Pinterest has gotten a lot of attention for its overall success at driving ready-to-buy to purchase from pins they’ve seen, boosting sales and conversions like email sign-ups.

This makes sense, since so many users on Pinterest use the platform to research buying decisions.

In order to get more sales, however, you first need to know how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your site, especially since very few businesses have access to the buyable pins that would allow pinners to purchase without leaving the site.

In this post, we’re going to look at why Pinterest is so effective at helping you send traffic to your site, and 4 easy, free, and effective ways to do so.

Why Use Pinterest?

I’ve talked a lot about how much I love Pinterest even aside from my personal recipe-pinning addiction. It can result in a lot of conversions and a lot of sales, it’s audience and reach is continuing to grow, and the fact that its users frequently use Pinterest to research buying decisions makes it a powerful opportunity for businesses (you can read about all that here).

In case you need more persuading, however, the following statistics show why Pinterest can be so effective at drawing large amounts of traffic to your site:

• The lifecycle of a pin is about one week. This is how long it will get engagement and repins. Compared to Facebook’s 90 minutes, this is huge.
• A single regular pin from results in an average of 6 page views.
• The half-life of a pin is 3.5 months, which is 1680x longer than Facebook
• 80% of pins are repins, meaning that new content can be highly valuable and continually shared.

Pinterest won’t just send you traffic once; the life cycle of a pin is significantly longer than the life cycle of another type of social media posts, and that alone is a huge asset businesses can take advantage of.

Now that I’ve officially added to my list of “why you should market on Pinterest,” let’s look at the 4 easy tactics that are most effective to increasing your site traffic.

1. Use Taller Pins

Choosing taller pins (but not too tall!) can make all the difference in how much traffic you’re getting to your site. While most pins will be slightly taller than they are wide, pins of a certain dimension are likely to perform the best.

Taller pins will naturally stand out more in a feed.

On Pinterest, all images will be scaled to a width of 235 pixels (with an expanded width of 736 pixels once you click on it). The ideal ratio seems to be closer to 1:3.5 (or 600 pixels wide by 2,100 pixels tall, for example).

You want your pin to be taller than it is wide. This focus of these dimensions is purely on the image, though additional text can help increase clicks, too.

Taller pins stand out in the Newsfeed automatically, and can be quick to draw the eye. While you don’t want it to be much taller than 1:3.5, you can test out different lengths and see what resonates best with your audience.

2. Post at Peak Times

Posting at peak times will help more users to see and click on your pins. Most importantly, it will also encourage more repins, will which continue to cycle through the site. Peak times for Pinterest are 8-11PM, particularly on Saturdays.

Other high traffic times include: 

• Fridays at 3PM
• 2-4 AM and PM, every day
• 9 PM daily (which is considered to be the true peak time)

Using Pinterest’s analytics to see where your target audience is located can give you a clue into what hours they’ll be awake and pinning.

Even though you do want to post at peak times, space your content out, with no more than one pin per hour. Since Pinterest has traditionally had rules in place so that only one pin per hour per user will show up in a certain category, you don’t want to take any chances.

3. Add CTAs to your Descriptions

Some of the best advice you’ll ever see in any blog post about marketing is to slap a CTA on whatever it is you’re sharing, whether it’s a Facebook post or an email. The same applies to Pinterest, though they’re overwhelmingly underused on this platform for some reason.

While ending with a CTA is more common, you can also start your description with a CTA, too.

If you scroll through Pinterest, it’s a little surprising how few pins actually have CTAs attached. Encouraging users to “click to learn more” or “sign up now” can be enough to actually get them to move to action.

Don’t believe me?  Call to action pins can increase engagement and conversions by up to 80%. If that’s not enough motivation, I don’t know what is.

Ending your description with a CTA can increase both traffic to and conversions on your site.

Add CTAs to the end of your descriptions, and keep them brief and to the point. In certain cases, like those of a Pinterest contest, you can also add your CTA to the image itself as text overlay.

4. Install Rich Pins

No matter what type of business you have, or what types of products you sell, Rich pins can automatically help send traffic to your site from Pinterest. Rich pins are dynamic, and offer more information than a regular pin. The idea is similar to Twitter Cards.

Rich pins give users additional information to capture their interest and make them want to click.

There are different types of rich pins available for businesses to install and use. The types of rich pins currently available are:

• Article Pins, which feature the name of an article, a description, the date it was published, the publication, and the author’s name.
• Recipe Pins, which feature ingredients, serving information, and cooking times
• App pins, which include install buttons and are currently available to iOS apps only.
• Place pins, which are ideal for local businesses and include a map, address, and phone number
• Movie pins, which include ratings, prominent cast member names, and reviews
• Product pins, which include up-to-date pricing, and purchasing information

Rich pins are synced up with your site, and will continue to automatically update and provide the most accurate information. This means that product pins, for example, will update the price listed automatically; if your product goes on sale, that’s reflected in the pin.

Product pins reflect current prices and availability; this product, for example, is currently listed as out of stock.

Brick-and-mortar stores can increase actual foot traffic and online traffic with Place Pins.

The extra information from rich pins can help drive more relevant and engaged traffic to your site, and they’ll have all the up-to-date information that they need.

To see how to install rich pins, you can learn more here.

Final Thoughts

Pinterest can send massive amounts of traffic to your site, resulting in large numbers of conversions like email subscriptions and sales—you just have to use the right tactics to get the right results. These 5 tactics discussed above will help increase the traffic you’re getting from Pinterest, and are all quick and easy to implement. For more about Pinterest marketing (or about promoted pins, which are also an effective way to send traffic to your site), check out our step-by-step Pinterest Guide here.

What do you think? How do you use Pinterest in your marketing campaigns? What pins have sent the most traffic to your site? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!