How to get started with Advertising on Pinterest

What is Pinterest?

Now almost reaching its seventh birthday, Pinterest feels like it’s been a social media channel for a lifetime for most millennials. However, in comparison to other social media channels, it’s still in its infancy with one of the smallest user bases at 150 million (monthly active users) compared to Facebook’s staggering 1.86 billion.

Pinterest can’t easily be compared to Facebook as they both have very different objectives and uses. Pinterest started as a sharing platform rather than a social tool. Users primarily use Pinterest as a source of creativity and inspiration giving it a very different twist to other social media platforms.

Pinterest is best suited to companies in creative, design and e-commerce verticals where products can be showcased in the research phase to make an impact on people looking for ideas.

Pinterest recently announced its Search Ads product which includes keyword-based campaigns and shopping feed capabilities. This product is exciting news for advertisers as it will open up the platform to new inventory with a reported 2 billion searches per month.

What are Pinterest Ads and how can I get started?

Pinterest initially launched its advertising platform in the US in January 2015, so it is still relatively new to the Paid Social Advertising scene. It then opened its ‘Promoted Pin’ offering to the UK in April 2016. The recent news that they will be offering Search and Shopping ads is going to make it a lot more attractive to advertisers.

The good news is the Pinterest ads platform is very simplistic and easy to use. Pinterest offers three core objectives for its advertising:

• Awareness

Due to the nature of Pinterest, generating awareness of your brand is a great use for Promoted Pins, as while people browse they will save pins to their board of inspiration.

• Engagement

While capturing interest at the top of the purchase funnel, the users engage afterwards by re-pinning, liking or adding your pin to their board showing signals of intent with the product or image ad.

• Traffic

Promoted Pins have a clickable link to the site so when users are ready to make that purchase, be it a wedding dress or a new piece of furniture, they will click through to your site and show their interest to buy.

Targeting

You can target on Pinterest by demographics (age/gender/location) plus interest, keywords and audience targeting enabling a broad reach to your target customers.

Pinterest also offers retargeting capabilities to reach people who have already visited your site through audience lists, email uploads for customer match and users who have engaged with your pins in the past.

Results

Pinterest reports that Pinners who’ve seen Promoted Pins had 40% greater awareness of new products and 50% higher purchase intent compared to those Pinners who have not seen them.

Promoted Pins see engagement rates of 2-5% higher than the industry average.  

Due to the evergreen nature of Pinterest, advertisers who use the Pinterest Ads Manager received an average of 20% more (free) clicks* in the month after the start of the campaign.

Summary

Pinterest is an emerging channel in the Paid Social Advertising space, so it is an excellent time to trial it, especially if you’re already an active business user on Pinterest for organic pins.

The key industries that will benefit the most from Pinterest ads include companies with visual products; such as furniture, fashion retail, automotive or travel, showcasing from décor, clothes, cars to luxury destination holidays.

Remarketing is a simple way to getting into Promoted Pins, engaging your existing customer base by creating customer lists.

The launch of Search and Shopping will also be a great way for advertisers to test the waters with this channel.

Pinterest has an analytics platform, so it will be easy to track impressions, clicks and engagement actions up to conversions.