With hundreds of millions global monthly users, Pinterest is an incredible tool for brands wanting to reach wide audiences. Advertising on Pinterest gives your brand access to millions of users spanning various age groups, creating unique opportunities to cultivate brand awareness.
Why Pinterest Ads?
Pinterest sits at a unique crossroads between social media and search engines. Unlike platforms where users scroll passively through content, Pinterest users are actively searching for inspiration, planning projects, coming up with ideas, and organising their next purchase.
Since users are actively searching as opposed to passively browsing, they’re often already in a planning mindset – making them a high-intent audience that’s more likely to engage with relevant ads. With thousands of images across every niche, there’s an opportunity to reach the right audience at the right time, regardless of what your product or service is.
Benefits of Using Pinterest Ads
On most social media platforms, ads interrupt the user experience. On Pinterest they are integrated into the feed.
Because people use Pinterest with intent, it is easier for brands to reach customers throughout the entire consumer journey – from early inspiration all the way to purchase.
Types of Pinterest Ads
Pinterest offers a wide range of ad formats to suit different goals and creative assets, including some formats exclusive to the platform:
- Collection Ads – A mix of images and videos in one ad unit, designed to help users explore from your shop or brand.
- Carousel Ads – Multiple images in a single ad, ideal for highlighting product range, or, telling a story in chapters.
- Idea Ads – Immersive multimedia ads that show ideas in action and encourage users to take steps.
- Image Ads – A single image representing your brand or product, effective for awareness.
- Premiere Spotlight Ads – Pinterest’s most prominent video placement, appearing at the top of the app for maximum visibility.
- Quiz Ads – An interactive format exclusive to Pinterest, letting users engage with your brand through a personalised quiz experience.
- Showcase Ads – Highlight multiple products or themes in one interactive format.
- Video Ads – Tell a tory and showcase products in action.
How Pinterest Ads Work
Pinterest Ads operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) auction model. For awareness campaigns, you can bid by impression or by video view, giving you flexibility depending on your goals.
The platform also offers built-in targeting, budgeting controls, and an analytics tool – though you can choose to work with a third-party partner if preferred.
How to Set Up Pinterest Ads
When setting up a campaign on Pinterest you can choose from three goals:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
Setup options, ad formats, and bidding strategies change depending on which goal you pick.
Performance+
Pinterest’s built-in AI tool, Performance+, offers several different ways to manage your ad budget. Rather than manually adjusting spend throughout a campaign, Performance+ automates budget decisions to maximise results.
Here are the three budget options brands can choose from:
Performance+ Lifetime lets you set a budget for a campaign’s full duration, automatically adjusting daily spend to maximise results.
Performance+ Daily works similarly but on a rolling basis, optimising toward the best opportunities each day.
If you prefer more predictability, a Fixed Daily budget spreads your spend evenly across the campaign without any automatic adjustments.
Targeting
Pinterest offers three options for targeting:
New Audiences: Widen your reach with users who haven’t encountered your brand before.
Retargeting: Re-engage with users who have previously interacted with your content or website.
Performance+ Targeting: An automated option that uses visual and search signals to enhance your ad’s performance and connect with a wider audience.
Best Practices for Pinterest Ads
Since majority of Pinterest users browse on mobile devices, it’s important to design your creatives for a vertical format. A vertical 2:3 aspect ratio works best and ensures your ads display cleanly across devices.
Every ad should include your product and a clear call to action that ties back to your campaign goal. Your logo or brand name should be visible on every ad to reinforce brand recognition, without overtaking the creative itself.
Mixing ad formats can also improve overall performance. Shopping ads, Carousels, and Collection each serve different purposes, so matching the format to your objective rather than defaulting to a single type can improve results.
Finally, regularly refreshing your creative and testing different formats gives you clearer data on what resonates with your audience, and keeps your content from going stale.
Do you want help driving conversions through Pinterest? Get in touch with us and we’ll go over everything together.
