How to Use Pinterest’s Audience Insights to Attract Readers to Your Blog

Pinterest is the best way to get readers to your blog as a new blogger. Knowing this, Pinterest offers bloggers and other content creators analytic tools to help us create content to drive traffic to our blogs. One of the most recent additions to Pinterest Analytics is Audience Insights.

Audience Insights is an amazing tool for any blogger planning his or her content. In this blog post, I will explain what this tool is and how you can use it to curate content that your audience will engage with. No guesswork, just results.

*This post may contain affiliate links. That means that I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through those links at no cost to you.

As a blogger, you work hard to come up with and create great content for your readers. However, when you go through the effort and no one reads your blog post, it flat out stinks.

The good news is that Pinterest offers free tools for business accounts that bloggers can use to analyze their audience and find out exactly what they are interested in.

Their newest tool, Audience Insights, literally takes the guesswork out of planning your content and won’t cost you a dime!

How great is that?!?

Related Posts

• How to Use Pinterest Analytics to Crush It On Pinterest
• The 2018 Blogger’s Guide to the New Pinterest
• Get to Know Your Audience Using Google Analytics

Audience Insights

At this point, you may be asking, “What is Audience Insights?” A few months ago, you may have noticed the following bar across the top of your Pinterest Analytics profile.

(You can follow along using your own Pinterest Analytics account by going to Audience Insights here.)

I know that I am guilty of going to Pinterest Analytics to find what I need and leaving. That means it was a week or two before I clicked on the white “Take Me There” button. To be honest, I was pretty confused by what I saw.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Audience Insights gives you a brief summary of your account and contains a drop-down menu. This menu allows you to select your total audience or engaged audience. In the examples in this blog post, I will be looking at my total audience

Categories and Interests

Below your profile information, you have Categories and Interests. Categories have an Affinity ranking and a Percentage of Audience rank. If you click on one of the Categories, the Interests within that Category populate to the right, as seen in the screenshot below.

You will notice that the Interests also have an Affinity ranking as well as a Percentage of Category Audience rank.

So, what is your Affinity rank and what does it all mean?

Affinity

The most confusing part of Audience Insights for me was the Affinity metric. This little metric can give you awesome ideas for the type of content your audience wants most.

Affinity is essentially the likelihood of that your specific audience will engage with a Category or Interest. In the screenshot above, my audience is 2.77 times more likely than average to engage with “Design” category content.

Within that category, My audience is 3.11 times more likely than average to engage with pins in the Interest, Book and Magazine Design. This number varies by interest within a category.

Affinity is a great indicator of your audience’s interest in the topic. Content with a high affinity will greatly increase the chances that your audience will click on your content or save it.

Percentage of Audience

In the Category section, the Percentage of Audience ranking tells you how much of your Pinterest audience is interested in the specific Category.

Whereas Affinity gives you the likelihood that an individual will engage with your pins, this Percentage is an indicator of the number of people in your audience who are interested in the Category.

Using the above metric data, for example, 33.2% or about 78,000 viewers (of 235k) are interested in the Design category.

Percentage of Category Audience

Interests, like Categories, also have their own Affinity ranking. However, the Percentage section under Interests contains only the percentage of your viewers who are interested in the specific Interest within the Category.

Since I have 78,000 viewers with an interest in the Design category, then 48.4% or roughly 37,000 of my total audience are interested in the Book and Magazine Design interest.

This is significantly fewer than the category total, but this portion of the audience is much more likely to engage with this content.

Use the Metrics to Grow

As you can imagine, knowing your audience’s interests will help you identify content that they are interested in and more likely to engage with. This can greatly increase the performance of your Pinterest account and increase traffic to your blog.

To get the most out of your content, look for a combination of a high Affinity ranking with a High percentage of your audience that is interested in the Category or Interest. This is the sweet spot for your content.

Write down the topics of interest that rank the highest. Then, research them on Pinterest and Google to get the most out of your content.

Demographics

As with many other platforms, Audience Insights includes demographic data. Since Pinterest is a visual search platform, this can help you target your specific audience visually based on your statistics.

There is a lot to gain just by understanding exactly who your audience is. In the above screenshot, you can see the age and gender of my audience.

Age

As with nearly any social platform, Pinterest’s audience is primarily comprised of millennials. It is no surprise that more than half of my audience are in the “under 35” age range.

There are two ways you can use this metric. The first is that you can look at your current audience’s age range and target that age group. You would then create pins and content that appeal directly to that specific demographic.

The other way to use this demographic is to change the age range for your audience altogether. For instance, if you have a blog for caregivers and elder health, you would be targeting a middle-age demographic, not a millennial. This means your current strategy isn’t work and you need to make changes.

As you make changes, you need monitor the age of your audience members to see if your changes are working. Experiment and try to get the percentage of your target audience up and make adjustments as necessary.

Gender

There is a lot to consider with gender these days. Older audiences tend to be more traditional and conservative in their marketing preferences. That means that older males may not be attracted to traditionally feminine colors and design.

Younger audiences, however, are much less dependent on femininity and masculinity in advertising. This is something to consider when planning your pins and your blog content.

I will point out that Pinterest was once dominated by a female audience. Its male audience has grown dramatically in the past two years. I have personally seen my male viewer percentage increase by 20 percent in the past two years.

This is something you should consider when designing your pins and planning content. For example, I shouldn’t focus all of my efforts on work-at-home moms since my male demographic may not share the same interests and struggles as mommy bloggers.

Location

Not all blogs are location dependent, but some are very dependent on it. For example, a sports blogger in Atlanta would likely be posting content about the Braves, Hawks, or Falcons.

It would only make sense that their audience is from Atlanta. If it is from other areas, that blogger would need to make changes. If you are attracting more readers outside your target city or country, you may have an issue with your content.

Likewise, a realtor in Los Angeles would want to attract clientele in the L.A. area, not New York. When your actual audience is in a location that isn’t your target audience, you have a serious problem.

To improve this, you can try adding keywords including the city or country you are targeting in your blog posts and on your pins. Also consider if your pins are making the subject clear and use location hashtags in the pin description.

Device

The device your audience uses impacts a lot of things on your website. For example, a website that isn’t responsive is a huge turn-off for mobile users, which could be a large percentage of your audience.

Another consideration is the type of content you may choose to create based on your audience’s viewing preferences. For example, if I know that most of my audience uses an iPhone or iPad, it would be a good idea to write a blog post on the best iPhone apps for bloggers.

If I create content that is for a platform that my audience doesn’t use often (such as an Android tablet, in my case), I could be wasting my time. My audience is only interested in content that appeals to them. That means I need to consider this when planning my content.

Export and Analyze Your Data

In addition to providing you with these metrics, Audience Insights goes a step further and allows you to export your data, which can help you sort through the data quickly and easily in Spreadsheet software using formulas.

This is optional, but if you have spreadsheet skills, it can help you quickly analyze the data from Audience Insights and find the Categories and Interests that appeal most to your audience.

If you wish to download this data, all you have to do is scroll back up the top of the page. You should see something similar to the screenshot below.

On the right, under your profile picture, you will see a red button that says “Create Campaign.” To the left of that is a gray box labeled, “Export CSV.” To export your data, click this button and a download should begin.

Once you have exported your data, you can easily import it into your favorite spreadsheet software, such as Google Sheets (aka Spreadsheets) or Microsoft Excel. This will allow you to filter and sort cells to eliminate topics, and set thresholds for the Affinity and Percentage of Audience data.

Create Content

Now that you have the data, take the information you have learned about your Pinterest audience using Audience Insights to create the content that you know your audience loves.

While you research these topics on Pinterest, take note of any blog post and pin ideas that jump out at you. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your pins, especially when using the demographic data. This data is subjective, so what may work well for others, may not work well in your niche.

Perform experiments one-at-a-time so that you can identify whether the experiment was successful or not.

Grow Your Pinterest Using Audience Insights

I hope you found this information helpful. I know that it has dramatically helped me to come up with content ideas that are relevant to my audience. In my own experiments, I have seen a dramatic increase in engagement when applying this information.

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