Drop in Pinterest traffic

Andrii

Jul 20, 2020 • 5 min read

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On May 31st I’ve experienced a massive drop in my Pinterest traffic.

I will describe the issue here – maybe it can help someone.

So, to start with, my Pinterest account – @museuly – amassed over nearly 80K followers (over few years), I was getting 10M impressions and 20-50K monthly pageviews on my website.

But, suddenly I got first small drop and then another massive drop in Pinterest impressions, traffic, engagement.

First drop – on 25th May – from 1.69M daily impressions to 1.22M. I was like “OK, this is not great, but can be recovered”. And then second drop on May 31st – from 1.35M to 396K daily impressions. 😅

What happened to my Pinterest traffic?

Well, I’m still not entirely sure.

In that period I tried to adjust Smartloop feature on Tailwind. Tailwind is a popular Pinterest scheduler and its Smartloop helps to automatically reschedule your most popular pins.

As I know, using Tailwind is ok with Pinterest – as long as you adjust to Pinterest guidelines – don’t spam. Even more, Tailwind tries to alert you, when for example you are scheduling more than 40-50 pins a day or when you are scheduling pins to the same board.

So, I think that’s what happened with my Smartloop readjustment. I’ve added many new popular pins to reschedule them in future.

But, I pushed these popular pins to the same old boards – these pins weren’t fresh anymore. Also, I set up Smartloop to repin 3 pins a day. And seems Pinterest didn’t like it.

I got a warning from Tailwind, that it can be an issue, but still proceeded, because there weren’t that many pins. So around that period, my Pinterest engagement started to drop.

I contacted Tailwind support…

I reached out to both Tailwind and Pinterest support.

First I reached out to Tailwind, basically they reassured that Tailwind is an official Pinterest Partner and that “any of Tailwind’s features won’t negatively impact your account in any way”.

However, “if you are constantly resharing the same content without adding in the new fresh pins, it could be a factor. Especially with Pinterest’s new best practices.”

So, to sum up, using Tailwind won’t get you penalized on Pinterest. BUT, if you still break Pinterest guidelines within Tailwind, it can lead to traffic drop.

Sarah also recommended visiting Pinterest communities for help.

So, here are links to these resources:

Pinterest Community: https://community.pinterest.biz/t5/support-and-questions/bd-p/support

Business Chat: https://community.pinterest.biz/t5/business-chat/bd-p/smb-chat

Creator Chat: https://community.pinterest.biz/t5/creator-chat/bd-p/creator-chat

If you can’t find your answer here, you might want to contact Pinterest directly here: https://help.pinterest.com/en/contact

Pinterest Communities

In fact, Pinterest Communities can be super helpful for Pinterest creators.

I’ve found plenty of topics and replies about drop of Pinterest traffic.

The cool part about Pinterest Communities is that official Pinterest admins hang out there, you can tag them and get an official answer to your request.

Change in Pinterest algorithm?

From Pinterest communities you can see that plenty of creators are reporting huge drops in traffic/impressions from Pinterest recently.

Especially, after/during May-July 2020.

Looks like, there are now stricter requirements for “original, fresh pins”. “This is true whether you publish content through Pinterest directly or through a third party scheduling tool”.

Here is a post by Gabby from Pinterest addressing recent traffic drops on Pinterest and possible new stricter Pinterest algorithm requirements.

I reached out to Pinterest support

So, after reading this, I reached out directly to Pinterest support by filling form on their site.

They requested that I reply from email, associated with my Pinterest profile.

Basically, Pinterest support team confirmed, that my account and website weren’t flagged.

They advised me to focus on quality of traffic, instead of quantity.

I used to pin 40-50 pins-quotes a day with Tailwind. Probably, I will pin less in future.

Then I asked what can be done to restore Pinterest traffic quicker.

How to avoid drops in Pinterest traffic (on my experience)?

To sum up, these are my subjective lessons after drop in Pinterest traffic.

– Avoid rescheduling old pins to the same boards. If you are rescheduling popular old pins or using Smartloop feature for that – at least pin them to new boards.

– Focus on “original, fresh pins”. New images, with links to new pages. I think it’s ok to add new images to old URLs, but not ok to pin old images to old URLs.

– Avoid too many pins per day. I was doing 40-50 pins per day and that is maximum I guess.

– Change design of your pins, use different Titles and Descriptions.

– Don’t steal pins. There are bunch of tools, which can help you scrape and download images from Pinterest. But, in the end your account might get flagged.

Hope at least some info here will help you out!