Why use Pinterest Ads?

Pinterest is an excellent social media tool with over 250 million users ready to consume, it enables discovery of information through images. The unbranded searches through Pinterest are a way to grab a future client’s attention in a subtle way, which leads the pinners to being more open to new ideas and products. 98% of pinners say they’ve tried new things they have found on Pinterest, versus 71% found on other social media platforms. More than half of Pinterest’s users have made a purchase after seeing business content on the site. Compared to non-pinners, they deliver an average of $2 more in profit for every advertising dollar.

Types of Pinterest Ads

We will be going over six different types of pinterest ads. This will help you determine which will better suit your company and what kind of advertising you are trying to mandate through Pinterest.

Promoted Pins

Promoted pins appear in the home feed and in search results just like a regular pin would. Other than being labelled as promoted, they look and behave the same as any normal pin. They’re boosted and targeted to deliver a higher reach. Once a user pins them to boards, shares them or comments them the “promoted” label will go away. This is considered earned media, giving you exposure for free. When the pinner taps or clicks your ad, they’re taken directly to your landing page.

Promoted Carousels

People use Pinterest for its inspiration and unique discovery. That’s exactly why this is such a great option for any business. Especially, when trying to showcase different products or features. They behave the same as regular pins but have the option to use a multi-image ad that can feature different images, titles, descriptions and landing pages for each photo. This is great for reaching out to all different types of pinners to highlight the many facets of your products or brand all within one single pin. REI’s Experience the Outdoors campaign is a good example of how well this ad works. They received a strong engagement of a 32% higher click rate through a Pinterest promoted carousel.

Promoted Video Pins

Promoted Video is just like promoted pins where they appear in the home feed, search results, and the “more like this” section. Videos are ideal to bring awareness to and tell the story of the brand or product. The videos will autoplay as soon as they’re 50% in view, without audio. It is important to create content that is not relying on the audio but the actual imagery, since most people watch videos with the sound off. It’s available in standard width and max width formats which spans out into two columns on mobile devices giving you a higher chance of being sought after over competing pins. Videos are four times more memorable than non-video ads according to a study conducted with Millward Brown for Pinterest. 67% percent of pinners say that videos inspire them to take action. If you are looking to choose traffic, conversions or increase performance goals, videos would be a good place to start.

Promoted App Pins

If you’re promoting an app this is the BEST way to do it. It allows pinners to download the mobile app directly from Pinterest. Just make sure you are including attributes about your app through your promotion. This is a good fit for a Pinterest audience specifically because 80% of their traffic comes from mobile devices. These promoted app pins look and act the same as a promoted pin or promoted video pin, but includes an install button that links directly to a valid iTunes or Google Play app store URL. Pinners are already looking to consume, by looking for inspiration and ways to make their lives easier, so a quick and easy download can turn into a sale for you.

Buyable Pins

Buyable pins are a way to sell your products right off the bat without trying to engage a pinner to go onto your site. These pins allow consumers to find and buy products directly through the photo itself. The best situation would be to have a staged aesthetically pleasing photo including the items you’re trying to promote. The items are then tagged in the photo being promoted with white dots that can be tapped or clicked to link to product information. It will also include a blue button that says “add to bag”. These buyable pins are designed to maximize sales. Modern Citizen, the fashion brand, saw its retail orders increase by 73% after using buyable pins on Pinterest.

Story Pins

This is a new form of advertising for Pinterest. A lot of apps are playing around with stories. Story pins can feature up to twenty pages of images, texts, and links. This story pin will appear on the home feed with a cover image and a title. When tapping a story pin it allows you to see all of the pages. They can also be saved under boards just like a regular pin.

How to Advertise on Pinterest

Now that we have all the ad formats explained, you’re now ready to start advertising on Pinterest. Here are the 13 easy steps to advertise on Pinterest.

Step 1: Get a Business Account

This is probably the easiest switch. You can take your existing Pinterest account to a business account by going to your account settings and clicking convert to business account. You also have the option of creating a whole new Pinterest account and setting it up the same way.

Step 2: Install the Pinterest Tag

The promoted tag will give you access to track the actions people are taking on your website after seeing your Pinterest ads. This includes checkouts, sign ups, and searches. You don’t want to skip over this step before creating your campaign.

Step 3: Choose your Campaign Goal

This will determine what ad formats are available and how you bid in the ad auction. After you choose your goal, head over to ads.pinterest.com.

Here’s the available objectives:

• Grow your website traffic: Earn high-quality leads that you will pay for each click.
• Build brand awareness: Gain exposure with current and prospective clients. You will get charged per 1,000 impressions.
• Downloads for your app: If you pay by install, Pinterest will adjust your bid based on your personal budget. If you pay by the click, your ad is optimized for click traffic.
• Awareness through video views: Promoted video pins are create to get people to take charge and to promote consideration. You will pay per 1,000 impressions.

Step 4: Campaign Budget

Here is where you will input your campaign name and set your daily and lifetime spend limits. There will be more pricing options later on so don’t spend too much time worrying about this section. Make sure to enable this option if you’re creating a carousel ad campaign. This will only work if you’ve selected brand awareness for your campaign objective.

Step 5: Create an Ad Group

Ad groups are for managing multiple goals within a single campaign, while still maintaining lifetime spend caps at your campaign level. You can assign budgets and targets to ad groups. You should have about two to four pins per ad group.

Step 6: Choose Your Target Audience

Based off the product you’re trying to sell, the app you’re trying to promote, or the website you’re trying to generate traffic for, you will need to know your target audience based on gender, location, language, device. If you’re looking to just specifically spread awareness, use a broader targeting strategy to generate a higher click volume.

Step 7: Select Ad Placement

If you have a higher budget limit, go with the all placements default. If not there’s two options, browse or search. Browse placements end up in the home feed and related pins of interest targeting. Search result placements perform better with keyword targeting.

Step 8: Add Interests and Keywords

Using interests and keywords on your ad campaigns will help reach the correct audience as they search for a specific idea on Pinterest. Use keywords related to the ad you’re promoting and use negative keywords to exclude the wrong pinners. For best results it is best to use at least 25 keywords per ad.

There are five different ways you can use keywords to your benefit.

• Broad match: Pins show for your own keywords, it doesn’t matter the order they are in.
• Phrase match: Pins show on search terms that include the same search term phrase in order of the keywords.
• Exact match: Pins show based on the exact keyword. The word order matters.
• Negative phrase match: Your pins will not show on any search that contains the entire keyword phrase in the search term. The word order matters.
• Negative exact match: Your pins will not show on a search that matches the keyword exactly. The word order matters.

Step 9: Set Your Budget and Schedule

This part is important as it cannot be changed once saved. Here is where you can enter your start and end date for your Pinterest ad campaign as well as the lifetime budget or daily spend limit. The lifetime budget is how much you want to spend in total from start to end. The daily budget sets the spending limit for your ad group.

Step 10: Tailor for Optimization and Delivery

Minimum bids must be above $2. Set your maximum bid for your Pinterest ads for your target CPM rate. The total price paid in a CPM deal is calculated by multiplying the CPM rate by the number of CPM units. Example: one million impressions at $10 CPM equals a $10,000 total price.

Step 11: Determine Your Pacing

Standard pacing and accelerated pacing are the two options you will have. Standard pacing is probably the best option if you want your ad to last through your campaign end date because accelerated pacing may drain your budget out. For high impact campaigns or in a crunch, accelerated pacing can be a good option because it will yield fast delivery and results.

Step 12: Pick Your Promoted Pins

Each ad group should include two to four pins. Here is where you will click a pin to add pins to your ad group. You can create new ones or pick pins you’ve added before. They cannot be saved to secret boards or feature third-party videos. They must be saved to your profile and include a destination URL that has not be shortened.

Step 13: Monitor Campaign Performance

To keep track of all the performance from your campaign you can go to the Analytics from the Pinterest Ads Manager dashboard. Here is where you will find an overview of all your campaigns along with the performance details for each. Make sure you are broadening your audience, increasing your budget, and trying different formats to optimize results.

WANT MORE INFO? Book A Call With Us to Learn More About Done For Your Marketing Solutions

CHECK OUT PINTEREST 4 PROFIT