Pinterest Drives More Traffic, But Facebook Is Better for Performance

Women may not be your target audience, but advertisers from any industry can learn a lot from women’s programming verticals such as food and recipes, home and garden, style and health and wellness. A recent study conducted by Yieldbot, which sees over a 1.5 billion page views per month come through its publisher analytics platform, analyzed the impact of social referral traffic from both Facebook and Pinterest on the advertising performance of women’s sites. The ad technology firm found that while Pinterest sent a lot of traffic to these publishers, these visitors don’t click on ads at the same rate as Facebook referrals.

According to the Yieldbot study, Pinterest sent approximately 85% of traffic to women’s verticals in July, compared to only 8.3% from Facebook. (These numbers only reflect traffic sent from desktop. On mobile, Facebook outperformed Pinterest 4.6% to 1.2%, highlighting an interesting and emerging mobile trend.) However, Facebook’s click-through rate is significantly higher than Pinterest’s, and other social networks barely even register.

If this isn’t enough for publishers that monetize on ad clicks to pay attention, it should be. According to the IAB, 66% of digital advertising is sold on a CPC or other performance-based metric, whereas just 32% is sold on an impression basis. This means that while Pinterest drives a lot of volume, Facebook is generating more performance. If advertisers really want to grab hold of the opportunity presented by Yieldbot’s study, marketers should look for ways to drive up the volume on Facebook. While there is little room for marketers to leverage Pinterest, marketers can still increase traffic from Facebook, increasing overall performance.

If you’re an advertiser working with both Facebook and Pinterest, what trends are you seeing? Are you seeing better performance from Pinterest or Facebook? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Author

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she handled content strategy and marketing communications at several tech startups in the Bay Area. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned home to Charleston, SC, where you can find her strolling through Hampton Park with her pup and enjoying the simple things between adventures with friends and family.