Pinterest links and the App Store

Pins keep sending traffic for years, which makes a broken destination unusually expensive here.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

The same wall

Pinterest loads links in an in-app WebView. Requesting apps.apple.com there gets Apple's redirect into itms-appss://, which the WebView cannot hand to another app, so the tap ends on a blank page.

Detection is straightforward, since the app marks its user agent:

if (/Pinterest/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) { … }

Why Pinterest is different

Most social traffic is gone in a day. A pin keeps surfacing in search and recommendations for months or years, so a destination set once keeps being tapped long after you forgot about it.

That cuts both ways. A broken store link keeps losing taps quietly, and a working routing link keeps paying off with no further work.

Practical setup

• One routing address on the pin, not a store URL
• A campaign token identifying Pinterest, since the traffic arrives over a long tail
• A destination you control, because you cannot edit a pin's link after it has been saved by others

That last point matters more than it sounds. Once a pin is repinned, the link travels with it. If that link points at a service you might stop paying for, the traffic disappears with the service.

Measurement

Pinterest traffic is slow and steady rather than spiky, which makes it easy to overlook in reporting. A campaign token on the store URL separates it out, and after a few months the numbers are usually larger than people expect.