Pinterest is one of the few places where people go looking for things to buy before they know exactly what they want. Wall art, gifts, wedding ideas, nursery decor: many of the searches that end on Etsy start on Pinterest, and unlike a social post, a pin can keep turning up in search long after it is published.
The problem is the work. Pinterest rewards steady pinning, not a burst of forty pins on a Sunday night. Etsy titles are written as keyword lists, which read badly on a pin. Most listing photos are square, while Pinterest shows tall pins at their best. So most sellers pin a handful of listings once, then stop.
Today the Pinterest tool in CraftRank covers the whole job: making good pins from your listings, publishing them a few at a time, keeping the queue full, and telling you which pins are working.
Pins that look like they belong on Pinterest
Connect your Etsy shop and your Pinterest account, pick the listings you want to pin, and CraftRank drafts each pin from the listing: a readable title, a description cut at a sentence rather than mid-word, and alt text. You can edit every field before anything is published.
Write it with AI. One click rewrites the copy for Pinterest search: a short title, two to four sentences of description and alt text, working in any keywords you add. The AI only uses facts from your listing, so it will not invent a material, a size or a discount.
Choose the image. Use your main photo, pick another, or choose up to five for a carousel pin.
Choose a layout. Pinterest recommends a 2:3 pin (1000 by 1500 pixels), and square photos leave a lot of that space unused. Pick one of four layouts:
- Original, your photo as it is.
- 2:3 centre crop, a tall pin cut from the middle, which suits most product photos.
- 2:3 smart crop, cropped around the busiest part of the photo, for products that sit to one side.
- Text template, your photo above a panel with a headline and an optional subtitle, in a light or dark theme.
A preview beside each pin shows the image as it will be published, so you can check a crop before it goes out. Nothing changes on Etsy: the layout only applies to the image sent to Pinterest.
A queue that pins for you
Most Pinterest advice comes down to consistency: a few pins every day beats a pile of them once a month. So instead of publishing everything at once, add your pins to the queue.
You set how many pins go out each day, your posting hours and your timezone. CraftRank spreads the pins evenly across those hours, one per slot. High-priority pins jump ahead, and you can schedule any pin for an exact date and time. If you fill the queue late in the evening, nothing floods out to catch up; the pins simply start at the next slot.
Every queued pin can still be edited, re-prioritised, published straight away or removed, and you can pause the whole queue without losing anything.
Automation that keeps it full
A queue only helps while it has pins in it. Three settings take care of that:
- Pin new listings checks your shop every few hours and queues each listing you publish after turning it on.
- Smart Pins keeps about a week of pins queued. It starts with the listings you have never pinned, most favourited first, then brings back listings that have not been pinned for 30 days.
- Smart Boards sends each Etsy shop section to its own board, so prints go to your prints board and mugs to your mugs board, with a default board for everything else.
Automated pins can use AI copy and your default layout, and they wait in the queue like any other pin, so you can review them before they publish.
See which pins bring buyers
The Analytics tab reads your numbers from Pinterest: impressions, saves, pin clicks and outbound clicks, which are the visits to your Etsy listing, over the last 7, 30 or 90 days. You can chart any of them day by day and sort your top pins by any metric, including pins you made outside CraftRank. For a single pin, open Stats from your pin history.
Read outbound clicks against impressions. A pin that is seen often but rarely clicked usually needs a clearer image or title. A listing whose pins keep earning clicks is worth pinning again with a fresh image or title, and Smart Pins brings listings back into the queue once they have gone 30 days without a pin.
A few honest notes
- Pinterest only shares analytics with business accounts. Switching is free in your Pinterest settings and keeps your pins and followers. Personal accounts can still use everything else.
- Pinterest keeps 90 days of analytics, and its latest day or two are usually still being processed.
- Pin links carry UTM tags, so Pinterest visits are easy to spot in your analytics. We do not create Etsy's Share & Save links, because Etsy only makes them in its own seller app.
- Each published pin uses one pin from your monthly allowance. Queuing is free, and a pin that Pinterest rejects is not counted.
Try it
The free plan includes 25 published pins a month, with every feature on this page. That is enough to set up a daily queue for your best listings and see what Pinterest does for your shop.
See how the Pinterest tool works, read the Pinterest guide, or create a free account and connect your shop.