Earlier this month, Pinterest opened up some new advertising tools to its self-serve ads platform, making them available to small and mid-sized businesses.
These tools are a game changer for marketing on the platform, enabling brands to target users that are much more likely to convert and become customers. In fact, brands like Bank of America and Zola have already seen amazing results from their Promoted Pin campaigns.
Let's explore Pinterest's new ad platform and determine how it can help businesses reach their marketing goals..
Step 1: Choose Your Campaign Goal
This might seem like an obvious first step, but selecting the wrong optimization could lead to mixed results.
Brands have two main options when it comes to choosing campaign goals: boosting engagement or driving website traffic. Those looking to build brand awareness and influence purchase intent should use the boost engagement option. Those with any form of ecommerce should look to drive conversions from Pinterest, and thus select the drive traffic option.
Need to see who is converting from Pinterest? Make sure you have the conversion tracking pixel on your website. Tracking conversions is an essential step to understanding your ROI from social media.
Step 2: Pick a Pin
This might be the most important step of all. Good content drives results - it's really as simple as that. Longer pins with beautiful and vibrant imagery tend to perform very well on the platform. Grab the users' attention with strong creative, or be passed by with the swipe of a finger.
Step 3: Add More Details
Here's where you fill in the campaign name, destination URL and various targeting options like location, language and gender.
Before this, Pinterest's targeting options were archaic, restricting keyword usage to ad targeting only. However, the new interest feature opens up more possibilities for your content to be seen in the main feeds by users that tend to favor particular topics on the channel.
There are 29 main interest buckets, each with its own bucket of sub-interests, with a total of 376 possible combinations. We've found our sweet spot to be around 10 combinations total. Utilizing the new interest targeting enabled us to increase impressions by 58% on one of our client's campaigns.
Step 4: Report, Analyze and Test
This step is unlisted on the backend of the ads manager, but it's crucial in understanding overall performance.
Although the Pinterest ad platform is leaps and bounds behind Facebook, new features, advertising updates and the overall simple user interface make it a great secondary paid channel. If you're creating content and placing it on the channel, you should be promoting that content.
In fact, a Pinterest brand lift study compared pinners who've seen Promoted Pins to pinners who haven't. According to that study, "people who saw [Promoted Pins] had 40% greater awareness of new products and 50% higher purchase intent".
Main image via d8nn/Shutterstock