Pinterest Marketers Are About to Get the Data They Want
Could help shift more budget to the social platform
Pinterest is opening its business platform to a handful of marketing tech players, letting them access data that should help their brand clients better understand what content efforts are performing best.
The initiative—dubbed Pinterest MarTech Developer Alpha—leverages the social player's application programming interface (API) and is being rolled out to a select number of vendors, including Piqora, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, Percolate, Spredfast and Curalate. The vendors will offer services meant to improve on Pinterest Analytics, the San Francisco-based social media firm's free data offering.
Creating such a developer platform is almost like a rite of passage for burgeoning social media companies, as Facebook began the trend a few years ago and Instagram, LinkedIn and Tumblr have more recently followed suit. Now, Pinterest is turning developers loose.
"We get more information about user groups, things like boards, number of followers as well as their gender and so forth," Piqora CEO Sharad Verma told Adweek. "With some of that data, we can eventually help brands kind of understand at an aggregate level [what] their audience demographic looks like."
Verma's company will begin to offer clients—including Etsy, West Elm and One King’s Lane—a content analytics product called Pinterest Trends in about two weeks. He added that the importance of Pinterest's MarTech Developer Alpha centers on the efficiency that tech companies can use to leverage data.
And marketers definitely welcome such data. Conversions from Pinterest, for example, continue to be a major gripe for retailers. Adding these tools that show which particular items are generating the highest click-throughs and sales could nudge brands to dedicate more staff and budget to creating a bigger presence on the social platform.
Meanwhile, Pinterest's tools are unlikely to completely cut out the aforementioned Pinterest Analytics. But as the company's ad business heats up, these kinds of insights could shift marketing spend toward the social site's promoted pins ad product.
"The release of Pinterest's API is important in that it pushes the brands that were on the fence about Pinterest to jump into the fray," said Apu Gupta, CEO of Curalate.
