How Pinterest Uses STAT:
Large-scale tracking in any market, any language, and any topic online
Integrated SERP data to test and track progress via STAT API
Fresh data, every day to develop quick solutions to SERP changes
“STAT has been fundamental to our growth. By incorporating it into our experimentation platform, we’ve achieved massive growth.”
Client: Pinterest
Industry: Content Platform | Location: San Francisco, CA
If you’ve ever searched online for baking tips, organizational tricks, healthy hacks, fashion muses, or a fixer-upper challenge, chances are the internet has led you to Pinterest.
Dedicated to building the world’s catalog of ideas, Pinterest is all about adding inspiration to people’s everyday lives. To achieve this, they designed an online platform that allows individuals to discover the content that fuels their passions.
Challenge: Creating solutions designed with the user in mind
Lo describes the SEO team — and Pinterest as a whole — as being committed to solving their users’ problems. Their novel approach to this? Creating solutions designed with the user in mind rather than copying what other platforms are doing. In other words, Pinterest isn’t concerned with what everyone else is up to.
“We’re not focused on the competition here,” says Lo, “we’re focused on helping people discover what they’re interested in and then getting them to do those things after they find them.”
And with over 150 million monthly active users around the world, Pinterest needed STAT’s sky's-the-limit full-SERP tracking in order to see exactly what searchers see — including answers boxes, videos, news, images, and the like — then serve up the best possible results.
But like most SEOs who are used to seeing rankings only once a week, the Pinterest team was initially uncertain about why they would require all of that SERP data on the daily. Now?
“I don’t think we could go back,” says Lo.
Getting a daily stream of SERP data for hundreds of thousands of keywords — in any location and any language — means that the team at Pinterest has deep, ongoing insight into the search visibility of the company and can quickly identify gaps in content.
“We have a really good pulse on how we are appearing in search results,” says Lo.
Pinterest also relies on daily STAT data for diagnostic purposes.
“One of the key things we do every day,” says Lo, “is log into STAT to check the health metrics of our traffic, making sure that all of our different markets, all of our different landing pages and categories — everything is running smoothly as expected.”
“If we see deviations that are not normal,” says Lo, “what’s nice about STAT compared to other enterprise SEO tools on the market is that we can immediately see if there’s been a change.” They’re now able to pinpoint the exact moment something goes awry instead of, as Lo says, “waiting until the next Monday to figure out what happened.”
"What’s nice about STAT compared to other enterprise SEO tools on the market is that we can immediately see if there’s been a change instead of waiting until the next Monday."
Solution: Seamless integration fuels experimentation and growth
But massive amounts of daily SERP data wasn’t the only thing Pinterest needed STAT for in order to solve their unique SEO challenges. With less focus on the competition and an engineer-driven culture built around performance testing, the Pinterest team realized they needed a creative way to discover new SEO strategies and measure those efforts.
“When you’re small, you can do an SEO project and it can have an impact that you can immediately see in all of your metrics,” says Lo, “but when you get to be a larger company, it’s just harder to measure impact in a pre and post scenario for every little thing that you’re doing.”
And just as Pinterest opens the door for its users to try new ideas, STAT’s flexible tracking and unlimited API provide a way for Pinterest to experiment with their SEO. By building a seamlessly integrated testing framework, Pinterest funnels daily SERP data out of STAT and directly into the hands and analytical minds of the SEO team, allowing them to gain access to entirely new levels of insight.
“We knew that we needed to have the ranking data to understand what actually was moving as a result of our experiments. It gave us an additional understanding of why things were working,” says Lo. For Pinterest, exploring new ideas is as easy as adding keywords into STAT and tracking them until the experiment ends.
“STAT has been fundamental to our growth,” says Lo. “So much of SEO is guessing what the search engines want, and this allows us to come up with a hypothesis, test it, and then learn.”
When asked about life without the integration, Lo says simply, “we’d be operating on wrong assumptions forever. STAT played a major part to provide a foundational understanding of what helps Pinterest rank, allowing us to double down on the things that really matter.”
“STAT has been fundamental to our growth. So much of SEO is guessing what the search engines want, and this allows us to come up with a hypothesis, test it, and then learn.”