How to Find the Best-Performing Pins in Any Niche
A board of 400 pins has about three worth studying. Where to find them, why the average pin tells you nothing, and how to tell an evergreen winner from a trend that has already passed.
By Mia Bennett · Pinterest strategist
Here is the single most useful thing to understand about somebody else’s Pinterest board, and it changes how you look at all of them.
A board with four hundred pins on it does not contain four hundred lessons.
It contains about three.
The saves on a board are distributed so unevenly that the top handful account for most of the total, and everything after about pin six is statistically indistinguishable from everything else.
the three worth studyingeverything else on the board
Saves on a typical board. Studying the middle of this chart is studying the noise.
Which means "look at what your competitors are pinning" is bad advice, because most of what they are pinning did not work either.
What you want is a very short list: their winners.
And those are findable, mostly for free.
Where to look, cheapest first
1
Sort their board by top
The board page can order by most saved. Free, instant, and largely unknown.
2
Search the phrase, not the account
What ranks for the query is what Pinterest already rewards.
3
Look at the repeats
The subject they have made four versions of is the one that worked.
4
Check the dates
A 2021 pin with huge saves is evergreen. A new one is a live trend.
Sort their board by top
On a board page you can usually change the sort order, and one of the options orders by how well pins have done rather than by when they were saved.
It is free, it is instant, and a surprising number of people who have used Pinterest for years have never touched it.
This is the single highest-value click in competitor research.
It converts a board from an undifferentiated wall into a ranked list, and the top five are the entire lesson.
Search the phrase, not the account
Better still in one respect: search the phrase you care about and look at what ranks.
That is not "what one account’s audience liked" — it is what Pinterest is currently rewarding across everybody, which is much closer to the thing you actually want to know.
Do it logged out in a private window.
Logged in, you are looking at results shaped by your own history, which for somebody who researches their own niche daily is heavily distorted — you have taught Pinterest exactly what you like and it is showing you back.
Look for the repeats
The subtle one, and my favourite, because it needs no tool at all.
When an account makes four versions of the same subject, that is not laziness — it is somebody responding to their own analytics.
Nobody makes a fourth pin about kitchen splashbacks unless the first three did something.
A repeat is a competitor telling you what worked without meaning to, and it is more reliable than any single pin’s save count because it reflects a decision rather than a moment.
Reading a winner once you have found one
The temptation is to study the design.
Design is the least transferable thing on the pin, and reading pin design without copying it is a whole post on doing that carefully.
Start with everything else instead:
- The subject. What specific question does this pin answer? Usually narrower than you would expect — not "kitchen ideas" but "what to do about a rented kitchen with brown cupboards".
- The phrasing. What words are in the title and the first line of the description? Those were chosen, and descriptions that rank explains what they were chosen for.
- The format. Photo, graphic, list, before-and-after, video. Format preference varies enormously by niche and it is easy to read from a handful of winners.
- The promise. What does it imply you will get by clicking? This is the half that decides outbound clicks, and it is usually visible in six words.
1
Bold keyword headline
The searched phrase — big and readable
2
High-contrast hero image
One clear focal point for the thumb
3
Your logo or handle
Small corner mark that builds trust
4
A clear benefit / promise
Tells a human exactly why to click
Old winner or live trend?
Check the date, because the two need completely different responses and they look identical on a board.
A pin from three years ago with enormous saves is evergreen — the subject has been reliably in demand for years, and there is very likely room for a fresh, better version of it.
That is a strong, low-risk thing to make.
A pin from six weeks ago with enormous saves is current — either a trend or something seasonal on its way up.
Worth acting on quickly if you can, and worth being honest that by the time you have made and published something the moment may have moved.
Spotting trends early is the discipline for that, and evergreen versus seasonal is the wider trade-off.
Saves, not impressions
You cannot see anybody else’s impressions and you can approximate their saves. That is fine, because saves are the better signal anyway — an impression means Pinterest showed it to somebody, a save means a person decided it was worth keeping. What saves actually mean covers why that distinction matters more on Pinterest than on any other platform.
The limit of doing this by hand
Everything above works and costs nothing, and for a single competitor it is genuinely enough.
It falls over at scale for two reasons.
The first is coverage.
Sorting one board tells you about one board.
To know what wins for a phrase across the whole platform you would need to do this across dozens of accounts, and you would be re-doing it every month because the answer moves.
The second is that you still cannot see demand.
A pin can be the best-performing thing on a board about a subject that eleven people a month search for.
Without a volume figure beside it, "the top pin for this phrase" and "the top pin for a phrase nobody types" look exactly the same.
That is what PinPinterest does with the crawl behind it: the pins actually winning a phrase across Pinterest, with the search demand for that phrase beside them, so a winner comes with the context that makes it meaningful.
The manual version above is the right place to start — this is what it turns into once you want to do it for forty phrases instead of one.
See the top pins for a phrase — with the search demand beside them
What to do with the three
You have found the three pins that carry a board.
Do not remake them.
Write down what they have in common — subject, phrasing, format, promise — and treat that as a hypothesis about the niche rather than a template.
Then make your own thing that satisfies the same hypothesis, and see whether it holds on your account.
Most hypotheses do not survive contact, which is precisely why testing them is the step that matters and copying is the step that does not.
The trap in reading a winner
One caution before you go and do this, because it catches careful people and it is invisible while it is happening.
A pin’s save count reflects everything about the moment it was published — who the account was, how many followers they had, whether they promoted it elsewhere, and whether it happened to catch a wave.
You are seeing the result, not the cause, and the cause is where the lesson would be.
Which is why repeats across accounts beat save counts within one.
If three unrelated accounts have all made multiple pins about rented-kitchen fixes, that is three independent pieces of evidence pointing at the same subject.
One pin with 40,000 saves is one event, and events have all sorts of causes you cannot see from here.
Keep the ones that hold somewhere you will find them again — a swipe file that is actually usable is the format for that — and if you want the whole study rather than this one piece, the running order is here.
#competitor research#pinterest seo#pin design#pinterest strategy
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