CASE STUDY: How Pinterest drives 41% of referral traffic to a website

One of my lifestyle websites that I created and maintain from scratch is now generating about 41% of its traffic from Pinterest. Pinterest has been slow to get moving in Africa but I think it is one of social media’s best kept secrets when it comes to generating traffic for media brands, e-commerce websites and client websites. I would seriously recommend Pinterest.

A Pinterest graphic about how 41% of traffic was generated

Insight 1: Pinterest posts are inherently viral

When you post on Pinterest, the viral loop is something to be awed at. The more impressions and saves your Pinterest pin gets, the higher chance you have of going viral and the more chance you have of people clicking on your pins and therefore being redirected to your website. My lifestyle website is in the fashion & beauty space which is one of the most popular niches for Pinterest however I would seriously encourage anyone in fashion, beauty, lifestyle, interiors, architecture and property to consider starting a Pinterest account today. To this end, I am always creating visually rich posts that I know will do well as pins on Pinterest because I want to keep my steady flow of fresh traffic from Pinterest.

Insight 2: Pinterest drives a hidden African audience

It is fascinating but Pinterest has a surprisingly strong set of fans in Africa especially the West African region. My lifestyle website has received plenty of views from countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. The East African traffic is not high but Kenyan traffic also comes to my website via Pinterest. This highlights that there are growth opportunities for organic traffic in Africa but you probably need to create your media brand in English to get this type of organic traffic from Pinterest.

Insight 3: Pinterest users want ideas & inspiration

Out of all the social networking sites, Pinterest is definitely want that has the classic shoppers compared to say Facebook and Instagram. Pinterest users want ideas & inspiration – always keep this in your mind when you are promoting content on Pinterest. My lifestyle website does well when I inspire my readers with beauty posts and give them ideas on what products to buy. This also creates huge opportunities for affiliate marketing.

41% of unpaid referral traffic coming from Pinterest was not done overnight. You do need to invest some time in building up your presence on Pinterest but even after just 30 days of a steady approach on Pinterest will start paying dividends. Pinterest can definitely work especially for media brands, websites and e-commerce brands. What are you waiting for?

A Brand-New Case Study About Bing Ads – Updated December 2018

I recently did a few campaigns on Bing Ads to learn more about how Bing operates and whether the cost per clicks (CPC) are affordable or not. Bing is known for skewing towards an older crowd, a wealthier search crowd compared to Google but naturally it’s traffic is much less. I decided to give Bing Ads a shot because I like doing things differently and going against the grain. Here are some of the things I have learned:

1-Longer keywords get clicks

Take a look at this screenshot from one of my campaigns in the small business space to reach more entrepreneurs and bsuiness owners. As you can see, the CPC for the term ‘online business’ is high with impressions while ‘starting online business’ got me a click for just $0.39 and I only had to wait for 54 impressions. This tells me that longer keywords get more clicks at a faster rate and that there is more inventory for longer keywords and less competition. I love helping entrepreneurs and small business owners but it’s clear that reaching them on Bing Ads is expensive because of the growth of small business consultancies. The most important lesson you need to learn from this is that you must bid on longer keywords because this is how we think as people.

2–Christmas campaigns are very expensive

I had a product to promote during Christmas and I learned how expensive it is to purchase CPCs during the festive season. As you can see here, cost per clicks for Christmas promotions for this specific product was $0.57 per click. This means you need to spend a lot to stand out during the holidays. Companies that reap benefits from this are ones with deep pockets.

3–You need to block bots and fake traffic from Bing Ads

I noticed there are issues when it comes to fake traffic from Bing Ads. This is a huge problem in search marketing in general but I’ve noticed it in Bing. There are fake referrals as well. Work on this by blocking problematic IPs or targeting specific countries for traffic depending on the goals for your Bing Ads campaign.

My Review and Opinion of Using Bing Ads

I will be using Bing Ads again but this time with a larger budget and I want to target cheaper CPCs that have long-tail keywords. The Bing Ads interface is easy to use and I like how easily you can see the CPCs. You do need to work hard to find out the keywords that make sense for Bing Ads. Bing users seem to like stringing together longer keywords which ends up working in your favour a lot more. Bing Ads is also only good for targeting US, UK and Germany users. In summary, I enjoyed testing out Bing Ads but I will be increasing my budget to get more impressions and conversions.

Any questions about growing and building your business with lead generation and paid acquisition? Contact me today via kagem [at] imperial-drive.com or fill out the form below

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[CASE STUDY] Pinterest brings 20% of organic traffic to beauty website, SEO brings 5% and more awesome findings in my beauty case study

One of my websites in the beauty space focuses on reviews, helpful articles and shopping recommendations. It targets all women globally but mainly focuses on women who want to know the prices of beauty products and context as to which ones that they should take.

The beauty website targets women and it exists as an experiment so I can learn more about growing traffic organically through referral traffic, keyword optimisation and SEO. I have been writing articles and posts on the blog for a few months now and I have some fascinating findings that have truly shocked me.

The Numbers

20% of traffic was from Pinterest organic referral traffic
5% of traffic was generated by Twitter
SEO brought 4% of traffic

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What I have learned

Twitter isn’t that good for bringing referral traffic

I’m not sure why but Twitter is not working for this specific beauty website. I invested a lot of time and effort to create tweets that resonate and clearly that has failed. Not every case study is going to be strawberries and cream. I am going to decrease my time and effort in building referral traffic from Twitter. I suspect Twitter’s failure in bringing traffic for my website is due to the rise in fake traffic from Twitter as well as less beauty oriented people being interested being on the platform. I will not dump it completely but I am going to retool my strategy.

SEO brought 5% of traffic with minimal effort

I did not rake myself over the coals with SEO yet I got plenty of traction compared to my efforts on Twitter. I learned how to write decent alt text, headlines with keywords and I optimised my blog headlines to generate traffic. One of the key SEO successes was about a post I wrote about Cartier Love bracelets.

A person used Bing to search ‘buying a cartier bracelet’ and s/he ended up on my blog post. This is SEO in action organically when you write a good article and you use SEO tips to make the search engine work for you.

I want to spend more time optimising SEO in order to generate more organic referral traffic for my website. Investing more time in SEO seems like it will reap dividends instead of spending time on tweeting links out.

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Pinterest brings 20% of organic traffic

I knew my beauty website would be successful with Pinterest but I was surprised to see that 20% of my traffic comes from Pinterest. This has been pretty shocking because everyone talks about Instagram and Facebook all day, yet Pinterest is here generating referral traffic like water.

This makes me want to spend more time and effort building a Pinterest strategy that will increase organic referrals and get more people interested in my beauty website. I spend just a few minutes per day on Pinterest however it brings 20% of my organic traffic. That in itself tells me that I need to realign the time I spend on Pinterest and I need to increase my time and effort on it. I also need to optimise my Pinterest posts more. I do upload directly but I also use Tailwind.

As you can see from this case study, Pinterest and SEO need to get more attention especially if you are trying to build traffic for a consumer website or a B2C online business. Not everything is about Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes, old fashioned SEO work and referral traffic strategies get the job done just fine.

Case Study

Category: Case Study

CASE STUDY: How Pinterest drives 41% of referral traffic to a website

[Case Study] My Experience Using Bing Ads in 2018

A Brand-New Case Study About Bing Ads – Updated December 2018

1-Longer keywords get clicks

2–Christmas campaigns are very expensive

3–You need to block bots and fake traffic from Bing Ads

My Review and Opinion of Using Bing Ads

Amazing! My beauty website gets 25% of organic traffic from Pinterest & SEO

Click Here To Get Your Free Digital Marketing Consultation

[CASE STUDY] Pinterest brings 20% of organic traffic to beauty website, SEO brings 5% and more awesome findings in my beauty case study

The Numbers

Click Here To Get Your Free Digital Marketing Consultation

What I have learned

Click Here To Get Your Free Digital Marketing Consultation

Click Here To Get Your Free Digital Marketing Consultation

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