What Are Pinterest Outbound Clicks? (+ 17 Easy Tips to Get More)

So you want to generate more outbound clicks on Pinterest to drive more free traffic to your blog or website?

You’re in the right place — read on!

Pinterest is a powerful traffic source for businesses, bloggers, and online shops. With over 522 million monthly users, it’s the biggest visual search engine worldwide.

However, it can be difficult to gain traction on Pinterest and make people click through to your site. Those clicks are called outbound clicks on Pinterest, and they are your #1 priority when it comes to Pinterest marketing.

After all, if you don’t get website visitors from Pinterest, what’s the point in using it in the first place for your business?

Luckily, you can implement a few proven strategies to increase your outbound clicks. I’ve tried and tested hundreds of Pinterest marketing techniques throughout the years for my website clients in various niches. The truth is: there’s a lot of outdated information out there, and it’s difficult to know what really works and what doesn’t.

To help you increase your outbound clicks faster, I’ll walk you through 17 key strategies in this guide. Follow them consistently and you will see more traffic to your website, allowing you to grow your blog or business faster.

Let’s go!

Please note: This post contains affiliate links to products I use, trust, and recommend. If you choose to purchase a helpful product using these links, I may receive a small commission for referring you – at no extra cost to you. These funds help me keep this blog up and running.

What are outbound clicks on Pinterest?

Outbound clicks are one of the most important metrics on Pinterest.

The official Pinterest definition says:

Outbound clicks measure the number of people perform actions that lead them to a destination off Pinterest.

So when publishers and bloggers tell you how much traffic they get from Pinterest, they are referring to their outbound clicks.

For example, when I publish a pin to one of my Pinterest boards, I include a link to the corresponding blog post:

When someone opens that pin and clicks on the link, they will be taken to my blog. That’s one outbound click for me.

When 5 people click it, I get 5 outbound clicks and 5 visitors. When 100,000 people click it, that’s 100,000 outbound clicks.

At the end of the day, those visitors will convert into readers, followers, email subscribers, and customers. Therefore, outbound clicks are your #1 goal with your Pinterest marketing strategy.

Pin clicks vs. outbound clicks on Pinterest

In your Pinterest Analytics, you can track both your pin clicks and your outbound clicks. So what’s the difference?

Pin clicks indicate the total number of clicks on your pin or ad when someone opens it in closeup.

That’s when a user clicks on your pin in their home feed, for example, to enlarge it on their screen.

Hence, here’s how pin clicks and outbound clicks are different:

1. Pin click opens the pin in a closeup view
2. Outbound click leads the user to your website

How to get more outbound clicks on Pinterest: 17 proven strategies

Now let’s see how you can get more outbound clicks to grow your website traffic faster.

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1: Know your target audience

Getting more outbound clicks on Pinterest starts with identifying your target audience.

If you don’t know who you’re targeting with your content, how could you know what types of pins to publish?

Remember: your target audience is already actively searching for ideas on Pinterest. You want to be crystal clear about:

1. Who they are
2. Where they’re from
3. What their biggest problems are and what they’re struggling with
4. Why they’re on Pinterest in the first place

You need these insights to figure out how you can make their lives easier. That’s what a successful Pinterest marketing strategy boils down to.

Your audience will be your Pinterest family. You want to solve their problems, answer their questions, and inspire them with your content.

To get started, follow my guide on how to find your target audience.

2: Do keyword research

Once you know who your target audience are, it’s time for some Pinterest keyword research.

Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, keywords are an essential part of your Pinterest marketing strategy.

People use keywords to find content on the platform. To make sure your content ranks higher in search results, you need to use the best, most relevant keywords throughout your entire Pinterest account.

The easiest Pinterest keyword research method is to use the native search bar.

Start by entering your overall niche or topic into the search field — but don’t hit Enter just yet. For example, let’s say you blog about travel tips. See how Pinterest suggests related keywords in a dropdown list:

You’ll see suggested search phrases like:

• Travel tips and tricks
• Travel tips with kids
• Travel tips packing
• Travel tips with toddlers
• etc.

These are popular keywords and search phrases related to your topic!

This autofill suggestion list is a quick way to discover keyword ideas for your profile, boards, and pins.

Now let’s hit Enter and peruse the search results overview. See the colorful keyword bubbles above the search results:

Again, these are popular keywords related to your search phrase “travel tips”!

You can click on a bubble to add it to your search phrase to find more specific, long-tail keywords. Let’s add “italy” to our search phrase and see what happens. Our search phrase now becomes “italy travel tips”:

We see further, more specific keyword suggestions for Italy travel tips in the colorful bubbles now. Neat!

These keyword ideas allow you to niche down to a more granular topic and interest to target with your Pinterest marketing strategy.

These two Pinterest keyword research methods are the easiest ones to start with. You can use them to find dozens and hundreds of popular keywords to create content people are already searching for.

Once you’ve found enough keywords, follow my full guide on the best places to use keywords on Pinterest.

3: Follow design best practices

Although you can be wildly creative with your pin designs most of the time, there are a few creative best practices for Pinterest you should follow when creating pins.

Here are a few guidelines you should follow to increase clicks:

• Make them tall — pinners love tall, vertical images. Square or horizontal landscape pins won’t perform well.
• Use the right size — Pinterest recommends a 2:3 aspect ratio like 1,000 x 1,500 pixels. Experiment with taller pins, too, like 1,000 x 2,000 pixels!
• Keep it simple and clean — avoid cluttered, messy layouts with too many elements. A simple, clear text overlay is enough. Add a call-to-action to encourage engagement, too.
• Give elements room to breathe — leaving enough white space around your elements makes your pins much easier on the eye.
• Use high-quality, relevant photos — your photos MUST be crisp! Use original photos is you can or pick relevant stock photos from Canva, Envato Elements, or Unsplash, for example.

4: Know what works in your niche

Each niche works a bit differently on Pinterest. Depending on the topic, people prefer different types of content, designs, and formats.

For example, highly visual niches like fashion, beauty, and design are great for sharing your best photos as such. No need to design complex layouts.

Just look at these search results for “summer outfits” — it’s enough to share editorial photos of people wearing outfits for the summer because that’s essentially what you want to see for this search phrase:

In information-based niches — like finance, education, and health — you want to create Pinterest pins with text overlays for context.

For example, let’s say you’ve just published a blog post titled “15 Must-Know Weight Loss Tips For Busy People”. To make your pin click-worthy, you want to add a text overlay that makes people curious. If you simply post a photo of a person at the gym, that doesn’t tell people what your article is really about, right?

Another example for using text overlays is the education niche. For example, look at these search results for “learning techniques” — they all have text overlays to give you an overview of what you’ll find in each article:

Here’s what you should do:

Head over to Pinterest and do a few quick searches to your most important keywords. Peruse the search results and pay attention to the pin designs you see. Use your findings to determine what types of pins perform the best for your niche.

When it’s time to design your Pinterest pins, you know exactly how your pins should look to generate those outbound clicks.

5: Give people what they want

The only way to generate outbound clicks on Pinterest is to give people what they want.

What I mean by this is:

People use Pinterest to find ideas. They use keywords and search phrases to discover new ideas. When they come across an interesting pin, they save it to their boards and click through to the website.

Your job is to share targeted content that matches people’s search queries and interests.

For example, tons of people search for outfit ideas on Pinterest. To generate outbound clicks from this topic, you want to publish pins that caters to this interest.

Furthermore, think about recipes. Millions of users search for dinner recipes, cupcake recipes, and healthy recipes on Pinterest. If you want to generate more clicks to your recipe blog, sharing your best recipe ideas on Pinterest is a surefire way to do that.

I know this is kind of self-explanatory, but I see tons of bloggers share content that nobody is searching for on Pinterest. For instance, if you blog about your daily life and your most recent blog post is titled “This Is What I Did Last Weekend”, Pinterest is not the right platform to generate traffic to your blog.

Summing it up: You have to know what your audience is searching for on Pinterest. That’s the only way to create targeted content that pinners will love.

Again, it all boils down to finding the best Pinterest keywords for your niche and topic.

6: Create attractive, clickable pins

What makes a pin attractive and clickable?

I could write an entire blog post to answer this question, but let’s focus on 2 key things you must consider:

First, be mindful of what type of content you’re sharing. You want to offer pinners value and inspiration by showing them what they can achieve with your content.

For example, let’s say you published a step-by-step tutorial for stunning Halloween nails. On your pin, include photos of the different steps in your tutorial. This gives people a sense of “Oh wow, I can totally do this!” and encourages them to click through to read your entire tutorial.

When we search for “halloween nails tutorial”, we see two pins in the top search results that showcase step-by-step photos:

This approach works well for tutorial-heavy niches like beauty, cooking, DIY and crafts, and art, for example.

Next, you want to nail your pin design. See what types of pins rank the best for your topic, niche, and main keywords. Pay attention to:

• Color palettes
• Pin format (standard or video?)
• Pin elements (text overlays, CTAs)
• Graphics (photos, illustrations)

Those top search results rank well for a reason: they resonate with the target audience. Hence, there’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel here. Do what’s working well already, but be unique and put your own spin on things.

7: Nail your text overlays

Text overlays add a ton of context and value to your pin designs. They can be the most important marketing message for the majority of your pins.

A text overlay fulfils one important purpose:

They tell people what’s in it for them. They tell people how your content makes their lives easier.

So, make sure your text overlays give people reason to click through and visit your website.

Will your content help them save money, improve their design skills, become better parents, or lose weight?

Show them with a text overlay why they MUST click and learn how to achieve the results they want.

See how all these text overlays for pins for “save money” make people curious to click through to learn more:

Here are a few quick tips for your pin text overlays:

• Use relevant keywords (we looked at Pinterest keyword research above)
• Use large and clear fonts (readability is everything!)
• Make the text large enough (for people on mobile devices)
• Include a number if you can (e.g. “12 best hacks for…”)
• Add an urgency power word (e.g. free, limited, secret, instant, now, etc.)

8: Use clear calls-to-action (CTAs)

An explicit call-to-action (or CTA) tells people what they should do next. It nudges pinners to take the action you want — click through to your website.

Clear calls-to-action can increase your clickthrough rate and overall engagement. They are like the cherry on top of your sales pitch, persuading people to take action.

An effective CTA is short, clear, and to-the-point. Ideally, stick to 2–4 words if you can. Also, make your CTA stand out in your pin design. For example, place it inside a button or another unique element, use another font for it, or use eye-catching colors.

Here are a few call-to-action ideas for Pinterest, categorized by the type of action you want users to take:

My tip: Avoid time-sensitive CTAs. For example, “1 day left”, “only 5 spots left”, or “sale ends today” won’t work well on Pinterest. It takes time to rank high in the algorithm, and chances are your sale will be over by the time people find your pin.

9: Create multiple pins for each blog post or page

If you’re just getting started with your blog and Pinterest, chances are you don’t have that much content just yet.

In that case, create multiple pins for each blog post, product, or page on your website.

Use different templates, colors, pin formats, framing, and fonts to keep things interesting.

Again, Canva is a fantastic tool for this — plus it’s 100% free to use.

For example, here are some of the templates I use to design new pins for my blog posts with Canva. When I publish a new article, I pick 3 to 5 templates, adjust the text overlays and graphics, and download my designs so I can embed them into my blog posts:

I suggest you create your own set of 10 to 20 Pinterest templates in Canva. That’s going to give you at least 10 different designs you can use for a piece of content.

If you have 10 blog post, you can use your templates to create 100 Pinterest pins or more if you like. Not bad!

10: Write click-worthy pin titles

What’s going to make people want to click through to your website?

They need to know your content is worth their while.

They’re thinking: “What’s in it for me?”

People are busy. You need to give them reason to spend their time on your site.

It’s your job to show them what your content offers.

How will their lives become easier when they visit your website?

Thus, your pin title has to convey a clear promise of what they can expect. Then, make sure your content offers tons of value in return for their time.

Here are 10 quick tips for click-worthy Pinterest pin titles:

1. Use keywords strategically:
   Keywords make your pins more discoverable in Pinterest search results and help reach your target audience. Research relevant keywords using Pinterest’s search bar, and incorporate them naturally into your pin titles.
2. Create a sense of urgency:
   Urgency can prompt immediate action, encouraging users to click through rather than saving for later. Use phrases like “Don’t Miss Out,” “Limited Time,” or “Before It’s Gone” to make users feel they need to act now.
3. Ask a question:
   Questions engage curiosity, making users want to find the answer by clicking through. Ask a question that directly addresses a common problem or interest of your audience, such as “Want to Save Money Fast?” or “Need Dinner Ideas?”
4. Use numbers and lists:
   Numbers and lists (e.g., “10 Tips” or “5 Easy Steps”) are specific and easy to digest, making them more appealing to click. Start your title with a number and follow with a compelling promise, like “7 Proven Ways to Lose Weight.”
5. Highlight the benefit:
   People are more likely to click when they know what’s in it for them. Clearly state the benefit or value they’ll receive, such as “How to Double Your Savings in 6 Months” or “Get Glowing Skin with This 5-Minute Routine.”
6. Be specific and descriptive:
   Vague titles don’t give users enough information to entice a click. Specific titles help users understand exactly what they’ll get. Avoid generic phrases and be as descriptive as possible. Instead of “Best Travel Tips,” try “10 Packing Tips for Stress-Free Travel.”
7. Incorporate power words:
   Power words evoke emotion and can increase click-through rates by making your titles more persuasive. Use words like “Ultimate,” “Proven,” “Effortless,” or “Transformative” to make your titles stand out.
8. Keep it short and sweet:
   Pinterest titles are cut off after a certain length, so shorter titles ensure your message isn’t lost. Aim for around 50 characters or less, focusing on the most impactful words.
9. Make it actionable:
   Actionable titles encourage users to take the next step, whether it’s learning something new or trying a specific tactic. Start with action verbs like “Learn,” “Discover,” “Create,” or “Master,” such as “Create Stunning Graphics in 5 Minutes”.
10. Test and optimize:
    What works best for one audience might not work for another. Testing helps you understand what resonates the best. Experiment with different title styles and analyze which ones generate the most clicks. Optimize future pins based on these insights.

11: Don’t give away everything

If you want people to click through to your website, they need to feel like they’re missing out on something, right?

Therefore, giving away all your secrets right away in your pin isn’t a good idea if you want to increase your outbound clicks. Pins that reveal everything right off the bat get tons of saves and repins, but your clickthrough rate will be relatively low.

Whatever value your content offers, tease the best bits on your pin to make people curious to find out more.

Give people a little taste of what they’ll get when they click through to your site.

For example, let’s say you publish a listicle with 15 best budgeting tips for entrepreneurs. When you create a pin for that blog post, don’t include all 15 tips on your pin. Instead, reveal 1–10 tips and tease on the image or in the description that there’s more to discover on your website.

For that post with 15 tips, you might even create 15 individual pins with just a single tip on each pin. Perhaps you’d even want to number them so that people can collect the whole series on their boards:

• “Budgeting Tip #1: Use Free Budgeting Printables”
• “Budgeting Tip #2: Switch to Cheaper Alternatives”
• “Budgeting Tip #3: Audit Your Software Subscriptions”
• etc.

You know what? This is such a great strategy that I’ll use it for this blog post. I’ll share my results and findings with my email subscribers — join my community now by downloading my free Pinterest marketing quick guide below:

12: Publish new pins consistently

One of the best ways to get more outbound clicks from Pinterest is to share new, fresh pins to your boards consistently.

The Pinterest algorithm favors creators who are active on the platform and keep sharing new ideas on a regular basis.

People use Pinterest to discover new ideas. What better way to offer them fresh inspiration than creating and sharing unique, click-worthy pins?

I know it’s a lot of work to create new pin images. It takes time and hard work — but it’s 100% worth your while.

Here are a few quick tips to create fresh pins faster:

• Use Canva — it’s super easy and intuitive, making pin design a breeze if you’re not a professional designer.
• Create or buy templates — you can create dozens of fresh pins within minutes using Pinterest templates. Adjust the text overlay, change the background, rephrase the CTA, and you’re done!
• Use ChatGPT for text overlay ideas — AI is fantastic at brainstorming. Ask ChatGPT to write 10 different text overlays for a single blog post, and you’ll have 10 unique pins for your article in no time.
• Use multiple color schemes — not all your pins have to follow the same exact color palette. When you use two or more palettes, you can duplicate a pin and change the colors. And boom, you have a new pin!

How about a set of minimalistic Pinterest Canva templates? I’ve created a template set you can customize super quickly with a free Canva account — grab them now!

13: Pin at the right time of day

This is kind of self-explanatory, but you want to pin content to your Pinterest boards when your audience is active on the platform. That way, your pins will show up higher in your followers’ feeds, meaning you’ll generate more views and clicks.

So how do you know when your target audience is active on Pinterest?

First, figure out where your audience comes from. If most of your website traffic comes from the US, for example, they’ll be active from about 6AM to 12PM.

The best time to pin stuff depends on your niche and which day of the week it is.

For example, people usually search for cooking ideas after work on their way home when buying groceries. Therefore, if you publish recipes, share them to Pinterest in the afternoon during the week. On the weekends, you could save new recipes to your boards in the morning already.

When you use Tailwind to create an automated Pinterest publishing schedule, the tool automatically suggest optimal times to publish your pins. Tailwind has a massive pool of data to determine when your audience is active on Pinterest. Therefore, this is by far the easiest way to make sure your pins get seen by as many users as possible.

If you haven’t already, sign up for a free Tailwind account here.

Log in to your account, head over to Original Publisher > Your Schedule and select Create Schedule. Now you can tell Tailwind how many pins you want to post daily:

Tailwind creates a weekly publishing schedule for you automatically, suggesting the best time slots for your pins:

It doesn’t get any easier than this.

If you’re not using Tailwind, no worries. I also like to use Google Analytics to find out when my website gets the most visitors. This gives me a general idea of when my target audience “needs me” and I can time my pins correctly for more outbound clicks.

In Google Analytics 4, it’s a bit tricky to see which hours of the day are most popular. If you’d like to see which hours of the day (01 to 24) get the most visitors, you can create an Exploration:

1. Mouse over the left-hand menu and click Explore.
2. Click the + (plus) box above Blank.
3. Update the Exploration name, if necessary.
4. Update the date range, if necessary.
5. Click the + (plus) to the right of Dimensions.
6. Import the Hour dimension.
7. Click the + (plus) to the right of Metrics.
8. Import the Sessions metric.
9. Under Rows, click the + (plus) button.
10. In the pop-up window, click Hour.
11. For the SHOW ROWS dropdown, choose 25.
12. Under Values, click the + (plus) button.
13. In the pop-up window, click Sessions.

The left column stands for hours of the day from 0 to 24, and the right column shows the number of sessions you’ve had for each hour:

In this report, we see that my most popular hours are 8 PM to 10 PM, for example. Also, we see a lot of traffic between 1 PM and 4 PM.

Therefore, I should share my content on Pinterest either in the afternoon or in the evening to get more outbound clicks.

14: Pin to the most relevant boards

Saving your pin to the most relevant board increases its chances of being distributed to the right audience who are interested in the topic.

The board you save your pin to adds more context to it, helping the Pinterest ranking algorithm understand your content better. This way, Pinterest can find the right categories and interests related to your content.

This simple Pinterest SEO technique should be part of your overall Pinterest strategy. Whenever you publish a new pin, look at the overall topic and make sure you save it to a board that’s most closely related to what your content is about.

15: Save content from other creators

Saving pins from other content creators to your Pinterest boards is an important SEO factor for generating more outbound clicks.

Whenever you create a new board, you want to help the algorithm understand what that board is about. The best way to do that is to save popular, related content from other accounts to that board first. Pins that have a long track record of being saved and clicked bring in tons of context for your board.

Once your board has about 30 to 50 third-party pins saved, it’s time to pin some of your own pins to that board, too. When you do, Pinterest has a clear idea of what those new pins are about since you’re adding them to a board that already includes popular, related content for that specific topic.

To create a new board, go to your Saved tab, click on the plus button on the left, and select Board:

Be mindful of your board topic and name. Name your board according to what types of pins you want to save, using the most relevant, popular keywords.

For example, I want to create a board for the best content I can find and create about “content marketing”. I’ve done my keyword research and I know pinners search for content marketing ideas, so that’s what I’ll call my board.

Type in your board name and click Create:

In less than 1 second, the Pinterest algorithm finds relevant ideas you can save to your new board. Here are the suggestions for my “Content Marketing” board:

To help the algorithm understand what this board is about, I’ll save about 30 relevant, click-worthy pins from other creators to it.

When I post my own pins to this board, Pinterest knows that they are related to these popular pins that already rank well for this topic and keyword. That way, my pins get an SEO boost and the algorithm will distribute them to the same target audience.

16: Create infographics

First things first: Infographics alone aren’t the best way to increase your outbound clicks.

Why?

Because they often give away all the information in one go. Thus, people have no reason to click through to your website to learn more.

However, infographics can generate a ton of views and impressions because pinners love saving them to their boards.

That engagement boosts your overall score in the Pinterest algorithm. When people save your infographics to their boards, the authority and popularity score for your content increases. As a result, the algorithm will distribute all pins for that piece of content to a wider audience.

When an infographic takes off, all other pins for that blog post will generate more impressions and clicks, too.

For example, I have an affiliate marketing infographic on Pinterest that’s doing pretty well organically. It gets a ton of saves, but the outbound clicks aren’t where they should be. Out of all users who clicked on the pin to see the closeup, only 7.6% clicked through to my blog.

So I started creating regular pins for the same blog post. Here’s one of them:

The clickthrough rate for this pin is 33% (out of all users who opened the closeup). The clickthrough rate is 4.3x as high as for the infographic!

Furthermore, it instantly got more impressions and a wider distribution because the algorithm knew pinners loved my blog post based on the performance of my infographic.

Creating infographics can be cumbersome because they include so many individual elements. The quickest shortcut is to use the pre-made infographics templates in Canva. There are hundreds of beautiful templates you can choose from — and they’re 100% free to use.

17: Tag your pins correctly

Pinterest uses categories and interests to understand your published pins better. Tagging your new pins with the right interests helps the algorithm distribute your content to the right audience — even if you’re not ranking very well for a specific topic just yet.

Use the built-in pin creation tool on Pinterest to add tagged topics to your pins:

You can choose up to 10 topics. Make sure they’re relevant to your content and target audience.

Bonus tip: Avoid outdated strategies

Last but not least, let’s go through a few strategies that are either outdated or just rumors.

Pinterest hashtags

First, Pinterest hashtags. Hashtags used to be a thing on Pinterest in the past. When you clicked on a hashtag in a pin description, you would see all pins for that hashtag in a chronological order. This was a fantastic way to discover new content on the platform.

However, hashtags quickly became messy when spam accounts started using them excessively. They’d steal a pin image and add a popular hashtag to it. That pin would then appear at the top of the feed for that specific hashtag, linking to a spam website.

Hashtags still exist on Pinterest. But when you click on them, you’re simply doing a regular search for that keyword.

Therefore, hashtags don’t offer a benefit for outbound clicks right now. This could change in the future, though — I’ll keep you posted!

Pinterest repins

Next, there are Pinterest repins. Repinning means that you save an existing pin again to one of your boards.

Repinning used to be an easy way to get more exposure to your pins, but Pinterest started favoring fresh, new pins back in 2020. That’s when creators started seeing strange numbers in their analytics, indicating a major shift in the algorithm.

Ever since then, Pinterest has clearly stated that it wants creators to share new, never-before-seen pins on the platform. After all, people use Pinterest to discover new, inspirational content. Thus, repinning stuff from 6 years back isn’t exactly inspirational.

Therefore, make sure you focus on creating fresh pin images instead of repinning old ones. Even if this means that you’ll save less pins to your boards as a total, fresh pins is where it’s at right now.

Final thoughts: How to get more outbound clicks on Pinterest

The only way to get more outbound clicks on Pinterest is to give people what they want.

If you don’t have content that people are interested in, you won’t see any clicks or traffic from Pinterest.

Thus, the only way to get more outbound clicks is to work hard.

There are no shortcuts to it, but there are proven strategies you can follow. That takes out the guessing from your overall Pinterest marketing strategy.

When you know you’re using the best techniques that really work, you don’t have to worry about a thing. Follow through, stay consistent, and you will see real results.

Here are 5 key strategies to get more outbound clicks on Pinterest:

1. Start by figuring out what your audience is searching for.
2. Create targeted content that answers their questions and solves their problems.
3. Design click-worthy pins that spark curiosity.
4. Encourage people to click and save your pin using clear calls-to-action.
5. Identify your top-performing pin designs and create more of what works!

Grab your free Pinterest marketing quick guide below to steal my best Pinterest traffic strategies right now!