10% of Social E-Commerce Visits Coming From Pinterest

Rich Relevance analyzed 490 million shopping sessions that occurred during the crucial 10 day period beginning on Thanksgiving (Black Friday/Cyber Monday). With more than 25,000 e-commerce stores analyzed, this study provided some interesting insights into how Pinterest is helping social e-commerce. Compared to 2011, Pinterest now accounts for roughly 10% of traffic from social channels (double of 2011 stats). Facebook still rules with it still commanding 89% of visits from social channels.

Note: Here’s the original article that I found while writing this post.

The ease of pinning content across Pinterest allows for greater share-ability, and with the holiday season in full swing, brands can take advantage of themed content across boards to generate interest in their offerings. As with most things, brands will have to be selective about the channels they choose to participate in and engage customers. The key here is, 10% of social traffic, not 10% of actual purchases. Social commerce directly accounted for .31% of thanksgiving purchases. That’s right. E-commerce in itself accounts for ~6-7% of total retail sales.

In the absolute sense, these are not great numbers. Social commerce has not exactly taken off as it was expected. Gamestop, Nordstorm opened their Facebook stores, only to close them shortly sighting lack of transactions. With much more robust systems and customer trust placed in e-commerce stores, many users did not any value in making the same purchase on Facebook. What’s mostly missing from social media channels is the lack of “commercial intent”. A person doing a search for a product/service is different from a user hanging out, viewing news feed and engaging in conversation with friends. CTR’s for Facebook average at 0.051% while it’s 0.4% for Google.

Coming back to Pinterest, the fact that it’s driving traffic to e-commerce stores cannot be ignored by marketers. The remaining piece of the puzzle is finding out if users from Pinterest are actually making purchases or not. As using a last-click model is flawed because it discounts the efforts put in by other channels/campaigns in meeting the objectives, Attribution Modeling tool in Google Analytics is a much way (especially for e-commerce websites) for finding out the path that a user takes in ultimately making a purchase. Ultimately, marketers would like to measure ROI and with Pinterest continuing to make waves, the holiday season might be a good reason to take advantage of it.

Pinterest and E-Commerce

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