What are Pinterest Ads and should I be running them?

When looking to run paid social, a lot of us would consider Facebook (& Instagram) as frontrunner for this space. While Facebook is indeed the most widespread of social media, it’s not the only site worth considering serving ads on.

Pinterest, often misconceived as merely a way to kill time at the weekend, has more marketing potential than you might imagine. There’s more to this social network than simply sharing posts for friends and followers to enjoy or killing time when there’s nothing good to watch on the telly.

Pinterest is a place for over 400 million users to search for inspiration, new ideas and products to save to their boards, ready for coming back to when they’re ready to make their purchase. Users are actively looking to discover new brands and products which makes it an ideal platform for introducing your brand to potential customers before competitors get the chance to reach them on other platforms.

87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest and 93% of active pinners said they use it to plan for purchases.

Pinterest offers a range of campaign goals where you can choose to focus on building awareness, influencing consideration, or driving conversions. This allows the creation of multi-funnel strategies to attract the most people to your brand.

Demographics available include age, gender, location, language, and device.

In addition to demographics, you can target a large range of interests, such as room decor, drawing, skin care etc. These are defined by what’s in the user’s home feeds and what they are actively searching for.

The audience insights feature contains breakdowns by demographic and interest of
your audiences as well as the combination of all Pinterest users for comparison. This is a great place to learn more about your audience itself and discover any interests you might be missing out on.

Another option is to input a list of relevant keywords to target within searches – this will determine which search results and related Pins your ads can appear in. Keywords can be used as Exact, Phrase, or Broad match types and can also include negative keywords to exclude.

The final form of targeting is by using audience lists created in the platform to target users who’ve engaged with your ads, your website, or are previous customers. These types of lists are particularly useful for retargeting or remarketing users at lower stages within the funnel. They can be created from a website tag, API, MMP, or they can be manually uploaded.

Audience lists can be used to create ‘Actalikes’ (Pinterest’s version of Facebook lookalikes) to find new users with interests and behaviors similar to your existing customers to expand your reach.

When fully utilised, a combination of these targeting options can ensure ads are being shown to the right users at the right time, allowing the ads to move away from being the nuisance we put up with on other social media channels and instead allowing the ads to integrate into the organic results. People on Pinterest are eager for new ideas, which means ads are a welcomed addition to feeds, not an interruption to them.

80% of weekly Pinners have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest

While the site has a large assortment of users covering a wide breadth of interests and demographics, some are more prevalent than others:

• 31% of Millennials in the UK with a household income of over £100K are on Pinterest
• 45% of people in the US with a household income over $100K are on Pinterest
• Gen Z users are up 40% year-on-year
• Women currently make up over 60% of all users.
• 35% US Millennial Pinners are up 35% year-on-year

So if you want to reach out to younger women with deep pockets, why not try reaching them on Pinterest?