A Simple Pinterest Rank Tracking Spreadsheet (and How to Tell When You’ve Outgrown It)

My first rank tracker was a Google Sheet with a typo in the title (I never fixed it).

It was also one of the most useful things I ever made for my Pinterest account.

It wasn’t clever.

It had five columns and I filled it in on Monday mornings with a coffee.

But it taught me more about how Pinterest search behaves than any course I’d paid for, because for the first time I could see what happened after I changed something.

So if you’re not ready for a tool yet, or you just want to understand the numbers before anything summarises them for you, here’s the sheet I’d set up today.

I’ll also cover how to keep it going past week three, and the signs that it’s time to move on.

The five columns

Keep it this simple.

Every extra column is one more thing to fill in, and a sheet that takes too long to update is a sheet that stops getting updated.

1. Date. The day you checked. Without it, nothing else in the row means much 30 days later.
2. Phrase. Exactly what you searched, word for word. If you change the wording, start a fresh series of rows, because it’s a different search.
3. Pin. Which of your pins you were looking for. A short nickname is fine, like “blue kitchen v2”.
4. Band. Top 5, 6–20, 21+ or not found. Not the exact position, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.
5. Note. Anything you changed, or anything odd you noticed. This is the column that turns data into answers, and it’s the one everybody leaves blank.

One row per phrase per check.

So five phrases checked weekly means five new rows every Monday.

After 4 weeks you’ve got 20 rows, and that’s when it starts getting interesting.

Why bands and not exact positions

I know, a number feels more serious.

But Pinterest search is a grid, it’s personalised and it shuffles a little every day, so the exact position is mostly noise.

Seventh on Monday and ninth on Tuesday is the same result.

Bands keep the sheet readable.

When a phrase goes from “Top 5” to “6–20” and stays there, you can see it at a glance.

When it bounces between seventh and ninth, you don’t waste an evening wondering why.

Why rankings jump around every day goes into that wobble properly.

Filling it in without losing your whole morning

Honestly, the routine matters more than the sheet.

Here’s mine.

1. Same day, same device, every week. I do Mondays on my laptop, because Monday me is organised and Friday me isn’t.
2. Open a private browser window so you’re seeing roughly what a stranger sees rather than your own history. The clean way to check a ranking explains why this matters so much.
3. Search each phrase, find your pin, write the band. About 2 minutes a phrase once you’re used to it.
4. Fill in the note column before you close the sheet. Even “nothing changed this week” is useful later.

Reading the sheet once a month

Weekly is for filling in.

Monthly is for reading, and that’s where the value is.

Once a month, sort by phrase and read down each one.

You’re looking for three things.

• A band change that stuck. At least 2 weeks in a new band means something moved for real. Look at the note column around that date first.
• A change that did nothing. You rewrote a title in week two and the band hasn’t budged by week six. That’s worth knowing, and it’ll stop you making the same edit on ten other pins (reread pin titles that rank before you try the next one).
• A phrase that’s always “not found”. After 2 or 3 months, either the pin isn’t about that phrase or the phrase isn’t worth it. Which phrases to track helps you decide which.

If you spot a drop that has held, don’t panic-edit.

Work through what to do when a pin drops first, because the cause is often not the one you’d guess.

How long it takes, in real life

Here’s the maths nobody does before they start.

Five phrases takes about 10 minutes, which you can keep up forever.

Twenty takes 40 minutes every week, which is fine until you get busy.

Fifty takes well over 90 minutes, and I’ve never met anyone who kept that going for more than a couple of months.

That isn’t a willpower problem.

It’s just too much for a chore that never feels urgent.

Signs you’ve outgrown it

A spreadsheet is a brilliant way to start and a frustrating way to grow.

These are the signs I watch for.

• You’ve skipped two Mondays in a row. Gaps break the comparison, and the weeks you skip are always the weeks something happened.
• Your list has crept past twenty phrases. At that point the checking takes longer than the thinking.
• You can see your pin dropped, but not what replaced it. The answer to “why” usually sits in the rest of the top twenty, and nobody writes twenty rows per phrase.
• You want to know the day it moved, not the week. A weekly sheet can only tell you it happened somewhere in the last 7 days.
• You’ve started tracking competitors too. Three accounts across fifteen phrases is forty-five lookups a week, and tracking competitors’ rankings deserves a better setup than that.

What to move to

When you get there, you want something that does the lookups for you and keeps the history without you touching it.

That’s what PinPinterest does.

Save your phrases and it records where the top pins for each one rank every time the phrase is crawled, so the date, phrase and position columns fill themselves in, and you get a “#9 → #4” style label when something moves.

I’d still keep my own notes on what I changed, because that habit is worth keeping forever, but the part that eats your Monday mornings goes away.

The history starts from the day you save a phrase, so add your sheet’s phrases before you stop filling the sheet in.

Start today, even if it’s messy

Open a blank sheet, type the five column headings and add your five most important phrases.

Check them now.

That’s your first row of history, and in a month you’ll be really glad it exists.

If you want the bigger picture of what you’re building towards, the rank tracking guide pulls the whole thing together.

And whether ranking first even matters is worth a read before you start obsessing over the top spot.

Mine’s still open in a browser tab, typo and all.