Pinterest Adds New Analytics Dashboard to Entice Future Advertisers

Pinterest has a new strategy for getting brands on its service: Show, don’t tell.

The online inspiration and discovery company unveiled a new, free analytics dashboard for businesses on Tuesday, providing potential advertisers with a glimpse of their mobile and audience analytics for the first time.

Pinterest* previously offered a bare-bones dashboard with Web-only information on traffic back to a business’s webpage, but it didn’t show traffic numbers from mobile users or any demographic information about the audience each business was attracting.

Businesses could pay third-party analytics companies like Spredfast or Salesforce for some of this info. Pinterest opened its fire hose of information to a few analytics companies in May, but the new dashboard offers some data those analytics providers don’t, including numbers related to the “Pin it” widget that companies can embed on their websites.

Now brands can see which pins or boards are performing the best, or break down their followers by country, language and even gender. Businesses can also see which interest categories are most popular with their followers. For example, a brand might notice a large segment of its followers are into a specific sport or style of clothing.

The ultimate goal for Pinterest is to help brands better understand its service and, ultimately, understand who sees their content. If brands believe they can reach their customers on Pinterest, they may very well open their wallets once Pinterest ads are more widely available. (The company is currently testing promoted pins.)

Pinterest currently has “several hundred thousand” businesses using the service, according to Jason Costa, a product manager on Pinterest’s ads team. That’s a lot of potential paying customers. Some brands are already using Pinterest data to advertise — they’re just doing it offline.

Companies like Target and Nordstrom are taking their most popular pins, for example, and advertising those products in-store with “as seen on Pinterest”-style signage. These are the types of things Costa believes more businesses will do with access to advanced analytics.

And of course, paying to promote a popular pin on Pinterest isn’t a bad idea either.

* Please see this disclosure related to Pinterest.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.