Pinterest recently announced the ability to target ads based on information brands already have about their customers. Now, more than ever, targeting on Pinterest is critical to every marketer's success. Here's what you need to know about promoting Pins with these new options.
In their announcement, Pinterest revealed three specific ways to target a group of people based on:
- Visitor retargeting - Individuals who have previously visited your site.
- Customer targeting - A custom client list which you upload.
- Lookalike targeting - An audience that's similar in profile (interests, demographics) to your current list.
To create one of these audiences, go to the Pinterest Ads Manager and select Audiences.
Visitor Retargeting
Although many are already familiar with the term "remarketing", Pinterest has opted to call their option "retargeting", however, it's just a matter of semantics. Retargeting is aimed at marketing your brand to those users that have already visited your site.
Potentially the most powerful of all three targeting options, visitor retargeting requires the most effort to get off the ground and running because you need to first set up conversion tracking before you can retarget visitors. Fortunately, Pinterest has an excellent guide (PDF) you can consult.
However, there are some strategic decisions to make regarding what you want to track. You can track page visits, signups, checkouts and other conversions. Plus you can see what kind of actions were performed, such as clicks, engagements, and views.
When setting up your tag in Pinterest, you'll be provided with a snippet of HTML code to paste into the page or template. Typically this goes just before the closing <body> tag. Remember to check and verify the tag to ensure it's operating correctly. Technically this is not difficult to do, but if you're not comfortable with HTML, you could mess things up.
Don't forget that if you decide to utilize Pinterest's conversion tracking, you need to also update your site to provide legal notice about using 3rd parties to collect data.
Once conversion tracking is established, you can create a visitor audience. Just name it, fill in the description, pick a conversion tag and set the retention days. Now you can use this audience for any Pin promotion you choose.
For example, let's say you've set up conversion tracking for people that have visited your site. Use the conversion tag when you create a visitor audience. Now you can use that audience with any Pin that you want to promote to Pinterest users that have been on your site.
Customer Targeting
This targeting option requires you to upload a .CSV file of customer emails or mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) when defining your audience. There are two distinctly different ways in which you can use this list.
Pinterest can compare that list to its users and include them in your targeting. You may have a list of high-value customers that you want to reach with a particular message.
Alternatively, Pinterest can exclude users in that list from the audience. This is ideal for new client acquisition where you don't want to spend your budget promoting to existing customers.
Lookalike Targeting
With this method of targeting, Pinterest creates a similar audience based on one of your existing audiences, plus what it knows about Pinners and their behavior. You'll need to specify what country from which to draw upon when creating this new audience.
Be aware that this is currently limited to Canada, UK, and U.S, so if you're looking to build an audience in Australia, for instance, this is not the way to go.
Three Important Audience Features
You also need to keep in mind the three following aspects concerning audiences.
First, audiences are independent of promotions. That means they can be used with any Pin that you promote.
Second, each audience needs 100 Pinterest users to be active. So if you upload an email list of 100 emails, but only 90 use Pinterest, you'll be short ten audience members.
Third, targeting isn't restricted to audiences. In fact, you can target ads based on audience, interests, keywords or any combination of all three.
Targeting is a powerful way to get better ROI from your Pinterest marketing efforts. With their new targeting tools, Pinterest ads are becoming even more useful. Depending on the method used, marketers have seen up to three times the increase in clickthrough rates.