There are many different platforms to choose from when it comes to digital advertising and it can feel a little overwhelming for some brands. For companies with minimal experience and even smaller budgets, it can be hard to decide which platform to invest in.
Could Pinterest be right for you?
At a glance, Pinterest is one of those platforms where the potential for success is more obvious than some of the others. If you are a home interest, clothing, or jewellery brand selling products that are visually appealing and inspirational, Pinterest is likely to be a place where your potential customers could be.
If it is a social platform that you use organically for your business and get a decent return from, in terms of engagement and traffic, then it could certainly be one to test advertising on. Also, if you are a brand with beautiful products to sell and have high quality imagery, then it is certainly something that you should be investing time into, even if it is just organically.
What do Pinterest users look like?
77% of Pinterest users are female and 38% of 50-64 years olds in the US use Pinterest:
However, women aged 25-34 represent 29.1% of Pinterest’s ad audience:
31% of people in the US with a household income over USD $100K are on Pinterest.
So, in short, if your aesthetic products are perfect for affluent women you should be investing, at least time, in Pinterest.
The number of active users had been increasing steadily for Pinterest since 2016:
However Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs) decreased 5% year over year to 433 million as reported in Q2 2022. But dispute users dropping YoY, Q2 revenue grew 9% year over year to $666 million.
How Pinterest Ads works
Setting up campaigns is very simple. You simply choose a campaign objective:
- Build Awareness – Grow your reach and build brand or product awareness:
- Brand awareness
- Video views
- Drive Consideration – Get more traffic to content on or off Pinterest:
- Consideration (aka Traffic)
- Conversions – Drive actions like online sales, signups and subscriptions:
- Conversions
- Catalogue Sales
Set a daily / lifetime spend limit.
Build an ad group and set your target audience, choosing to either reconnect audiences (remarketing) or find new customers:
Then you have to select audience lists and/or keywords & interests as well as demographics and ad placements:
Then select pins from your account to be the ads for your campaigns. It is recommended not to choose more than 4 pins per ad group.
Creative best practices
- Standard Pins:
- Vertical images are recommended (2:3 ie. 1000×1500 pixels)
- Make sure the brand is prominently displayed
- Have a logo on every pin but in a subtle manner
- Use text overlay to help your pin stand out
- Use a good landing page for your ad
- Write compelling Pin copy (up to 100 characters for your title and up to 500 characters for your description)
- Video Pins:
- Hook the user in in the first few seconds
- Video ads should only be around 6-15 seconds long
- Don’t rely on audio – people may be seeing your video with the sound turned off
- Choose a descriptive cover image to show what your video is about in one glance
- Write compelling Pin copy (up to 100 characters for your title and up to 500 characters for your description)
Reporting and Optimisation
When looking at conversion data for Pinterest Ads there are many different conversion windows to look at:
- 30/7/1 days after they click on your ad
- 30/7/1 days after they engage with your ad
- 30/7/1 days after they view your ad
So you can choose the attribution model that you feel is most applicable to your product / sales cycle. Pinterest will advise opting for 30/30/30 as it wants the best chance to report a sale back to its ads but you may not agree.
It’s important to have a long-ish “days after they click on your ad” setting so you can attribute the sale to a click, even if that sale happens a few days later.
“Days after they view your ad” is less important, however, as you don’t know that that sale truly came because of that view. It’s likely that the user saw your ad within their buying journey but how much influence did it have on the final sale? It’s very unlikely that 100% of that revenue can be attributed to that ad view, especially if it happened 30 days ago.
One good thing about Pinterest is that you can easily see which sales are click through conversions and which are view-through, as well as the total, so you can easily get the data that is most important to you.
Interesting links
If you want to learn more about how to use Pinterest Ads they have an Academy here: https://pinterestacademy.exceedlms.com/student/catalog
There are also some more interesting Pinterest Stats for business here. My faves are:
- 82% of people use Pinterest on mobile
- 86.2% of Pinterest users also use Instagram
- 97% of the top searches on Pinterest are unbranded
If you’d like help to set up and manage your Pinterest account, get in touch.