Are you integrating the visual web into your holiday marketing strategy? If not, these stats from comScore’s The State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy in Q2 2012 might make you think twice.
Pinterest and Instagram Still Growing
comScore’s data shows a continued uptick in growth for the two visual media platforms. And with the recent introduction of Instagram web profiles, the photo app’s traffic is bound to spike even further.
Social Retail Referrals
While Facebook is still the reigning king of social referrals to retail apparel sites, Pinterest is gaining ground. As of May 2012, Pinterest accounted for 30% of social retail referrals. Tumblr, another leader in the visual web trend, has locked down a solid 8% of social retail referrals.
Pinterest: More Than Reach and Referrals
Pinterest’s reach and referral rates certainly are impressive – but as we’ve said before, reach alone doesn’t tell us much about value. Instead, we need to dig a bit deeper and find metrics that tie visits to sales.
comScore’s report looks at the buying power index, or *BPI, for popular social media sites. Below we see that on average, Pinterest users have a significantly higher BPI than Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Tumblr users.
*Buying power index = average spending per buyer for site / average spending per buyer for total internet x 100, where 100 represents average spending behavior
To further connect Pinterest to sales, a separate study from Shopify shows that Pinterest-referred traffic is 10% more likely to make a purchase compared to those who come from other sites like Facebook or Twitter.
How are you integrating Pinterest into your digital marketing strategy for the 2013 holiday season?
