Accessing Pinterest Analytics, and verifying your website with Pinterest

This Quick-tip is about how you can verify the website (or blog) associated with your Pinterest account - and solving a small problem with the meta-tag that Pinterest give you.

Pinterest have recently announced Pinterest Web Analytics, which will show you "how many people have pinned content from your site, what content is most popular with pinners, and more."   (From their announcement email.

To register to Pinterest Web Analytics, you need to

1. Get early access to Pinterest’s new look.
2. Verify your website, using the tools listed here.

After your website is verified, there will be an Analytics option on the top-right menu whenever you are using Pinterest.

Verifying your blog with Pinterest:

There is one slight twitch to the verification process:  As I've explained previously, Bloggers don't have access to load files to their site's root directory.   Instead we need to use the meta-tag option, currently on the bottom left of the box which opens when you choose "Verify your website" from Pinterest's settings.

The meta-tag that Pinterest gives you looks like this

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >

Add it to your blog's template the same way you would add any other meta-tag.

If you see a message like this when you try to Preview or Save the change:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly. <br/> XML error message: The element type "meta" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</meta>".
Error 500

then it means is that the meta tag that Pinterest gave you has not been closed properly.   To fix it, you just need to add a "close tag" command  ( </meta> ), so that the code looks like:

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >
</meta>

After the tag is added and you have saved your template, click the Complete Verification button in the Pinterest window, to tell Pinterest to look at your website and make the connection.