There are now 31 weeks until Christmas, and Pinterest has decided to remind advertisers of the advantages of longer-term content planning and promotion, in order to drive better results in the festive period.
According to Pinterest, planning is a key consideration, and the brands that tap into this behavior stand to deliver the best results in their end-of-year push.
As per Pinterest: “On Pinterest, the dynamic is different: people come here to plan. They search for ideas, save what they like and narrow down what they want to buy, often weeks or months before they are ready to spend.”
As such, Pinterest said that an always-on presence puts brands on shopper shortlists while those lists are still being written. “It also gives you room to A/B test audiences, products and creative so that by the time Q4 arrives, you’re scaling what works, not scrambling to figure it out in the most competitive weeks of the year,” Pinterest said.
In other words, Pinterest said marketers need to launch their expanded Q4 campaigns soon, in order to maximize their in-app opportunities.
“The longer your campaigns run, the better the system gets at matching your products and creative to the right people,” Pinterest said.
Indeed, according to Pinterest:
- Advertisers who run shopping campaigns for six months or more see around 33% higher ROAS than those who run them for fewer than three months.
- Expanding the learning phase of campaigns leads to better results, especially as it relates to data gathered via the platform’s Conversions API.
- Pinterest Performance+ catalog sales campaigns, which are powered by API data, deliver 20% lower cost per action, on average.
There are clear advantages to running longer-term campaigns when it comes to data gathering and subsequent optimization. Pinterest advises marketers to devote around 75% of their overall ad budgets for the platform to always-on initiatives in order to maximize this.
“Peak performance isn’t built in November,” Pinterest said. “If you want Q4 to deliver, start building momentum while your audience is still planning and your costs are still low. By the time peak arrives, the brands in the strongest position are the ones that have been running campaigns all along.”
This is sound, logical advice, though that does also mean longer-term planning, and likely increased spending, to maximize data flows for the period.
But with Pinterest now up to 631 million monthly active users, with most of those users coming to the app in a planning mindset, this could be a key approach to boost Pin marketing performance.
