The Perils of Pinterest

The Perils of Pinterest:from Wide Angle by Corey Mull
So, you may have noticed that Wide Angle’s gone a bit quiet over the last few weeks (and if you haven’t noticed, you should read us more often!). It’s because we’re presenting brand-new research on June 7 into what drives effective marketers. We’ll have much, much more on the research in the coming weeks – but, for now, suffice it to say that one of the key problems we’ve identified with marketing teams – both as currently constructed, as well as how they’d be constructed in marketing leaders’ dreams – is a signature lack of focus.
As we’ve been hammering out this work across the last month or so, we’ve developed a lot of shorthand, and one of my favorites is our go-to word for the bright, shiny objects that distract marketers from focusing on real economic results. We’ve been calling those things “Pinterest”, after the white-hot social network much loved (and obsessed over) by CPGs and retailers alike.
Now, this is probably a bit unfair to Pinterest, who have made an excellent product that clearly excites and inspires people. And it’s entirely possible that the nascent platform will evolve into something that’s very, very important for marketers in terms of connecting with their customers. But it’s entirely too early to make that call now – Pinterest has only become popular in the last six months or so.
That hasn’t stopped the hype machine from doing its thing. A range of studies by social media agencies have come out in recent weeks, all touting Pinterest’s performance as a conversion machine. A study by SteelHouse, a marketing firm, showed that Pinterest users are twice as likely as Facebook users to buy things they see on the respective platforms. A few weeks before that, Shopify released an infographic, detailing how Pinterest spurs its users onto more buying. It’s been making the rounds in marketing circles online since then:

The main thing we’re supposed to take away here? Pinterest is super-popular, growing ever more popular, and is a better e-commerce channel than Facebook. But note the big, unexamined assumption here: that Facebook is a good baseline for activities designed to maximize conversion. As anyone that’s been following the social commerce space lately knows, that’s not true; Facebook is a notoriously poor driver of financial outcomes for brands (it may be more influential in “softer” aspects of the consumer buying process, though). And, if you actually dig into the numbers, you find that in April, Shopify stores realized 320 conversions from 262,943 visits to the site from Pinterest. That’s a conversion rate of 0.12%, and marginal revenue of around $25,000 across a network of over 25,000 stores. I don’t know the combined revenues of all of Shopify’s member stores, but for an average retailer, that would be a relative drop in the bucket.

But judging from online chatter and our own search logs, Pinterest is occupying a space in marketers’ imaginations that’s much, much bigger than its current impact on financial outcomes. A key skill for marketers in the digital era is the ability to keep things like Pinterest in perspective – and we’ll tell you a bit about the marketers capable of doing that in the next few weeks.