Today, we're going to talk all about Rich Pins! Chances are, you've come across them on Pinterest before but you just didn't know what they were. Not to worry—today, we're going to break it all down. In this post, we'll cover:
- What Rich Pins are
- The different types of Rich Pins
- How Rich Pins can help you
- How to set up Rich Pins for your site
- How to optimize Rich Pins for more traffic
What are Pinterest Rich Pins?
Here's Pinterest's definition of a Rich Pin:
Rich Pins provide more context about an idea because they show extra information directly on a Pin. There are four types of Rich Pins: app, product, recipe and article.
In other words, Rich Pins give users on Pinterest more information about the page without them having to leave Pinterest. The user can get information such as recipe ingredients, product price, etc, before they click the image and Pinterest to go to your website.
Okay, great. So what does that look like exactly? Read on to find out more!
What types of Rich Pins are there?
As Pinterest mentioned, there are four types of Rich Pins: app, product, recipe and article. Let's do a deep dive into what each type looks like!
App
App developers, rejoice! App Rich Pins come with an “Install” button so that anyone going through their feed can tap on the button to get the app in the App Store, all without ever leaving the Pinterest app!
Note: At this time, this feature is only available for iOS apps and the Rich Pins will only show up on iOS devices.
Product
Product Rich Pins provide shoppers with a bit of extra information about, you guessed it, your products. You'll be able to tell it's a product Rich Pin if there's a little tag icon below the image, like so:
So in this case, I can already see that I can get this sweater on Etsy. Awesome! Now that my interest has been piqued, the next step is to click on the Pin to find out more information. Here's what that gets me:
Here's what that same pin looks like in the Pinterest app:
So now, I can see the price range, product description, and a direct link to the Etsy listing so I can make my purchase. Pretty great, huh?
If this wasn't a Rich Pin, I would have either scrolled past the image or I would have saved it to a board in the hopes of finding out the name of the retailer at some point. Not an ideal outcome, especially for the retailer!
And one other cool thing about product Rich Pins: if you update the price of your product on your site, your Pin will automatically be updated to reflect the new price so you don't have to go through and update all of your Pins! ?
Recipe
Here's a regular pin and a recipe Rich Pin, side by side in the Pinterest feed:
You can probably guess that the one on the right with all of the stellar ratings and the cook time is the Rich Pin, right? Between the two Pins, I'm most likely going to click on the Rich Pin since I know it's trusted by other readers and I can see that it's only going to take me 15 minutes to make!
Here's what those same Pins look like when you click through:
Regular Pin:
Rich Pin:
As you can see, the Rich Pin (the one on the bottom) contains a lot more information than a regular Pin. Specifically, with recipe Rich Pins, you'll see the ratings, cook times, serving sizes, and ingredients! This provides readers with a lot more context about your recipe and will help them decide whether or not they want to come to your site.
Article
Article Rich Pins are geared towards bloggers and content creators as the Pins highlight the article's headline and description. Here's what that looks like on the Pinterest site:
And here's what that looks like on the app:
Without Rich Pins enabled for these articles, you'd only see a single description below the image, which doesn't people much to go off of at all. Thus, you'd likely end up losing out on clicks and readers! ?
How can Rich Pins help me?
It might help to think of Rich Pins as the Pinterest equivalent of Rich Results in Google. You may recall that in our post about Rich Results, we performed a quick litmus test and came to the conclusion that Rich Results were more likely to entice the reader to click through. With the star ratings displayed right in the search results, readers can feel more confident about your recipe before they even click through to your post!
The same concept applies to Rich Pins. If you compare the regular pin and the Rich Pin examples above, chances are you'll gravitate to the Rich Pins because of all of the extra information provided.
How do I set up Rich Pins?
Setting up Rich Pins is pretty easy! There are only two steps:
- Make sure your website has the proper data
- Apply for Rich Pins with Pinterest
Make sure your website has the proper data
First, you'll need to make sure that your site contains the correct meta tags or oEmbed endpoints so that Pinterest can turn that data into Rich Pins.
Wait… what does that all mean, exactly?
Pinterest is smart – but it's not that smart. It can read the information on your page, but it's not smart enough to automatically pick out the important pieces. This is where structured data comes in. It's data that is organized in such a way that machines (eg. Pinterest) are able to make sense of it. This data is included in the page source code and isn't viewable on the front-end of your website.
Here's what that might look like for a recipe:
Depending on the kind of Rich Pin you'll be applying for, the structured data on the page will vary.
You'll likely be using a plugin of some sort to create this data. Let's take a look at what's needed for each type of Rich Pin.
Setting up app Rich Pins
With app Rich Pins, all you need to do is upload the Pin for your app and edit the Pin to set the website to the App Store page. Easy peasy!
Setting up product Rich Pins
For product Rich Pins, your eCommerce solution will either need to provide that data themselves (Etsy and eBay's Pins will provide the product information within 24 hours!), or another plugin that hooks into it will. For example, this addon for WooCommerce adds the necessary schema markup to your shop!
Setting up recipe Rich Pins
One question that we've gotten a lot from both Tasty Recipes and Tasty Pins customers is whether or not the plugins automatically turn their pins into recipe Rich Pins. The answer here is no, but don't worry! Tasty Recipes does provide all the necessary info, so setting recipe Rich Pins up for your site should only take a few minutes.
One thing to keep in mind is that with recipe Rich Pins, you'll need to use a recipe plugin like Tasty Recipes that adds appropriate structured data to the page to provide an in-depth view of your recipe. That way, any image saved from a URL with a Tasty Recipe on it can be used for Rich Recipe Pins because the proper data exists on the page. So if you're using Tasty Recipes, you're already a step ahead of the game!
If you're not using a recipe plugin that creates the proper schema markup for Pinterest, then you'll need to start doing so. A number of recipe plugins provide the correct markup, so you can have your choice! We, of course, recommend using Tasty Recipes. ?
Setting up article Rich Pins
If you're using Yoast SEO, you're in luck! All you'll need to do is enable Facebook OpenGraph on the Social settings page and you're good to go. ?
Applying for Rich Pins
Once your pages have the correct structured data, you'll just need to apply for Rich Pins and validate that your posts contain the correct metadata. And just a little FYI: you won't need to validate every URL on your site—one URL is enough!
After you click Validate, you'll see whether or not your site is properly marked up. If it is, then you can just click the button to apply. Usually you'll get approved in just a couple days.
If there are errors with the validation, you'll either need to revisit the first step (adding the correct data to your page), or contact the author of the plugin that is creating the markup to see why it's not validating. Once you get those issues worked out, you can try validating and applying again.
How to optimize Rich Pins for more traffic
Now that you're approved for Rich Pins, you're probably wondering how to make the most of them. The good news is that Pinterest does most of the hard work for you – it scrapes the data from the page, formats it, and presents it in the nicely-laid-out Rich Pin style on Pinterest. Cool!
Your job isn't quite done, though. Having Rich Pins can help boost click-throughs to your site due to the extra information, but those Pins still have to get found and seen on Pinterest first. That's where optimizing your pins comes in.
Use great imagery
Pinterest is a really unique search engine because of the highly visual component. Whereas Google search is maybe 95% about the data (results do sometimes show small images, but in my experience they don't make much of an impact), I'd guess that Pinterest search is maybe 50% about the data and 50% about the image. That's a total guess there – don't go quoting that statistic! ?
The point is – use images that will perform well on Pinterest. That means you want vertical images in a 600×900 pixel size, or a 2:3 aspect ratio.
The image should show a great representation of what the user will be getting – if it's a product, it should display the product in its perfect setting. If it's an app, it should display some of the best screens for the app. If it's a recipe, the image should show the completed dish (and maybe a process shot if it looks good and you can squeeze it in there).
Finally, text overlays do really well on Pinterest. People quickly scan through Pinterest looking for something that catches their eye. The native descriptions on Pinterest are really helpful for search, but aren't that eye-catching. Adding text over your images can help grab attention.
Take the Pinterest image we have for this post:
It's on-brand for WP Tasty, it includes simple yet pleasing imagery, and the text overlay makes it stand out. (Go ahead and save that to Pinterest, while you're here! ?)
Sometimes these images don't look that great in your post content. If that's the case, you can use the Hidden Images feature of Tasty Pins to hide them in the source code so that they are available for saving to Pinterest, but they aren't displayed super prominently on your website. You can also force a hidden image to save whenever any image is selected to save – pretty nifty!
Write good pin descriptions
While the imagery is important for getting your pins seen, the pin description is what gets your pin found. Pinterest is a search engine, and the pin description can help your pins show up in search. We have a good article here on the WP Tasty blog all about writing great Pinterest descriptions, so I recommend checking that out!
Basically, you want to think about search terms that will be used to search for content similar to yours, then turn that into a comprehendible and enticing sentence, and include relevant hashtags that will help your pin show up in the “Explore” features of Pinterest. Check out the article linked above for more info.
The best place to put a pin description is in the data-pin-description attribute of the image. You can certainly do this manually, but Tasty Pins makes it easy by adding a field to your WordPress admin screens:
With a good image and a search-optimized description, you're well on your way to Pinterest success. Once your pins found and seen, Rich Pins will help those readers click over to your site.
In conclusion…
If you're trying to drive traffic to your blog (and let's face it, who isn't), Rich Pins are a really great tool to have in your arsenal. Whether it's a recipe, product, or app, Rich Pins are easy to set up and will provide your readers with a lot more context around your post. Once your pins are optimized via imagery and descriptions so that they can be found and seen on Pinterest, Rich Pins will help convince people to click through to your site and read your content. Hopefully, you'll earn a loyal reader, too! ?
