Developing an interest in Pinterest is leading to significant gains for retailers and small businesses.
Image search is raising product attention among customers. Pinterest Analytics, along with redesigns in other social media platforms, spotlights the importance to the bottom line.
Online search has been popular for several years now. But search quality is beginning to spread into different digital media. Among these splinter search techniques, image search is increasingly becoming as desirable to digital marketers as Manhattan real estate to a New York City realtor.
A number of technological and usage factors in digital marketing is the cause for the growing interest. New technical features in code and programming languages are discovering new ways to highlight media files. HTML5, for example, introduced new tags such as <video> and <figure> to distinguish media elements in the browser. Such distinctions are an aid as search engine algorithms increase their query sophistication.
Another factor lies in the devices being used while online. Digital images have always been available, but now smartphones and new behavior introduced by social media has made image share essential. Digital Trends reported that 27% of US smartphone users share photos through their device. Facebook, the largest photo-sharing website in the world, sees 300 million photo uploads daily.
Raising the ante to bridge consumer activity to measuring insights is Pinterest Analytics. The new measurement solution provides pinning diagnostics – number of pins in a given period, where pin clicks lead, impressions, and the means to determine overall pin performance. Its launch is the first in-house solution from Pinterest. A third party solution, Reachli, has been available for a year.
The introduction of Pinterest analytics means more than keeping up with Facebook Insights or the analytics centered on Twitter. Pinterest has generated a highly engaged community of followers, qualities that has benefited participating retailers and attracting marketers. The skew towards women has been documented for some time. In 2012 Marketing Land noted a Nielsen report heralding the platform’s high growth rate, a 1,047% increase in unique PC visitors. Reuters reports Pinterest to have 48 million users worldwide.
Most of all, the Pinterest activity implies the value images have for customers as they research retail goods. Retailers will want to pay attention to images, their labels, and descriptions, which lead to customer discovery. An image with a primary keyword in its file name and description, for example, can show in a search engine result page.
Evaluating and refining on-page image element descriptions will help marketers gauge the right images that can endear customers to their brand. Further sophistication in analytics will aid marketers in discovering how well a keyword or phrase attracts people to a digital presence. Search context will begin to include a more visual meaning. The ultimate potential can lead to a blend of image sharing campaigns on social media with on-page image element descriptions that complement search optimization techniques.
The jury regarding the best co-existing strategies of social media and organic search is still deliberating. But as search engines improve their reference of social media reference and website incorporate more semantic tagging descriptions, images used for entice researching customers will provide the context needed to make organic search even more beneficial for the customer.
