What is Pinterest and its Ads?
Pinterest is a combination of a search engine and social media designed to help their users discover, save, and share new ideas. Pinterest ads are a way for brands and businesses to promote their offerings on the platform.
Pinterest Ads are also called Promoted Pins. Pinterest shows Promoted Pins based on their users’ interests, past activity, and actions on websites as part of retargeting ads.
The combination of a search engine and social media makes Pinterest a powerful marketing tool that understands their audience, for example, curating taste, or seeing trends before they happen.
Key Pinterest metrics: 300m users every month, 98% of users have tried something new they found on Pinterest, 84% of users conduct their shopping research on the platform and 77% have found a new brand or product.
Depending on the type of business, advertising on Pinterest can offer many benefits to grow online. Even companies who think Pinterest demography might not be suited for them may find out that under the large user base that Pinterest reaches, you can find a profitable target audience to maximize your profits online.
Pinterest advertising is an effective method to include in your digital marketing strategy.
As a social media platform, Pinterest is a unique option for companies to use in their social media marketing. Pinterest also functions as an alternative search engine, where a business can utilize optimized content to promote themselves further and gain more traffic, sales, and brand awareness.
Understanding how Pinterest works is essential when figuring out a proper strategy to use it for your business. We will go through the benefits of Pinterest, and its ads for your business and why considering Pinterest into your marketing strategy is crucial.
Pinterest Ads Benefits
- Gain Brand Awareness
- Increase Your Reach, Traffic, and Sales
- Pinterest Search
- Pinterest Benefits to Content Marketing
- Pinterest Ads Cost
- Pinterest Ads Targeting
- Pinterest Analytics
- Pinterest Ads Strategy For Marketing
Gain Brand Awareness
Pinterest ads are an efficient way to gain brand awareness and recognition online. When compared to other social media platforms, Pinterest is the most suitable for branded content as users are more acceptable for it, nor the content itself is invasive for the experience.
Pinterest is a discovery tool, and users tend to look for new ideas, and brands can use it to their benefit. More and more users see brands on Pinterest the first time, especially with promoted pins.
Utilizing the platform in your marketing strategy increases the number of touch-points your target audience can engage with you online. To build brand recognition is all about being more seen and available than ever before.
Brands on Pinterest can benefit from three different metrics to measure their success on the platform: Increased awareness, boost favorability, and brand perceptions.
Introducing new ideas and topics with your brand to users who are researching and engaged with these topics and ideas, is a benefit of Pinterest ads, that in other platforms is hard to replicate.
Every brand and business can benefit from the use of Pinterest ads in their online marketing strategy, but its key to discovering your perfect audience for best performance.
Increase Your Reach, Traffic, and Sales
Utilizing high-quality images within Pinterest search can bring more traffic to your websites and landing pages while increasing your brand awareness, traffic, and sales.
A benefit of Pinterest is it can bring more online traffic to your business, whether the traffic is paid or gained organically on the platform.
83% of weekly pinners have purchased from a brand seen on Pinterest, making the platform a social destination for users with a high purchase-intent to your website. The opportunity to target users of higher conversion rates for businesses is vast.
As users on Pinterest are more open to new brands, using Pinterest in your marketing strategy, even for smaller brands can bring much-needed awareness and sales.
Pinterest ads can expedite your strategy for the platform successfully. Using ads to promote your content further is crucial to gain more traffic and brand awareness and helps your content become more viral on the platform.
Using Pinterest as a marketing strategy offers a long-term generator of online traffic, reach, and visibility for businesses of all kinds.
For companies competing for online visibility, not using Pinterest may hinder your business’s competitiveness.
Pinterest Search
Content shared through Pinterest can be found again and again through keywords, interests, and boards, increasing its potential as a long-term traffic generator to your business.
By pinning, Pinterest users save content they like for later use, and this alone makes Pinterest a viable method for long-term visibility. As more as your posts get pinned, and users remind themselves when needed, it’s easier to find your business again.
Pinterest search engine functions as a discovery tool, and Pinterest serves its users with content they like. Keyword optimization for content on Pinterest is a crucial step for gaining the long-term benefits of Pinterest marketing.
Users on Pinterest can find and view pins by:
- Visiting your Pinterest profile
- Searching through relevant keywords
- Find pins within categories
- On home feeds, where Pinterest serves users with relevant pins and promoted pins to cater to their interests.
Content in Pinterest is more evergreen than other social media and offers long-term benefits of visibility to your business. Content ranks slower on the platform, but achieving high-rank positions in Pinterest Search is a benefit for businesses.
Like a well-optimized search engine optimized blog post receives traffic long-term though Google Search, an optimized pin can gather clicks, impressions, and conversions over time.
Pinterest itself is a powerful image-based search engine for its users and utilizes high-quality search optimized images. Compared to Google Images, for example, Pinterest is a social media platform that allows the images to spread wider to users based on their interests.
Pinterest Benefits To Content Marketing
Pinterest ads are an excellent add-on to any content marketing strategy as it offers a visual platform to post your content, expanding and giving you more options for your content distribution strategy.
Using Pinterest in your content strategy, you can modify your content from other platforms to fit the Pinterest standards easily to connect with your audience there too. Creating a cross-platform social media strategy is an effective method to increase your reach online.
For example, you launch video ads through Facebook and Youtube, and in most cases, you can use the same videos in Pinterest ads or by modifying it a little.
Creating engaging Pins to reach your audience and increase your target audiences makes Pinterest an excellent option for content marketing. Create Pins that showcase your products, services, and ideas.
As an Image-based platform, the most crucial part of Pinterest is to have clear, high-quality, and engaging images. You want to use images that will spark interest and make your audience engage with it whether to go to your website, saving the pin for later, or sharing with friends.
The benefit of Pinterest is you can share different types of images to elevate your brand through the network.
By learning what types of pins to post to your target audience, you will increase your reach and results of any Pinterest goal you might want. Replicating successful pins over and over again will make the platform into a traffic-generating channel for your business.
Pinterest Image optimization
Image optimization is crucial to gain most out of Pinterest ads and organic pins. Make sure images are high-quality, non-blurry, and have a clear purpose.
Images should be in the right aspect ratio 2:3 as Pinterest tends to scale images depending on where the users see the pins.
For best results for pins in Pinterest:
- Use unique and eye-catching images
- Display your brand in the best way possible
- Give context around the image
- Include your logo
- Add text that is relevant to the pin itself
- Create value
- Include call-to-actions
Pinterest Ads Cost
A business profile on Pinterest is free to create, and posting Pins to the platform is also free. To calculate the cost of organic Pinterest reach, you will need to figure out how much producing the content, and the management will cost you.
To expand your results of Pinterest marketing, you will have to advertise on the platform.
Pinterest ads are paid either by per click (CPC) or CPM (Cost-Per-Mille); you can decide how much you want to bid on a click or per thousand impressions. Alternatively, you can let Pinterest do the bidding for you automatically.
Both methods have their pros and cons. For example, a too low bid might impact on your possible reach and results. To ensure your ad’s visibility, toggle automatic bidding, and optimize with gathered data. The problem in automatic biddings is the loss of control, not being able to control every aspect might not be the best solution.
All-in-all Pinterest ads are a cost-effective method of online marketing that can help you reach your online goals of sales or traffic faster.
Pinterest Ads Targeting
Targeting in Pinterest ads boils down to five main methods: demography, interests, keywords, actalike audiences, and retargeting.
Pinterest ads allow you to target and define your audience by different demographics such as gender, language, devices, and location.
Every promoted pin supports up to 150 relevant keywords, but 25 keywords come recommended for achieving the best results, as being relevant to the topic is always crucial. Choosing the right mix of relevant keywords that are specific and more general ones will bring the most visibility to your ads. Compared to Google Ads and other search engine platforms, selecting keywords isn’t that strict and allows for using keywords more broadly.
Pinterest supports negative keywords, which helps with targeting keywords that matter most.
As Pinterest strives for creating an engaging home feed for its users, ads can target users by their interests. Users might then see promoted pins if the ads match their interests (things they’ve followed, liked, or saved)
Within Pinterest ads targeting, you can choose from over 5000 interests that might be relevant to your ads. The large selection of interests based on user-behavior enables businesses to create highly targeted campaigns.
The testing opportunities that the list of interests has for advertisers are also massive, finding the right combination of interests might be overwhelming at first yet rewarding if you find a successful combination.
The key is always to test new targeting options to better your campaign performance.
Audience-Based Targeting And Retargeting With Pinterest Adsa
Utilizing audience-based targeting options in Pinterest Ads enables you to target specific people that engaged with your website, pins, are on a customer list, or similar people to an existing audience list.
To create an audience, you will need at least 100 people that are also Pinterest users.
To retarget people who visited your website, you need to enable the Pinterest tag across your website. The benefit of retargeting website visitors is that the website visitors are more likely to engage with your ads again. Powerful retargeting ads that retarget specific actions from your website increase your results from ads and lowers the costs.
If you have a customer list available in your company, you can use those lists to create effective audiences to target with your ads. The benefit of customer-based audiences is you could create a list of the highest value customers and create unique campaigns for them.
Pinterest ads offer Actalike audiences, similar to lookalike audiences on Facebook and LinkedIn, meaning you can create a similar audience based upon gathered data. For example, creating sales funnel based actalike audiences can boost your results from Pinterest ads and overall lower cost per results.
With an Actalike audience, you will reach similar audiences you have already. Actalike audiences help you scale your advertising. Utilizing Actalike audiences in Pinterest ads is an effective strategy to boost its results for your business.
Pinterest Analytics
Using Pinterest Analytics to discover what your audience loves helps you create better and more engaging content that converts. Understanding the needs of your audience is a sure way to improve your online marketing results.
You can also use Pinterest Trends to determine what’s trending at any given time.
Pin stats tell businesses quickly how engaging every pin is.
With Pinterest Analytics, you can see the following metrics to refine your content and its reach:
- Impressions
- Engagements
- Closeups
- Link Clicks
- Engagement Rate
- Link Click Rate
- Save Rate
- Total Audience
- Engaged Audience
- Monthly Total Audience
- Monthly Engaged Audience
Utilizing these metrics allows the creation of better content and optimization of your campaigns for better results of advertising and the organic reach of your pins.
Connecting your websites and landing pages with the Pinterest tag is crucial because it allows you to track conversion from Pinterest.
Pinterest Analytics Audience Insights
Audience insights is a useful tool to reveal your potential and existing audience’s interests. The interests are made combining search and saved pins data.
Audience insights reveal your audience’s interests, demographics, and their affinities. You can use audience insights data to improve your ad campaign targeting.
Using the available data of your audiences is useful for other online marketing platforms as well. Understanding what interests your audience the most, helps you produce content that is more profitable and more engaging to your specific audience.
Measurement of Pinterest Ads Results
You can measure awareness, sales, traffic, and other marketing objectives of Pinterest Ads. Measuring your results in real-time, you will know precisely how well your campaigns are doing.
Measuring and optimizing your Pinterest ad results can be done with the Pinterest Ad manager, which gives you the most crucial metrics to help you optimize your performance.
Pinterest ad manager quickly shows you key metrics on any given time frame:
- How much you have spent
- How many clicks the ads have received
- How many results the ads received
- How many impressions every ad received
- CPM Cost – The average cost of 1 000 impressions
- CTR – Total Link clicks divided by total impressions
Diverting your ad budget to your winning campaigns and ads is essential from early on, so you won’t be spending on ads that aren’t bringing the wanted results for your business.
For example, you’ve ads in your campaign that have a lower average CTR than your best ones. You should improve results by ending worst-performing ads.
When measuring ad performance, the key is to have clearly defined business goals: If you want maximum reach, clicks or sales, every goal will need a different approach when it comes to what to optimize in your Pinterest ads.
Finding successful ad combinations will take time, and only by measuring and optimizing performance, you can find the right combinations to take your Pinterest ads for the next level. Optimization lowers the cost of advertising and increases its results.
For ensuring the success of your ad campaigns, the need to use third-party web analytics tools are necessary. Tools such as Google Analytics on your website will tell you how the increased traffic is engaging on your website.
Optimizing the full funnel and experience of the visitors and customers, and knowing how they behave, will be the key factor in making a Pinterest ads campaign successful.
Pinterest Ads Strategy For Marketing
Your Pinterest ads journey starts with picking the right objective for your campaign. Choose one of five goals that match what you want to achieve with the ads the most.
Pinterest ads revolve around five main campaign objectives:
- Brand awareness
- Video Views
- Traffic
- App Install
- Conversions (Requires Pinterest tag installed on your target website)
Start defining your target audience for your ads. Pick interests that match your audience. You can use audience insight data if enough of it is available to you.
Choose up to 25 keywords that are relevant to your brand and for the ad itself.
Define you’re wanted demographic you want to reach. If you are unsure what is your core target audience, start by at least defining your wanted location, and narrow it down with data.
Careful to narrow your reach too much, as too narrow targeting might not result in optimal results.
Choose the wanted budget, the schedule, and optimization rules.
Choose a high-quality image that is in the right format of 2:3 or a video that is six to fifteen seconds long.
Take time to write a couple of good call-to-actions for testing your ads going further. A right call-to-action can make a massive difference for successful ads. Actionable ads will work the best.
Leverage landing pages, if possible, or send traffic to the most relevant page on your website that your ad is all about. For example, a sales-based campaign benefits the most from a strong landing page and brand awareness campaign from traffic to your homepage if you have optimized it for it.
Launch and watch the results come in. As your Pinterest Ad campaign progresses, remember to evaluate with data from the Pinterest ad manager and optimize for achieving the best results.
Conclusion
Pinterest ads benefits include many ways to grow brands online and to get actionable traffic and in-depth data from their audiences.
The users of Pinterest are a unique opportunity for companies to reach as they are more acceptable for new brands, and they are looking for new ideas. Being a brand that offers new ideas for its target audience and giving them what they are looking for will grow significantly with Pinterest.
Whether growing with paid ads or organically, Pinterest offers a platform for businesses to benefit from in their marketing strategy.