Pin Clicks vs Outbound Clicks: the Gap That Explains Your Missing Traffic

For about eight months I thought I was getting roughly four hundred visits a month from Pinterest. I was getting about thirty.

The four hundred was real. It was sitting in the dashboard, it was labelled “clicks”, and I had no particular reason to interrogate it. The problem was that it was counting a completely different event from the one I assumed, and the two events are separated by a decision the reader has not made yet.

This is the most expensive misreading in Pinterest analytics, and almost everybody makes it at least once. So: what each one is, why the gap between them exists, and how to tell a normal gap from a broken one.

The difference, in one sentence each

A pin click is somebody tapping your pin so it opens larger on Pinterest. They are still on Pinterest. They have expressed curiosity and nothing more expensive than that.

An outbound click is somebody leaving Pinterest for your website. They have gone. That is the event that turns into a session, an email signup, a sale, or any of the other things anybody actually wants.

The two are one tap apart in the interface and an entire category apart in meaning, and this is not Pinterest being sly — the words are accurate. It is just that “clicks” in ordinary English means the second thing, and in the dashboard it very often means the first.

It helps to know these two live in different families. Pin clicks belong with saves, in the group of things people do while still on Pinterest; outbound clicks are the only member of the family that has actually been to your website. The whole set of numbers, sorted into those families is worth ten minutes if you have never had them laid out — most of the dashboard turns out to be one family wearing several hats.

Every step loses most of the people, and that is fine

Before diagnosing anything it helps to know what normal looks like, because the raw drop-off is so brutal that healthy accounts routinely read as catastrophes.

Losing well over ninety per cent between impression and pin click is completely standard. An impression is a pin sliding past somebody mid-scroll; most of them were never going to stop, and what an impression actually counts is worth reading if that number is the one you have been treating as an audience.

The step that carries real information is the next one. Once somebody has opened your pin, they have already decided they are interested. If most of them then do not leave for your site, something specific went wrong in the two seconds after they opened it — and unlike the first drop, that is a problem with a cause you can find.

Five reasons the gap gets wide

In rough order of how often I find them:

1. The pin already answered the question. A beautiful infographic listing all seven tips is a complete experience. They saved it, they are grateful, and they have no reason on earth to visit you. This is the most common cause and the most painful, because the pin is doing well by every other measure.
2. The link is broken, redirecting oddly, or pointing at the wrong page. Genuinely common, completely invisible from inside Pinterest, and worth checking properly rather than assuming.
3. The image promises something the page does not deliver. They opened the pin, read the title again more carefully, and decided the page probably was not what the image implied.
4. There is no reason given to leave. The pin says what the thing is but never suggests there is more — no “full recipe”, no “the other nine”, nothing that implies the click is worth making.
5. The destination looks slow or heavy on mobile. Most of this audience is on a phone, and a page that takes five seconds is a page a fair share of them abandon before it renders.

Notice that four of the five are mechanical and one is editorial. If the mechanical four are clean and the gap is still wide, you are almost certainly looking at cause one, and the fix is not a better pin — it is a pin that deliberately withholds something.

That order matters more than it looks, because the mechanical causes are the ones people check last. It feels more productive to redesign a pin than to open a link on a phone, so redesigning is what happens, and three weeks later the link is still broken and the new pin is failing for a reason that has nothing to do with how it looks. I have done this. Twice, on the same account, with the same broken redirect sitting there the entire time, because I was busy being creative at a problem that needed four minutes of being boring instead.

The awkward tension nobody mentions

There is a real conflict here, and pretending otherwise makes for cheerful advice that does not survive contact with your own account.

The pins that get saved most are the ones that are most useful on their own. The pins that send the most traffic are the ones that are useful enough to be worth opening and incomplete enough to be worth leaving for. Those are not the same pin, and optimising hard for one will cost you the other.

I settled on roughly a two-to-one split — most pins designed to be genuinely useful and saved, a smaller number designed as an obvious doorway. The saved ones keep distribution healthy because saves feed the algorithm; the doorway ones do the actual work. Trying to make every pin do both produced pins that did neither, which was a lesson I paid for over about a quarter.

How to read the two numbers together, weekly

One ratio, and it takes about a minute: outbound clicks divided by pin clicks.

The absolute figure matters far less than its direction. A ratio that is stable is a machine working as designed. A ratio that is falling while pin clicks rise means you are getting better at attracting curiosity and worse at converting it — usually because a batch of recent pins was too self-contained, sometimes because a link broke and nobody noticed.

A ratio that suddenly collapses to near zero is nearly always mechanical. Check your links before you rewrite anything, and if you want to attribute the traffic properly rather than guessing which pin did what, tagging your links is the fifteen minutes that pays for itself repeatedly.

This is also the ratio worth keeping beside your topics rather than your pins, because that is where the pattern lives. When I finally lined mine up by subject, one topic was producing a third of my saves and almost none of my traffic, which is the sort of thing that is invisible in a total and obvious in a list.

What I would do first, on a real account

Open three of your best-performing pins and click your own link on a phone, not a laptop. That single check finds more broken traffic than any amount of analysis, and it takes four minutes.

Then look at your top ten pins by pin clicks and ask, honestly, whether each one leaves anything worth going to get. Not whether it is good — whether it is finished. The finished ones are your saves engine and should stay exactly as they are. The ones that are nearly finished are where your missing traffic is.

Then, before making the next batch, spend the twenty minutes that decides everything downstream: work out which topics people are already searching for and already saving, so the pins you are about to design are aimed at demand rather than at a hunch. That is the part PinPinterest is built to answer, and it is why a good pin about a topic nobody wants stays a good pin about a topic nobody wants.

Related reading: what an outbound click really measures, getting Pinterest traffic to show up in Google Analytics, and whether your own browsing is inflating the top of this funnel.