by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

Pinterest Analytics for verified websites problem


Pinterest has unveiled Pinterest Web Analytics, a webmaster tool that enables website statistics to track the content other Pinterest users like, pin and use from the user site.

Any catch?  Well there are two.  Any hurdles?  Yup, there are two of them too!

The first catch.  To enable Pinterest Web Analytics the account has to undergo a verification process.  Pinterest announced a website verification process (without Web Analytics) sometime in Oct/Nov 2012.  At first it wasn’t easy for bloggers, especially on Blogger platform, to verify the sites.  But once they enabled verification with meta tags, the pinned life became less complicated.

The second catch.  The Pinterest account has to be a business account to enable Pinterest Web Analytics.  Fortunately an existing personal account can be converted or a new business account can be set up and the process is simple.  They even accommodate the humble bloggers to exist under Professionals category.

This may be an appropriate moment to write a walk through on converting personal Pinterest account into a Business account, but seeing that there is an excellent how-to at Social Media Examiner, seems pointless to rehash it.  In fact that article also explains the verification process [http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/pinterest-guide-business-pages/].

Now for the hurdles.  The first hurdle is as of this writing is the meta tag generated by Pinterest has an error.  The same meta tag in the html verification file is all right, but the meta tag generator forgets to insert the closing ‘/’ (slash) in the code.  A simple copy paste of the code into the Blogger template (inside the <head> section), makes the smarty pants Blogger to throw a tantrum for the missing ‘/’.

Blogger also rephrases the meta tag to suit itself, but that does not concern us or Pinterest.  Though it is a wonder why Pinterest meta tag generator uses that particular format and not the one liked by Blogger.

The second hurdle is even after the above correction Pinterest might throw up a cannot verify website error.  It said so for this site today morning.  After a lot of head-scratching (both my wooden one and the template section), the solution floated up.
:-P

Pinterest wants its verification meta tag to be first one after the <head> tag.  [Or maybe it wants its verification meta tag to be first one before any other verification tag - like Google Web Master Tools].  Once the Pinterest verification meta tag is the first one, the site verifies OK.  One more stat to manage and pine about.

pinterest_web_analytics_validation_problems

All it needs now is for people to actually start repinning my content.
:-D

3 comments:

  1. Pinterest Analytics06/05/2013, 22:59

    The Pinterest account has to be a business account to enable Pinterest Analytics web.Love it.

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