redpepper / Pinterest: What we learned from One Million pins

Pinterest: What we learned from One Million pins

When we began concepting the Pinning Parlor in early 2012 we didn’t have any context as to what would be considered a successful Pinterest promotion. 10 pins? 100 repins? One Billion pins served? All we knew was that we were starting at zero.

Pinterest had yet to expose a public API which made gathering data and insight a very manual process. Early on we wanted to know how many pins, repins, likes, and comments Kirkland’s and their competitors were getting so we could set some performance targets.

So, in February we tasked an “employee”, lets call her Curlette, to “collect” pin data for us. Starting two months before the Pinning Parlor was set to launch on mykirklands.com she looked at pins coming in from potterybarn.com, westelm.com, restorationhardware.com, pier1.com, worldmarket.com, homegoods.com, and hobbylobby.com. After three months and one killer promo later she had collected data on 509k pins, 697k repins, 221k likes, and 9k comments. We finally had something to compare our success against.

In it’s first week, the Pinning Parlor generated well over 60k pins. This was more than West Elm, Restoration Hardware, Pier 1, and World Market had total in the two months leading up to the promotion. By the end of the month the Pinning Parlor had generated 253k pins. At its peak, over a 30 minute period, the Parlor was getting an average of 2 pins per second. I’ll pause for a moment while that sinks in and the Jeopardy music plays…

Ok, so you’re asking, what does all this pin data look like? Well, I spent the last week with a TI-82 diligently adding up all the numbers from Curlette and put them into some neat little graphs for your viewing pleasure. As you look through the graphs you should start to see some very compelling trends in the realm of Pinterest usage. Under the graphs are most popular things Pinned from Kirkland’s Pinning Parlor and their competitors over the past 3 months. Enjoy!