Pinterest Ads can be a great way to reach new customers and grow your business. In this blog post, we will discuss everything you need to know to get started with Pinterest Ads. We will cover topics such as campaign objectives, targeting options, and ad formats. By the end of this post, you should have a good understanding of how Pinterest Ads work and how you can use them to reach your target audience.

Pinterest is the 14th largest social media platform, beating out Twitter, Reddit, and Quora making it a contender in the social media space. How many active users do they have? As of the first quarter of 2022 Pinterest has 443 million active users making it an active place to advertise your business. Worth noting is they had a slight decline in 2021 in traffic, but Pinterest is back on the rise in 2022. Worth noting more though is despite the traffic decline, Pinterest revenue actually gained revenue with a 21% growth in 2021.  The growth was mostly seen by retail advertisers.

The concept of Pinterest is a social media network where you can visually share and collect interest using pins.  Pinterest is about inspiration, idea creation, education, and product research. These pins are either added to your own boards or other people’s boards.  Endless hours are spent creating boards that are usually organized by categories.  Who are the users of Pinterest? Pinterest boasts a 76% female user demographics and 72% are between 30 and 64.

If you are trying to reach females in GenZ, this is the platform for you.

Let’s talk about spending, 45% of their users make more than $100,000. When looking at all social media platforms, Pinterest users are 90% more likely to say they are always shopping.

If you are not already intrigued as a marketer you should be. The content creation on Pinterest is similar to some of the already popular content being created on Instagram/Facebook reels and Tiktok. Another interesting stat is that Pinterest users are not searching for brands 97% of the time. That is some incredible stats to really get into a new audience of potential clients.

While we do organic social media our prime type of marketing as an advertising agency is with ads.  We do recommend that you already have a decent amount of pins and boards set.  Especially all of your products if you are a commerce client.  So let’s get to it and talk about how to take advantage of the Pinterest ads.

We always like to start with the audience.  If you don’t have your marketing audience right then nothing else matters with any type of marketing.  There are many items that go into the strategy of your ad platform choices but they are all based on getting to your audience.  We have given some interesting stats above of who is on Pinterest let’s further define how you can target with ads. The targeting options are the ways that you can target your ads to reach the people who are most likely to be interested in what you’re promoting. Pinterest offers a variety of targeting options, including interests, demographics, keywords, actalike, remarketing, and more.

“Audience” is a Pinterest targeting type often called your “warm audience” or remarketing.  In this audience, we can upload your customer list from email marketing or customer list.  We can also do the traditional website visitors and those who have interacted with you before with your pins.  With this type of audience you have;

• Site Vistors
  • These types of audiences are relying upon your having the interest pixel set up. There is a base code plus event codes to set up to track whether someone takes certain actions on your website.  You can filter down to certain sections of your website like other ad platforms.
• Engagement
  • These are those who have engaged with your pins on both organic and paid ads.
• Customer list
  • Just like with other ad platforms, Pinterest will match audiences to existing emails from your email marketing.  There will likely be a reduction in your list because just like other ad platforms there will likely not be a 100% match.

This audience type is similar to what you have seen with similar audiences in Google ads and lookalike audiences in Facebook ads.  This audience type uses your existing data to create audiences that act similar to those audiences.  Your source audience will not be part of your actalike audience. Also similar to Facebook ads, there is a % breakdown of how similar your audience is to your source audience as well a target country.

This audience is also like traditional other ad platforms in that it can target interests that your potential clients might have. There are currently 21 specific interests and hundreds of subcategories.

• Tattoos
• Home Decor
• Food and Drink
• Quotes
• Women’s Fashion
• DIY and Crafts
• Men’s Fashion
• Wedding
• Art
• Design
• Beauty

• Animals
• Architecture
• Education
• Electronics
• Event Planning
• Finance
• Holidays
• Lawn and Harden
• Travel
• Vehicles

Outside of traditional Google and bing search ads, this is unique to social ads.  You can target by the keywords your potential client searches on Pinterest.  Now Facebook ads use this within their targeting under interest.

This type of targeting you can find with almost all ad platforms.  They cover targeting by age, gender, location, or device.

With this type of targeting you can choose whether your ads are placed inside of the home feed, search results, or related pins.

This type of targeting does what it sounds like.  It takes your targeted keywords and interests and expands to an audience outside of this.

In addition to all the targeting above you can also use a data partner of Oracle Data Cloud. Pinterest does manage the cost of these lists and will reduce your bid automatically by at least 15%.

Campaign objectives are the goals that you want to achieve with your Pinterest Ads campaign. There are four main objectives: awareness, video view, consideration, conversion, and catalog sales. Each objective has its own set of ad formats and bidding options. Each objective has a purpose and meaning in building your funnel to marketing.  Just like with Facebook ads, if you are not building a funnel and only relying on top-of-funnel marketing, you will most likely fail.

Awareness

• This is for building a cold audience or those who don’t know you to target later.  You pay by cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for those willing to click through to your website.

Video view

• This type of marketing objective can in a lot of respects also be awareness-type ads.  With this marketing objective the pay-per-view of your video for longer than 2 seconds.

Consideration

• In this type of marketing, you are paying for pin clicks. The user is clicking on your ad in a grid format.  This is not a click to the website.

Conversions

• This is usually the objective everyone wants but might not have the data to pull off in the begging.  With this type of objective, you are bidding to get people to your website and check out, sign up or add to your cart. 
  

Catalog Sales

• This marketing objective helps people discover your product or service while looking for their inspiration.

Ad formats are the different ways that Pinterest Ads can be displayed on the platform. You can see the full ad specs here.

Static Pins

• These feature one image.

Standard videos

• Are regular pins with a video

Max width videos

• Are videos that expand across the entire screen on mobile.

Idea ads

• Is a set of many videos, images, lists, and custom text to promote an “idea”.

Collection ads

• Are three images placed below the main pin

Carousel Ads

• Features several pins pulled together to showcase a story.

Shopping ads

• Are ads that show one product at a time but allow the user to buy directly from the ads.

As with any marketing, there are metrics that can measure effectiveness and success.  Understanding those metrics and where they are at in the funnel from first impression to the actual conversion will lead you to success.  You need to always be looking at and finding where that funnel is broken and take action steps to fix it.  Just like with many ad platforms, many matrics are the same. Below is a sample of metrics, there are many more metrics available!

Spend

• Simple enough how much have we spent on your ads

Impressions

• How many times have the ad been shown to potential clients.  This is the start of the ads funnel.

Reach

• How many actual people are we are reaching, your impressions could be larger because we have people seeing our ad twice or more.

Frequency

• How often are they seeing your ad, they can read to ad fatigue if your ad is being seen too often.  It can also have the opposite effect if they are not seeing it enough.

Pin Clicks

• This is unique to Pinterest ads and it measures how many times a user tapped on a pin that lead them on or off.

Paid engagements

• The total number of engagements with your ads including saves, Pin clicks, outbound clicks, carousel card swipes, secondary creative (collections) clicks, and Idea Pin forward/backward swipes.

View Views

• Amount of views of your videos that are at least 2 seconds with 50% in view of their screen.

Average Video Time

• How long on average are users watching your video.

Saves

• The number of times people saved your pin to their boards.

Outbound Clicks

• There is a distinct difference between this metric and the one above.  With this click, you are leaving Pinterest ads and landing on likely a website or landing page.

Cost Per Results

• This is measuring how much it cost you to get the result you choose with your marketing objective.  This is not always the final result of a conversion or form/sale/phone call.

Goal Value

• If you are an e-commerce website it will tell you the value of the actual sale.

% to Goal

• How close are you to the goals you set.

CTR

• Click-through rate is a percentage of how often your ads are shown and clicked on.  It is a reaction to how good your ad copy and creative are.

Pinterest Ads are a great way to reach new customers and grow your business. Pinterest offers a variety of targeting options and ad formats to choose from, so you can create an ad campaign that best suits your needs. If you’re looking for a top advertising agency in Indianapolis to help you with your Pinterest ads, reach out to chat!

Rather Listen?

Listen to “Ep #39 – What You Need to Know About Pinterest Ads” on Spreaker.