Idea Pins vs. Standard Pins: Which Should You Actually Make?

This is one of those topics where I see people accidentally sabotage themselves for months, so let’s clear it up once and for all. Pinterest has (broadly) two kinds of pins, and they do completely different jobs. Pick the wrong one for your goal and you’ll pour effort into something that was never going to get you what you wanted. Here’s the plain-English breakdown.

What each one actually is

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Standard Pins — the workhorse

A standard pin is the classic one: a single vertical image (or video) with a clickable link. Someone taps it and gets taken to your website — your blog post, your product, your recipe. This is the pin that drives traffic. If your goal is getting people off Pinterest and onto your site, standard pins are your bread and butter.

Idea Pins — the reach builder

An idea pin is the multi-page, video-forward, story-style format. It’s designed to be consumed right there inside Pinterest — swipe through steps, watch a quick how-to. Idea pins can get great reach and are fantastic for growing followers and building brand familiarity. The catch, and it’s a big one: historically they’ve had weak or no outbound linking, so they’re not built to send people to your website.

The difference that changes everything

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Here it is, the one sentence to tattoo on your brain: standard pins send traffic to your site; idea pins keep people on Pinterest. Neither is “better.” They just have different jobs. The mistake is making a hundred beautiful idea pins, getting tons of views, and then wondering why your website traffic didn’t move. It didn’t move because idea pins weren’t trying to move it. (If website traffic is your aim, you want the whole blogger traffic playbook.)

So which should you make?

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It depends entirely on your goal, so be honest about what you actually want:

• Want website traffic, blog readers, or product sales? Lead with standard pins. That link is the whole point.
• Want reach, brand awareness, and more followers on Pinterest itself? Idea pins shine here.
• Want both (most of us)? Do a mix, weighted toward your primary goal.

For most of the people I talk to — bloggers, shop owners, service businesses — traffic is the goal, so I recommend roughly 80% standard pins, 20% idea pins. The standard pins do the traffic-driving heavy lifting; the idea pins keep you visible and growing your audience on the platform. And growing that audience isn’t vanity — a bigger, warmer following makes everything else work better, which I get into in how to grow your Pinterest followers.

The efficiency hack: make both from the same content

You don’t need separate content strategies. Say you write a “5 small-space storage ideas” post. You can make several standard pins that link to it, AND an idea pin that walks through the five ideas as swipeable pages. Same core content, two formats, two jobs done. This is just smart repurposing.

The bottom line

Don’t make idea pins and expect website traffic. Don’t make only standard pins and ignore the reach idea pins can build. Know the job of each, lead with the one that serves your main goal, and reuse your content across both. Match the tool to the task and you stop spinning your wheels.

Whichever mix you land on, consistency carries it. Line up your standard-pin queue in Burnpedia and keep that traffic engine running. — Sadie