How Many Clicks Does It Take to Get a Sale From Pinterest? Work Out Your Own Number

Short answer: there’s no single number, but one division gives you yours: clicks per sale = 100 ÷ your conversion rate in per cent.

If 2 in every 100 people who click your link buy, that’s about 50 clicks per sale.

At 1% it’s 100, and at 0.5% it’s 200.

The catch on Pinterest is which clicks you count.

An outbound click in Pinterest Analytics isn’t a visit to your page, and a visit isn’t a click on your affiliate or product link.

This guide covers why those counts differ and how to work out your own clicks per sale from four figures you already have.

It also shows how many clicks you need before the number means anything, and what 550 clicks with no sale really tells you.

It’s all arithmetic you can do in a spreadsheet, and none of it needs a benchmark from someone else’s account.

Clicks per sale: the one division that answers it

People ask this a dozen ways.

How many outbound clicks to Amazon before a sale?

What percentage of Pinterest clicks turn into sales?

How many clicks do you need for one affiliate sale a day?

It’s the same sum each time.

An affiliate guide on page one for this search prints it as: clicks needed for one sale = 100 ÷ conversion rate (%).

• 5% conversion → about 20 clicks per sale
• 2% → about 50 clicks per sale
• 1% → about 100 clicks per sale
• 0.5% → about 200 clicks per sale
• 0.25% → about 400 clicks per sale

For a target, run it backwards.

One sale a day at a 1% conversion rate needs about 100 clicks a day, or about 3,000 a month.

Three sales a day at 0.5% needs about 600 clicks a day.

Two warnings before you plug your numbers in.

First, the same guide puts it plainly: “A 2% conversion rate does not mean every block of exactly 50 clicks will create one sale.”

Sales come in clumps and gaps.

Second, the conversion rate in that formula belongs to one specific click, the one on the merchant’s link.

That isn’t the click Pinterest counts.

Pinterest’s clicks and your affiliate dashboard’s clicks aren’t the same clicks

Pinterest defines outbound clicks as “the number of times people perform actions that lead them to a destination off Pinterest” (Pinterest Analytics help).

That counts the moment someone leaves Pinterest.

It doesn’t mean your page loaded, and it certainly doesn’t mean they bought anything.

Pin clicks are a different number again: they count opens inside Pinterest (the gap between Pin clicks and outbound clicks).

Between a Pin and a sale there are up to four counters, and a different system keeps each one:

1. Outbound clicks: Pinterest’s count, in Pinterest Analytics and in each Pin’s stats.
2. Sessions from Pinterest: your site’s analytics, the people whose page actually loaded.
3. Clicks on the offer: the affiliate network’s or merchant’s dashboard (or add-to-cart, if it’s your own shop).
4. Sales: the merchant’s or your shop’s orders report.

If your Pin links to a blog post, the affiliate dashboard’s conversion rate is sales ÷ offer clicks.

Divide Pinterest’s outbound clicks by sales instead and you get a much bigger clicks-per-sale number.

It also includes everyone who left before the page loaded, and everyone who read the post but didn’t click the product.

Neither number is wrong; they answer two different questions:

• Outbound clicks ÷ sales = what a Pinterest click is worth to you. Plan your Pinterest work with this one.
• Offer clicks ÷ sales = how well the merchant’s page and the product convert. Compare offers with this one.

So when someone in a forum says they need 50 clicks for a sale and you need 300, first check which clicks each of you divided by.

That alone can be the whole difference.

If your Pin links straight to a product page, the first and third counters get closer.

But they’re still kept by two systems with their own rules, so they won’t match exactly.

Compare how each one moves over time, not the two totals.

Work out your own number from four figures

Pick one period and use the same dates everywhere.

Thirty days is the shortest period worth reading, and ninety is better for a small account.

Pinterest Analytics lets you “view custom date ranges for the past year and a half”, so a quarter is easy to pull.

Leave out the last two days: the Pin stats help says Pinterest’s real-time metrics “are estimates and subject to change”.

1. Outbound clicks. Pinterest Analytics, your date range, the outbound clicks total. The help page adds: “Outbound clicks are measured starting from the date the link is added.” A Pin whose link you added later has a shorter click history than its age suggests.
2. Sessions from Pinterest. Your site analytics, the same dates, visits that came from Pinterest (how to set that up in Google Analytics).
3. Offer clicks. The affiliate dashboard’s clicks on the links in the pages Pinterest sends people to. If your network lets you make a separate tracking ID or sub-ID for Pinterest, use it. That’s the only way this figure belongs to Pinterest alone.
4. Sales. Orders from the same links on the same dates. If your network credits a sale some days after the click, pull this figure a week after the period ends (why conversion counts keep changing).

Now do four divisions:

• Pinterest to page = sessions ÷ outbound clicks: how many people actually arrive.
• Page to offer = offer clicks ÷ sessions: how many of them go on to the product.
• Offer to sale = sales ÷ offer clicks: the merchant’s conversion rate.
• Clicks per sale = outbound clicks ÷ sales: the answer to the question you started with.

Here’s an example with round numbers.

It’s an illustration, not a benchmark.

Say a month shows 600 outbound clicks, 480 sessions, 120 offer clicks and 3 sales.

Pinterest to page is 80%, page to offer is 25% and offer to sale is 2.5%.

Clicks per sale is 600 ÷ 3 = 200 outbound clicks per sale, while the merchant’s dashboard would say 40 clicks per sale.

Same month, both true.

How many clicks before you can trust the number?

Sales are rare events, and rare events swing a lot.

With 3 sales in a month, one sale more or less moves your clicks per sale by a third.

With no sales you can’t divide at all, and that’s exactly when people start to ask whether something is broken.

Statistics has a handy shortcut for this, the rule of three).

If something hasn’t happened in n tries, you can be 95% confident its true rate is below 3 ÷ n.

It’s a good approximation once n is above 30.

For offer clicks that haven’t produced a sale yet, it looks like this:

• 100 clicks, no sale → the real conversion rate could still be as high as 3%
• 300 clicks, no sale → very likely below 1%
• 600 clicks, no sale → very likely below 0.5%
• 1,000 clicks, no sale → very likely below 0.3%

You can turn it round to plan a test.

If you hoped an offer would convert at 2%, you need about 150 clicks with no sale (3 ÷ 150 = 2%) before you can say it probably doesn’t.

If you hoped for 1%, you need about 300.

Below that point, “no sales yet” mostly means the sample is too small.

550 clicks and no sale: what that actually tells you

One of the results on page one for this question is a Quora thread titled “I am getting clicks but no sales in affiliate marketing”.

Its question describes 550 clicks without a sale, with Pinterest as the traffic source and about 20 clicks a day.

It makes a good worked example.

By the rule of three, 3 ÷ 550 is about 0.55%.

If those 550 were clicks on the offer, the true conversion rate is very likely below about 0.55%.

That’s fewer than one sale in roughly 180 clicks.

It isn’t the same as zero, though: it says the path is weak, not that it’s dead.

The first question is which 550 clicks they were.

At 20 a day, 550 is under four weeks of clicks.

If they were Pinterest’s outbound clicks, only some of those people reached the page, and fewer still clicked the product, so the offer had only a fraction of 550 chances.

If they were the affiliate dashboard’s clicks, the leak comes after the click: the product, the price, the merchant’s page, or the reason the visitor came at all.

Then check the path in this order, cheapest checks first:

1. Open the Pin’s link on a phone while signed out. It should land on the page you meant, load quickly, and not bounce through a chain of redirects.
2. Compare outbound clicks with sessions for the same dates. If sessions are a small fraction of the clicks, people are leaving before the page loads.
3. Compare sessions with offer clicks. If few readers click the product, the page and the Pin are promising different things.
4. Look at the offer itself. Is it in stock, at the price the Pin suggested, on a page that works on a phone?
5. Look at the searches the Pins rank for. A Pin found by people collecting ideas brings a different kind of click from one found by people choosing what to buy.

Where the clicks leak, and which step to fix first

Clicks per sale is every step multiplied together.

So the cheapest fix is usually at the step with the biggest drop that you control.

Read your three step ratios against each other:

• Pinterest to page is low → look at the page: its speed on a phone, redirects, a broken or changed link. Pinterest can’t see any of this, so its own numbers look fine.
• Page to offer is low → look at the match: the Pin promised one thing and the page leads with another, or the product link is buried.
• Offer to sale is low → look at the offer: price, stock, reviews, the merchant’s checkout. You control this step least, so fix the first two before you swap products.

A small change at one step moves the whole number.

In the example above, lifting page to offer from 25% to 35% turns 480 sessions into 168 offer clicks.

At the same 2.5%, that’s 4.2 sales, or about 143 outbound clicks per sale instead of 200, without a single extra click from Pinterest.

That’s also why more clicks aren’t always the answer.

More clicks down the same leaky path leave your clicks per sale where it was.

The Pinterest outbound clicks guide covers how to earn more of them; this one is about making each of them count.

Which Pins bring the clicks that buy

An account-wide clicks per sale hides the most useful thing to know.

Often a few Pins and a few destination pages do most of the selling, and you can only see that Pin by Pin.

Pinterest gives you the first figure for each Pin: open Created, pick the Pin and click See more stats (Pin stats help).

There’s one thing to know when you read it.

Pinterest says it calculates Pin stats “by aggregating the data for all Pins that share an image and if applicable, a URL”, including other people’s saves of it.

So one Pin’s outbound clicks include clicks on the copies other people saved.

That’s good news for you, but the figure belongs to the image and its link, not to one upload.

For the other three figures, give each Pin’s link its own tag (UTM parameters) so your site analytics shows sessions and offer clicks per Pin.

Then line the Pins up:

• Many outbound clicks, few sales: the Pin is good at attention, but the page or the search behind it isn’t a buying one. Keep it for traffic, and don’t judge it on sales.
• Fewer outbound clicks, several sales: your best Pin per click. Make more Pins for the same search and the same page.
• Clicks fading, sales steady: the people still clicking are the ready ones. Leave it alone.
• No outbound clicks before a certain date: you probably added or changed the link then. Outbound clicks count from the date the link was added, so measure from that date, not from the day you published.

The search behind each Pin matters as much as its design.

Write the keyword each Pin ranks for next to its clicks per sale.

PinPinterest’s rank tracking shows where your Pins rank on the keywords you save, which fills that column.

After a couple of months you’ll see which kinds of searches bring buyers in your niche, and that list is worth more than any general rule.

It sits alongside the other numbers in the Pinterest metrics that matter most.

A 20-minute clicks-to-sales check, once a month

1. Pull the same 30 days, ending two days ago, from Pinterest Analytics, your site analytics and the affiliate or shop report.
2. Write down the four figures: outbound clicks, sessions, offer clicks and sales.
3. Work out the three step ratios and your clicks per sale.
4. Put them next to last month’s figures. Use only your own numbers, never someone else’s.
5. Find the step with the biggest drop and pick one fix for it.
6. Check the sample. With no sales, is the click count past 3 ÷ the rate you hoped for? If not, wait before you decide.
7. List your top five Pins by outbound clicks and note which of them sold anything.

Keep the sheet.

Three months of it will tell you more about what a Pinterest click is worth to you than any average you’ll find on page one.

Quick answers

Does Pinterest count your clicks?

Yes.

Pinterest Analytics reports outbound clicks, which are clicks that take people off Pinterest.

It also reports outbound click rate, which Pinterest defines as “the total number of clicks to the destination URL associated with your Pin divided by the total number of times your Pins were on screen”.

Figures for the last 48 hours are estimates that can still change.

The help pages don’t say whether your own taps on your own Pins are counted, so test your links while signed out (more on counting your own activity).

Is 1000 monthly views on Pinterest good?

It depends on what those views turn into.

Monthly views count how often your Pins appeared on screens, not clicks and not people, so on their own they can’t tell you about sales.

Follow the chain instead: how many outbound clicks did those views produce, and how many sales did those clicks make?

A small account whose views come from buying searches can earn more than a big one whose views come from browsing (what monthly views measure).

How do you get lots of clicks on Pinterest?

Make a clear promise on the Pin, target keywords people search with intent, and keep the link working; the outbound clicks guide goes through each one.

If sales are the goal, though, aim for the right clicks rather than lots of them.

A hundred clicks from people choosing what to buy can beat a thousand from people collecting ideas.