Not really surprising. Is that not, in part, the point of sharing such information.

Marshall

I'm surprised more people don't find this interesting because that's a pretty significant conversion rate.

With the volume of traffic Pinterest has, the mere act of appending their own affiliate IDs on URLs before performing a redirect to the online retailer would probably generate so much revenue they'd be in the black in no time at all.

As a way to monetize the site, they should at least take a percentage of the affiliate IDs or add one if it doesn't already exist. It's really silly to leave that money laying on the table for everyone else without taking a slice of that pie.

They tried that and there was a huge outcry.

They tried that and there was a huge outcry.

They certainly didn't pay attention to the huge outcry on meta tags for opt-out vs. a trivial robots.txt implementation. They must be picking and choosing who is OK to tick off and who isn't as webmasters obviously don't rate.

Anyway...

Many businesses have went broke paying attention to the huge outcry. People flipped out over ads in YouTube yet they persist. Outcries don't pay the wages, servers or bandwidth fees but affiliate IDs do.

Besides, if it were done silently, in a server-side redirect, the end users would never be the wiser about the affiliate IDs.

The mistake was making them visible where people can see them.

They tried that and there was a huge outcry.

From whom? For people posting the links, does it matter if PInterest makes a commission out of any sales. They are using Pinterest for free after all.

that's a pretty significant conversion rate

This comment has been bugging me and I finally figured out why.

I think it's misleading to refer to the 21% as the "conversion rate". We are given no context about how many links those users clicked, or how many sites they visited.

FWIW, on one site whose stats I have access to, whose target audience is primarily female, the conversion rate from Pinterest referrals has been .18% on 121,824 visits since the beginning of the year. Of course those sales are welcome, but that conversion rate is lower than the site's overall average. For every Pinterest referral who makes a purchase, nearly a thousand just look around then leave.

Pinterest is worth paying attention to, but let's not get more excited about it than the numbers actually justify.

@Buckworks

Did you mean 18% or .18% ?

.18%

Pinterest referrals do make purchases, but not as often as traffic from other sources. YMMV

Reconciling the numbers, which are wa-a-ay far apart, I think there maybe (perhaps, could be) some weasily language, as in how to lie with statistics, in the PriceGrabber info, or the article....

My emphasis added....

...Out of the people who were surveyed who had an account on the site, an astonishing 21% of them have actually purchased items that they found on someone’s Pinboard. The most popular products fall in line with the interests I told you about above. That means that people are buying cooking utensils, things to make arts and crafts, and of course clothing.

This is not the same as saying that the made the purchases because they found the items on someone's Pinboard, or even after they found them on someone's Pinboard. It may simply be saying that they have bought such items.

Just thinking out loud... if the language is that sloppy, perhaps it's even sloppier. Perhaps it just means that they have bought "cooking utensils, things to make arts and crafts, and of course clothing."

Or, "conversion rate" might mean traffic referrals, though that then would need to be further defined.

The article itself doesn't use the phrase "conversion rate" or even the word "conversion". Referring to the 21% as the conversion rate happened right in this thread.

I have no trouble believing that 21% of Pinterest users have indeed purchased something that they saw on someone's Pinboard ... but remember that they likely viewed a great many Pinboards and visited a great many sites along the way before finally making that purchase.

The numbers are "wa-a-ay far apart", but the problem I see is not the numbers themselves, but sloppy naming. It's just not accurate, IMHO, to call that 21% a "conversion rate".