGraph brings a couple of very talented engineers to Pinterest’s team,” he says. “I suspect most of their work is yet to be done, but the principle of Pinterest being able to understand images the way a human brain might is very powerful. Such capabilities should unlock better search results, improved content recommendations for users and an ability to organize and understand content at a much deeper level. Businesses will use this technology just by participating in the platform, as it will help their content surface to an increasingly better targeted audience.”

Maloney says he expects the next steps in the evolution of Pinterest’s promoted pins ad product to come this year (which appears to indeed be the case based on what Silbermann told the Wall Street Journal). He thinks we’ll see the Pinterest ecosystem become “much richer” as third parties continue to build value-added tools that help businesses adopt the platform.

“And of course, I expect deeper innovation on the consumer side, from continued localization bringing Pinterest to new countries to improved search and discovery capabilities and innovative new ways to organize content,” he says.

Pinterest itself is only gaining momentum. It appears that it is not just a fad at this point. Content sharing to Pinterest increased by 58% last year, surpassing even email, according to a report from ShareThis (via MarketingCharts).

Do you see significant business opportunities with Pinterest? Specifically with Pinterest search? Let us now what you think.

Images via Pinterest

January 22, 2014