Statistics are an integral part of any service we use regularly. How many followers did we gain today? How many people liked our album? How many e-mails passed through our inbox? Around every popular service we use, stats services sprout like mushrooms after the rain. And things are no different with the latest in social networking - Pinterest.

Pinterest is a service with a strong need for some stats. It’s easy to see how many people liked or re-pinned a single pin, but how many actually clicked through? And how does the amount of re-pins relate to the time of day? This is especially important for brands, blogs and websites who use Pinterest to promote their main website. Pinerly is a stats and management service for Pinterest, where you can create Pinterest “campaigns” and follow up on clicks, likes, repins and reach.

Pinerly is currently in closed beta, but we have 200 invites to give away to our awesome readers. Read on to find out how you can get your hands on one!

Creating Pinerly Campaigns

There are two ways to get started with Pinerly. You can grab one of the early invites below, or if you missed out on those, you can register and start sharing Pinerly with friends to get ahead in line. Either way, once you’re in, it’s very easy to get started.

When you first sign up, don’t forget to use the same username you have on Pinterest. This is crucial for the service to work. You will also have to be logged into this same Pinterest account for quick pinning.

If you feel confused, you can take the Pinerly tour to get your bearings before creating a campaign. When you’re ready, click on the Campaign tab.

So what is a “campaign”? A campaign is just a good old Pinterest pin when it’s done through Pinerly. You can still pin stuff to Pinterest as usual, but when you do so through Pinerly, you’ll get to enjoy Pinerly’s stats and tips.

As on Pinterest, you can choose to upload a local file or find an image online. When you enter a URL, Pinerly will scout the page for media, and you’ll be able to choose the image you want to pin. This is where you can modify the source link and enter a description.

From here you can also enable “Click-through tracking”. This is something you’d want to give some thought to. If you choose to enable this option, Pinerly will track the total number of clicks on your pin to your final destination URL, which can be your website, blog, etc. In order to do this, Pinerly currently routes traffic through the Pinerly servers, and for that reason, all your pins will appear as “from pinerly.com”.

Clicking the image or the link will lead the users to the correct source website, but this can still be a bit confusing. If you don’t care about click-through tracking, you’d be better off disabling this option.

Now it’s time to click “Pinerly It”. Pinerly will lead you to Pinterest, where you can pin the image as usual. When you’re done, let Pinerly know you’ve pinned it on Pinterest.

Pinalytics

This is the heart of Pinerly, and where you’ll find all the juicy details about your Pinterest activity. First off, you can look at an overview of the past month or week, see how many followers and pins each of your boards have, and how many campaigns, clicks, likes, etc. you have in total.

When you click the “Pinalytics” tab, you’ll find a weekly graph where you can see the number of clicks, likes and repins you had each day.

Scroll down to take a look at each campaign individually. You can sort this list by chronological order or by number of clicks. Here you can easily see how each campaign did, how many people  it reached, and correlate this with the day and time of the pin, etc.

If you feel like a campaign didn’t do very well, you can choose to either repost it or delete it. Pinerly can help you figure out when are the best times to post things on Pinterest.

More Goodies

Pinerly is not all about stats and account management. Under the “Suggested” tab you’ll find interesting pins you might like. You can browse these for fun, discover people to follow, and, of course, pin some interesting images onto your own account.

The follow tab can help you find pinners to follow as well. You can browse accounts according to 19 different categories, including photography, fitness, DIY and more. I couldn’t help but notice that there is no “tech” category. An oversight that will hopefully be fixed soon!

If loading Pinerly every time you want to pin seems like a hassle, there’s a handy bookmarklet you can use to speed things up. Simply drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar, and use it whenever you want to pin something. Pinerly will scan through the website you’re on and let you choose which image you want to pin.

Pinerly shows great promise just as it is, and exciting things such as scheduling pins and Pinerly for multiple Pinterest accounts are planned for the future.

So How Do I Get In?

As mentioned, Pinerly is still in closed beta, but the team was kind enough to offer 200 invites exclusively to MakeUseOf readers. If you’d like to try this innovative service, follow this link [No Longer Available] to register. The first 200 to do so will gain immediate access to Pinerly.

Don’t forget that this is still a work in progress. If you get stuck, you can visit the help page, or contact the Pinerly team, who would love get constructive feedback about the service.

Did you manage to get an invite? What do you think of Pinerly? Know of any similar services for Pinterest? Let us know in the comments!