20 May Pinterest Shopping Intent – What the IPO Means for this Network
Pinterest is the top social network for finding and shopping for products among US users.* So it’s no surprise that after their IPO announcement, Pinterest is expanding their lower funnel ad offerings to support shopping intent. Shortly before the announcement in March, the visual search platform rolled out their new shopping objective, catalog functionality, and shopping ads, making it easier for you to directly grow online sales from Pinterest advertising. As a refresher, the shopping objective promotes dynamic shopping pins that use a catalog, which pulls information from your website such as product name, price, description, and availability. To learn more about these offerings, check out “3 New Features to Help You Achieve Online Sales on Pinterest” on the Ignite blog.
Pinterest also recently unveiled the website conversion objective, making it easier to drive actions to your website. With this new ad objective, you can optimize for a conversion event such as Add to Cart, select from a variety of attribution windows that look at days after click, engagement, or view (30/30/1, 7/7/1, 7/0/0, 1/1/1, or 1/0/0), and set a target cost for average cost-per-action. This is a big change for Pinterest, as the lower funnel traffic objective previously only allowed advertisers to optimize for clicks. Optimizing for desired conversions will let you reach those qualified users who are more likely to convert. To use this optimization, the Pinterest Tag and events will need to be implemented on your site. Add the base code to every page on your site and event codes on the pages you want to track specific conversions. Having these in place will also allow you to track actions from your media buy and create custom and lookalike audiences of those who visited your website.
Custom audiences are very important when running your lower funnel campaign, as these users are more likely to convert than broad audiences. Check out “Content for the Customer Journey – Phase III: Conversion” on the Ignite blog to learn more about building and using these audiences. Lastly, with this objective, you’ll be able to utilize standard promoted pin, promoted video, and carousel ad units for driving conversions on your site.
Now with the IPO out of the way, we expect to see Pinterest work aggressively at securing ad dollars to increase revenue. It’ll be interesting to see how they will build up their lower funnel ad offerings to support shopping intent on the platform. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for their newest features and share our insights on the best ways to use them.
Looking to develop a paid strategy to increase your sales from Pinterest? We’d love to chat.
*Source: Cowen and Company, “Facebook: US Ad Buyer Survey and Consumer Survey Highlights; Model Update,” Jan 10, 2019
