Should You Advertise on Pinterest?

Social Advertising
Digital Strategy
Social Media Content
Social Media Insights
Social Media Strategy

Are you a Pinner? If so, you’ve probably spent the odd evening (or more) going down the rabbit hole that Pinterest can become when exploring a seemingly infinite number of inspiring pins and boards.

If you’re less familiar with this platform, let us give you a quick overview. Pinterest has become a cosy corner of the internet where millions of people all over the world (and around 10 million monthly users in the UK according to Pinterest’s own data) can find (actionable) inspiration for their dreams, passions, and hobbies.

It’s a hybrid between a social media platform (less about sharing, more about self-service, making it more of a ‘personal’ media network), and a search engine. Whilst the core of its search functionality relies on text-based queries, the search results are visual, making it more of a Visual Search solution.

How does Pinterest work?

Whether it’s planning a wedding, a Halloween party or your next trip, you can find all the inspiration you need across Pinterest, as well as discovering new interests and exciting products you might want to try. 

You can save pins which are images or videos with a bit of text and a destination URL, as well as sort them in different boards, as well as uploading brand new pins to link to your website.

You can follow other pinners who inspire you, as well as gain followers, and when it comes to Organic exposure, you’re never limited to showing the content you post just to your followers. Instead, Pinterest’s powerful algorithm can grow the exposure of your pins organically by showing them to users who might be interested in your content, all over the platform, whether that’s in the home feed, within the Pinterest Search, or under related pins.

Pinterest also has a popular mobile app, with over 80% of its users accessing the platform on mobile. This is where users can discover similar products from various brands by using the ‘close-up’ feature, or even taking photos of products using their smartphone and then Pinterest’s algorithm can bring up related product pins to browse. Imagine you’ve seen a sofa you love somewhere - you can just take a photo of it and Pinterest will bring up similar matches that you can then go on and buy.

As a consumer, Pinterest is a great place for finding new inspiration and fulfilling certain desires. As a brand, the platform can put your products and services in front of a highly relevant audience that is open-minded and actively looking for them. 

But how do you take the power of Pinterest to the next level as an advertiser?

What are Pinterest ads?

When it comes to Paid Social there are plenty of solutions to consider, with Facebook and Instagram advertising leading the way. Fewer businesses tend to consider Pinterest advertising for their social media strategy, but we think this channel can make a clever addition in most cases.

The platform has invested in developing a wide range of advertising solutions ranging from sponsored pins, carousel ads, video ads, app install pins to shoppable pins which are now also available in the UK and other English-speaking markets.

Its targeting options are also nothing short of impressive, with advertisers being able to harness a wealth of data from the platform and segment their audiences using:

  • Interest
  • Keywords
  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Device
  • Language and more

Top tip - Make sure to implement your Pinterest tag on the website to be able to start creating custom audiences for retargeting and actalike ones which you can model on the custom ones. These can be particularly effective if you want to run Conversion-based campaigns, and you will be able to run more types of campaigns and better optimise them.

You can also create a product feed from your ecommerce website and integrate it with your Pinterest account to generate product pins, which can then be used to run shoppable pin ads or catalog ads, in English-speaking markets.

In terms of the ad spend you should set aside for Pinterest, this can vary depending on your objectives and the budget you have available, but there is no minimum spend requirements and you can start low, with just £5-£10/day and scale the account up gradually. Overall, you can expect to spend less than you would on other Paid Social channels such as Facebook due to an overall lower volume of audience available.

Measuring results

Pinterest’s Ads Manager provides a comprehensive overview for the performance of all the campaigns you are running, reporting on a wide range of metrics. Having the Pinterest tag implemented before you start running ads is important to make sure you can access all this data and report on it correctly.

You should also bear in mind that due to the way users interact with the platform, and the fact that it’s more powerful during the Discovery phase and for reaching consumers who are at the top-of-the-funnel, the traditional last-click attribution model is not the most effective one when measuring the success of your Pinterest campaigns.

Instead, you should look at a wider attribution window, with Pinterest having a recommended 30/30/1 attribution window which stands for measuring conversions that happened within 30 days for clicks, 30 days for engagements and 1 day for views. 

We also recommend taking into account your CLV (customer lifetime value) when measuring the impact of your Pinterest campaigns and using this channel in combination with other digital marketing tactics.

So, should you advertise on Pinterest?

Hopefully by now you have a better overview of how Pinterest works, the advertising solutions available and whether it’s a good fit for your business. 

If you’re still not 100% convinced, you can also consider the following questions:

  1. Is your business in the fashion, beauty, home, food, and drink or travel sector?
  2. Do you need to expand your acquisition strategy to reach more consumers?
  3. Do you have strong lifestyle imagery that you can use to create engaging content?

If the answer is yes, then Pinterest is definitely the right platform for you to be active on, not just organically, but also for using its advertising capabilities to take performance to the next level.

Need a helping hand getting started with Pinterest? We can help. Get in touch with Williams Commerce today.