46. How to Find Your Top Back-to-School Content from Last Year

[00:00:00] Stephanie: As we approach back to school season on Pinterest, it's important to take last year's top content into consideration, but it can be hard to find. Let me walk you through the steps for how to find your top Pinterest content from last year. Welcome back to the podcast. Last month we focused on how to spring clean your blog, and I hope you were able to glean some helpful takeaways and tips from those episodes.

[00:00:40] For this month, I wanted to shift gears to Pinterest. It's going to have a bit of that spring cleaning feel, but we're actually going to focus on preparing for back to school season because Pinterest likely does a lot of the heavy lifting for your traffic during this season, and because it's such an important traffic source for your business,

[00:01:02] as much as we would like to get through these busy spring months without thinking about back to school season, this is probably the time that we need to start thinking about it. Back when I was a teacher, Pinterest was my go-to during the summer months. I didn't wanna feel like I was putting too much time or thought into my classroom during my time off, but for some reason Pinterest felt like a safe option.

[00:01:29] I would cruise Pinterest for classroom ideas while on our summer road trips or when a pain point from the previous school year just randomly popped into my head. I'd mindlessly scroll and save things that looked interesting for my August brain to think about it. No matter how teachers decide to use Pinterest during the summer months, one thing is true. Pinterest traffic sees a huge surge during back to school season.

[00:01:59] To help you prepare for this, we're going to start from square one, which is finding your top content from last year's traffic surge. There are several reasons why we want to focus our attention on last year's best hits on Pinterest as we prepare for the upcoming back to school season. First, it gives you a glimpse into what teachers are searching for as they get their classrooms set up.

[00:02:24] You'll likely find themes within your best performing content. For example, you might have pins that highlight full year solutions like morning work for the whole year. These are things that teachers want to have squared away before school starts. So this would be the type of content that you might want to focus on. Looking at last year's

[00:02:47] top pins can just take the guesswork out of it because you can see firsthand which of your pins did best. You don't have to take guesses because the clues are already there. Another reason why we want to focus on last year's top content is so we can hedge our bets. If you've been pinning for a while, you likely have older legacy pins that resurface every year like clockwork.

[00:03:15] You know that around July this particular pin is going to take off. These old faithful pins are a great boost for your account, but it is helpful to hedge your bets by making a few more fresh pins for that same piece of content just in case a switch gets flipped in the algorithm and that legacy pin no longer does the heavy lifting for your account.

[00:03:39] When you know that a post does really well on Pinterest, you are able to make a few more pins for that URL just in case. And finally, analyzing last year's content can help you troubleshoot your pins that didn't perform well last year. Maybe you have a post that should have done well based on your experience and your keyword research, but it just didn't translate to Pinterest success.

[00:04:05] So by looking at last year's content, you can make a plan for how to increase traffic to some posts that just weren't quite as strong last year. But the problem is that finding last year's top pins is actually a bit tricky. Now you might think to yourself, how hard can it possibly be? Pinterest has an analytic section where I can see my top pins and boards for a particular time period.

[00:04:33] And yes, that's true, but if you've ever tried to go to last year's content, you will quickly discover that this data is only available within the past six months. So finding your top back to school content from Pinterest last year is going to take a little bit more legwork when you're doing it for the first time.

[00:04:57] If you're listening to this episode on the go, you might decide to pause here and come back when you're in front of your computer, because I'm going to show you step by step how to find your top content from Pinterest last year. We are going to start in Google Analytics, and I know we don't love the new analytics, but hopefully I can make this pretty simple and low stress for you to find what you need.

[00:05:25] So once you're logged into your account in Google Analytics, you'll see a toolbar on the left side of the page. Under the home icon there is an option for reports, and that's what you wanna click. A new menu will pop up and you'll choose acquisition, and then more options will pop up and you will select traffic acquisition.

[00:05:49] Once you're there, you're going to see a graph, and underneath that graph will be a table. Looking to the left side, that first column, there is going to be a dropdown menu at the top, and you're going to see a little plus sign next to it. So this dropdown menu will likely default to session primary channel group.

[00:06:12] That's probably what it says. If it says something else, it's not a big deal because we're gonna change it. So, session primary channel group, this just means that the traffic is sorted by traffic type in a very general way, and so Pinterest is lumped in with like Facebook and Instagram in the organic social grouping. We want to be able to isolate Pinterest, so we're going to switch that dropdown menu to the option that says session source slash medium.

[00:06:46] Once you've done that, you're going to hit the plus button next to the dropdown menu, and a box is going to open On the left hand side, you will choose the page slash screen option. There will be three choices that appear in the window, and you'll choose page path and screen class. So what you've done now is you've broken up all of those different types of organic traffic and you've broken them up based on the different blog posts, but now we just want to see Pinterest.

[00:07:21] And so right above the dropdown menu and the plus sign, there's a search box. Type in Pinterest and press enter. Now the table will show you your top blog traffic from Pinterest. But we're not quite done yet. We still need to narrow it down to back to school season. So you'll go up to the top and find the date dropdown option, and you can choose the start date that you're most interested in.

[00:07:47] I would suggest searching from the beginning of June, and then you select an end date of probably the end of September last year. And now for one last step, if you go to the sessions column, you can sort it in descending order so that your top content is right there at the top. And so I know what you might be thinking.

[00:08:09] Well, Stephanie, this doesn't tell me the individual pins that are bringing me the traffic. And I know that's actually one limitation of the new Google Analytics is they don't give us that pin by pin information like they used to. And so in next week's episode, we're going to talk more specifically about what you can do with these URLs

[00:08:32] to make a plan for your back to school Pinterest content. But for now, let's talk about how you can save yourself some time next year and have more actionable data. While the information you can get from Google Analytics can be very helpful for your Pinterest strategy, it would definitely be more helpful to have your top back to school pin data straight from the source.

[00:08:57] To save yourself some time and have more actionable data next year, set a reminder on your calendar to grab this data and also to listen to this podcast episode if you need to, at the beginning of October. And when that reminder pops up on your calendar, here's what you're going to do. You will navigate to your Pinterest analytics dashboard.

[00:09:20] You'll see the traffic graph at the top, like usual. And above this graph is where you'll adjust the dates to include that back to school window. So on the date range dropdown menu, just select custom and then adjust the calendars to include your preferred start date and end date. Once you have that date window set, you can navigate down to your top pin section and choose which analytics you'd like to see.

[00:09:48] Impressions are helpful because they tell you which pins are popping up the most in search results. This can give you valuable insight into search bar behavior during back to school season. Outbound clicks are helpful because they tell you which pins teachers are using to solve their problems right now when they see that pin and they're clicking right out to go see what your solution is.

[00:10:13] These are likely going to be the pins that have the best chance to convert to sales. And finally, saves are another great stat to take into consideration. These are posts that teachers find valuable enough to save for later, but might not be in a place to take action on that post, right then. Once you choose the data type that you want to sort by,

[00:10:38] you're going to select it in the dropdown menu and then scroll back up towards the graph at the top of the page. On the right hand side, you'll see an export button. This will give you a summary report with clickable links to each pin. They lead directly to the top pins for that period of time based on whatever data type you chose.

[00:11:03] If you can grab this data before the six month window closes, this is going to be such a huge help to your back to school planning next year. So I would suggest exporting a report for each type of data. So you would have a report for impressions, one for outbound clicks and one for saves. Keep them in a Google Drive folder and then add a link to that folder in your calendar when you're ready to look at your back to school strategy next spring.

[00:11:36] I hope that this episode has given you some actionable steps to help you find your top performing Pinterest content from last year's back to school season. It might be a little bit tricky to find this the first time around, but it will help you create a more effective pinning strategy moving forward.

[00:11:54] In next week's episode, we're going to talk in more detail about what to do with this information you've found. Be sure that you're following the Pay Less for Traffic podcast so you don't miss it.