'Net Features : Pinfluencer

Pinfluencer Gets a New Name and Social E-Commerce Product

Michael Garrity — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:15:00 GMT

Pinfluencer literally made a name for itself by providing marketing and return-on-investment (ROI) analytics to brand’s using the Pinterest social network. However, as the company begins to move away from only using information from Pinterest and Facebook to incorporating image-based sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Polyvore into its platform, it felt like maybe a name-change was in order.

From now on, Pinfluencer will be known as Piqora, a marketing suite that will include analytics, promotions, content management and even social e-commerce.

“We have changed our name to Piqora, because it is an elegant blend of piquing one’s curiosity and inquiry about products,” explained the company’s CEO, Sharad Verma. “The new name also implies pictures and the IQ lends itself to deep analysis. This encompasses the essence of what we do.”

As mentioned, the new moniker isn’t the only big news to come from Piqora; the company is also launching a new social e-commerce product for brands on Pinterest and Facebook known as Gallery, a tablet-optimized and automated visual feed of a company’s current stock and top trending products on social media. Not only will this establish a social commerce experience for consumers, but (more importantly), it helps marketers turn their social traffic into conversions.

Since Pinterest is such a visual discovery experience that promotes browsing, pinning and purchases, it seemed like a natural choice to the folks at Piqora that they should find a way to turn these users into customers. Naturally, the best way to do that is by offering visually compelling product options on channels like Pinterest and Facebook. The Gallery landing pages for Pinterest-driven traffic promote on-site product browsing, pinning and purchases.

“Our new Gallery product gives brands a way to nurture their discovery traffic from social networks and tablet users,” said Verma, adding that it can also “showcase what is most popular and offer customers a rich, boutique-type browsing experience.”

In addition, Piqora will also monitor the social “pinning” activity on Facebook and Pinterst and examine search queries, traffic and purchase data from Google Analytics, Omniture and Coremetrics.

Pinfluencer Launches Image Recognition Engine

Allison Howen — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Merchants that actively maintain a Pinterest profile have the potential to gain a lot of traffic from the visually driven social network.

However, just like any other social network, merchants must monitor the analytics of the content they post in order to optimize their production strategies to drive the best results. Luckily, tools like Pinfluencer, which is an enterprise marketing and analytics platform for Pinterest, can help brands do just that.

In fact, Pinfluencer just launched a new image recognition engine that helps brands identify which image on a particular page is driving the most traffic from Pinterest. The technology also breaks down data based on URL patterns and SEO tags, which can help marketers discover which images and products from a website are generating engagement on Pinterest and driving traffic back to the website. Moreover, Pinfluencer’s image recognition technology combined with URL and SEO parsing allows marketers to conduct analytics at an image, product and website level.

Pinfluencer also allows merchants and marketers to measure metrics such as overall followers, pins per day, repins per day and clicks per pin. Additionally, the platform’s Top Products report displays a brand’s most popular products on Pinterest, while the Top Images report shows which images are most popular and drive the most traffic.

“A website is composed of product pages and product pages are comprised of individual images. These images distribute the products on Pinterest via pins and repins serving as the digital mannequins that help drive traffic back to a retailer’s website,” said Sharad Verma, CEO, Pinfluencer. “We see every pin on Pinterest as a distribution opportunity for our customer brands and we have spent the last year helping these brands see how to identify their top and most influential pinners and learn which pins actually drive the most sales. We are unveiling our new image technology to allow brands to understand which images on a webpage drives the most traffic relative to other images. These insights are extremely powerful.”

Pinterest Promotion's Puzzle Solved

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:16:00 GMT

Finding participants and ensuring eligibility and legality are among some of the time-consuming issues businesses face when running a sweepstakes or contest on Pinterest. The popularity of the giveaways, however, keeps increasing.

Creative freedom is one of the many reasons these Pinterest promotions are so popular. Sharad Verma, CEO of Pinfluencer, a marketing analytics and promotions platform, says Pinterest contests or sweepstakes are not just about winning, but they are also about fun and creativity. Participants don’t just hit a “like” button to enter, instead, many contests require them to collect items and put them on their board.

For example, the popular retailer Express ran a “Win Your Wish List” campaign. Entrants gathered items from Express’s Pinterest boards and/or website to their boards for a chance of winning a $500 Express gift card.

This contest is a strong indicator of Pinterest’s e-commerce prowess. Additionally, Pinterest serves as an e-commerce driver because people are collecting products for themselves, and so that lead to low-barrier sharing. Plus, every pin is virtually a hyperlink, which makes Pinterest really a collection of links. Another benefit (in the long line of them) is that people using Pinterest are in a mode to shop, as they are actively planning a party, wedding, trip – you name it.

“Pinning is an act of getting ownership of the product,” said Verma. “Sharing happens as a byproduct of that.”

As for SEO value, Pinterest has it – just in a roundabout way.

“The links on Pinterest are no follow, which means that sites do not get link credit for those,” said Verma. “But the boards can be SEO’d, and they can rank when searchers search for that brand’s name. Really, Pinterest is a catalog in an interesting, unique board.”

For those companies looking to run a Pinterest promotion, and reduce some of the friction associated with them, there are tools can help.

One is the aforementioned Pinfluencer. Launched in Feb. 2012, the platform has hosted and tracked more than 50 holiday promotions for brands, such as Gilt, Jetsetter, WayFair, Martha Stewart, Shape Magazine, and others reaching nearly a half million Pinterest users.

Brands who ran their contests and sweepstakes on Pinfluencer increased their follower acquisition rate by 156 percet while their Pins/day jumped by 125 percent.

The way it works is Pinfluencer creates a Web-based platform for brands, retailers, publishers and agencies to easily create turn-key contest and sweepstakes marketing campaigns on Pinterest and boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality. The platform allows marketers to deploy custom branded contests and sweepstakes with significantly improved user experiences for the participants, resulting in higher entry rates. The dashboard also provides insights into clicks and revenue and saves marketers hours of manual work by automatically tracking user eligibility and allows them to proactively interact with the ineligible participants to maximize the success of the promotion.

“With Pinfluencer we were able to easily run a successful scavenger-type contest that generated 7 million impressions of our Jetsetter pins on Pinterest,” said Jonathan Goldmann, head of social at Jetsetter.com said. “Pinfluencer’s Promotions dashboard tracked not just participants and pins, but also ROI metrics like revenue and clicks and made the reporting very intuitive.”

A scavenger-type contest is one promotion type that can be ran on Pinfluencer’s Pinterest promotions platform. Others include create-a-board contests (like Express’s), repin to a board and pin to win.

WayFair, a U.S.-based e-commerce company, leveraged Pinfluencer to create its "Turkey Day Tabletop" challenge.

"We challenged users to pin items for their ideal Thanksgiving table and spread, dishware, centerpieces, recipes and décor," said WayFair Senior Manager of Social Media Trisha Mack. "We saw a 34 percent lift in eligible entries and a 21 percent growth in pins/day from wayfair.com (compared to the same three-week period previous to the contest). In terms of ROI, we saw about a 27 percent increase in referral traffic and revenue coming from Pinterest during the contest period."

Prior to leveraging Pinfluencer services, WayFair held four contests on Pinterest, on its own. These proved to be clunky, as people were required to email a link of their completed board to WayFair.

Pinfluencer streamlines the process, as companies can host the promotions on Facebook or on their own websites, easily build a contest with custom rules from a menu of options and use the Pinfluencer tracker and dashboard to determine how a contest is performing, check participants’ eligibility and track them. Finally, the platform makes it easy to judge boards and rank participants.

“Marketers can host their contests and sweepstakes on a Facebook tab powered by Pinfluencer and convert their Facebook fans into avid pinners on Pinterest. Every pin has a traffic and sales driving potential,” said Verma.

Curalate, a marketing platform for the visual Web, also offers a Pinterest module – dubbed Promote. This service also reduces some of the challenges marketers face when running a contest on Pinterest by integrating registration, management and tracking into its platform (as opposed to using disparate systems to accomplish the same result).

By making contests easier, Curalate has increased participation and engagement for its clients, which includes Carnival Cruise Lines (see results here).

And, as Pinterest cruises to be more top of mind with marketers, Web workers should expect more Pinterest platforms to capitalize on the overwhelming amount of social and e-commerce potential it has.

Pinterest is also recognizing its power. It is offering more and more business-related tools and guidance, including those for promotions. Check out Pinterest's tips on running a promotion, here.