It looks like Pinterest is starting to show up with real promise in the jWAG referral tracking system. It seemed to jump in from nowhere with some pretty good looking results.
Let's dig in!
There were 578 tracked referral websites over the last 30 days. Here are some you might find interesting:
#1 Google being
#3 YellowPages.com
#4 Facebook
#32 Google Maps
#36 Yahoo Local
#38 Pinterest
It still surprise me to see Yellow Pages so high on this list, even though I know many jewelers are not paying for that service.
Facebook's position is not surprising, however it's only that high because of paid advertising, not because of organically linked visits from a Timeline.
Most of the top referrals every month change as different jewelers switch up their link building methods, but Google Maps holds its usual spot in the top 40.
Yahoo Local's positioning shows that links from them still help about 11% of the jewelers monitored.
Then Pinterest appears in the #38 spot which represents referral links for about 7% of the tracked jewelers. Only 1.5% of that 7% accounts for actual jewelry stores that created their own Pinterest Pin Boards; the rest were pins and repins by random people.
I found it most interesting that these referrals were to jewelers who haven't put "Pin It Buttons" on their website. I know a few jewelers that have the Pin It button, but the last 30 days' report doesn't include referrals to those websites. This means that people figured out how to pin things on their own.
I followed all the referral links back to the original pin boards and found that consumers are installing the Pin It toolbar to their web browser and pinning items they find on their own. Two consumers had pinned items into their wedding related pin board. Two other consumers had repined original pins.
The referrals on the report represent each time someone found a pinboard and clicked a photo to visit the jeweler's site. Most of the pins I looked at were 4 or more weeks old, which means the referral click didn't come from the pinboard owner, but someone who found the pinboard for the first time.
This means Pinterest has the potential to general more and more referral visitors month after month as you people pin your site.
Pinterest visitors are bouncing 52% of the time, but those who don't bounce are browsing around a jewelry site for 18:55 minutes! That's astounding since the only other referral sites to create that much interest are usually zip code search referrals from jewelry vendors.
Pinterest will continue to rise in popularity, and I'll keep an eye on it while it does. This social network will become a huge benefit for all jewelry stores that have online product catalogs of their own.
