Pinterest Traffic Tips: Use Before And After Images, Not Just After Images

Yesterday we ran a great little experiment on Pinterest using a fantastic Photoshop article from Clickinmoms, [get it here].

The test was to determine something that I’ve felt curious about for a while. That…

Before & After Pins are better than just using the ‘After’ image alone “

The Experiment: We noticed that the Clickinmoms team had pinned the ‘after’ image 23 hours previously, and on their website they have the before & after images stacked one on top of the other perfectly, so we simply screenshotted it, and pinned that, with a link back to their [awesome] article of course.

The result: Within 1 hour we had 26 repins, and 23 hours later we had 94 repins, compared to their 84 repins after the same time period. As a raw number that’s just an 11% improvement. But wait, there is more…

Importantly, we had launched our version to a pinboard of 400 followers, where as they had launched their version to a pinboard of 8,200 followers. So even though the actual results are only 11% higher, (94 versus 84), the percentage of followers result, (or what you might call ‘repin rate’ similar to ‘response rate’ in Direct Response Marketing lingo), was 23.5% versus 1%. That’s a fairly dramatic different.

The Extraneous Variables: [sorry to geek out]. You’ll also notice that I changed the image description. That’s called a variable. Specifically called an extraneous variable, [learn about intervening variables versus extraneous variables here]. If I wanted a proper A/B Test, I would have used the exact same phrase so those would have been ‘constants’. And we would have launched both versions to the same pinboard so the number of followers would have been constant. So, you could say the variable influenced people differently and impacted these results. But I’m not going to be that picky. Maybe I’ll run that test next. All other variables were fairly constant – time of day it was launched, etc. The day of the week was different, so that again, is another variable. But all in all, this is a good enough, (for me), test to prove my original gut feeling. If one of you want to do a proper A/B test with no other variables, go for it.

Ps. Hey, don’t forget to…