New Data Shows Pinterest Users Look But Don't Buy

forbes.com

7 pointsJJColao2 comments

This makes perfect sense. What Pinterest offers are not links to products, but a stream of aesthetically-pleasing visual stimuli that are constantly new and interesting, but fleeting.

Their other major product is self-satisfaction. The act of re-pinning is a way to prove your taste to others, and when your pins get re-pinned or liked, the reward in terms of self-aggrandizement is fairly substantial.

Could they do better to convert people to purchasers? Probably. If there was a buy link on many of those images, I'm sure people would click it and consider. As it is, they're not trying for that, because they're not in the business of selling products; they're in the business of providing emotions.

I think it goes beyond that. As an anecdote, I'm getting married in April and my fiance is using pinterest to collect and organize all our ideas for the wedding. We'll end up buying probably 10-20% of what she has pinned, but over the next 6 months. By internet click-through funnel micro-measurements, when we buy it will look like a direct purchase rather than attributed to the channels we discovered the product on. Unfortunately, being able to determine the source and measure return on it is roughly the same as TV advertising and I don't know of any company that provides that sort of analysis for internet campaigns.

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