Well, hello again 👋🏼!
This (not so 🙄) short piece of text will give you an introduction to Pinterest Ads and how your business get all set up to activate your first ad. Pinterest differs from other social platforms that we are used to as it puts focus on the future, while other channels often tend to focus on the past and already lived moments. Pinners (a Pinterest-user) are open for ideas and goes in to the platform with an open mindset. They are seeking inspiration and are full of intent to find inspiration –they want a change and try something new wether it’s in their home, clothes or lifestyle. So, it’s definitely in their home feed you as a business want your ads to appear!
Why Pinterest?
Let’s start by having a quick look at some numbers, since I know that’s what gets some of you going 😉. Pinterest was launched in January 2010 and was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors. According to Statista, the platform hade 367 million active users every month in the first quarter of 2020 and there’s over 200 billion Pins saved (!).
75% of all pins on Pinterest comes from brands which includes both organic and paid pins. Different from other social platforms – 50% of pinners don’t realise they see ads. Imagine showing your ads to people without them realising it’s an ad 🤪!
As mentioned above, Pinterest is all about inspiration and 90% of pinners comes to Pinterest for inspiration and 97% of all searches are unbranded- people mainly use the platform for inspiration (all the Pinterest stats is taken from Pinterest itself). According to Pinterest these are the top three categories that Pinners are searching inspiration to:
1. Seasonal times: Easter, Christmas tree inspiration, summer dining table
2. Daily decisions: outfits, recipes, table settings, home decor
3. Life moments: travel destinations and travel guides, weddings, starting a family
Pinterest ads was first launched in 2014 and are currently available to businesses in 28 countries over the world.
How to get started
The first thing you need is of course a Pinterest business account. There are three ways to get set up:
1️⃣ If you’re brand new to Pinterest, go to this link to create a standalone business account from scratch (for free).
2️⃣ If your business already have a private account you can just convert it to a business account (also free of charge), which will give you access to the Business Hub, analytics and Ads Manager.
3️⃣ Or, you can simply add a business profile to an existing personal account by selecting the three dots in the top right corner and select ”Add a free business profile”, and then just follow the prompts.
Going forward, head over to settings and complete your profile with required (and non-required) information 💡. Then go on by confirming your website, your Etsy-page and other social accounts in order to strengthen your Pinterest profile. Add the Pinterest-widget to your website to allow easy engagement with your Pinterest content.
When your profile is all set up you have access to Ads manager and you are basically ready to launch your first campaign, yay! 🥳 Consider Ads manager as your campaign HQ, this is where it all happens (but my guess you aren’t brand new to performance marketing - so you get the drill).
What about campaign objective?
The different campaign objectives that are available basically represents the complete funnel. Starting with brand awareness in the upper funnel moving down through prospecting, retargeting, shopping ads and retention in the lower funnel. The campaign objective you choose should reflect your business goals, and what differs between objectives is basically how you bid in the auction and what ad formats that are available to promote. We’ll give you a short brief of each and every objective so you get the hang of it!
Brand Awareness 👀
Branding campaigns aims to help people discover your brand, your products or other services that you offer. You bid by setting a maximum CPM (cost per thousand impression) bid, or the maximum you are willing to pay for 1000 impressions your ad serves. We recommend to start with one interest based ad group and one keyword ad group.
Video view 📹
Similar to other social platforms video is everything. So it’s makes sense that video view is a standalone campaign objective. It optimizes the quality of views, average watch times and completion rates to people most likely to view your video. How to bid? Set the maximum you’re willing to pay per view (CPV) when people view your video for 2 seconds or more. Approximately 15 second videos are ideal.
Traffic 🚙
This objective isn’t more complicated than this: drives the number of visitis to your website. The bidding works as easy as you set your maximum CPC (cost per click). It’s a good idea to structure your traffic campaign similar to a branding campaign, starting with one interest based ad group and one keyword based.
App install 📲
Simply optimize for visitis to your app’s download page or installs of your app. For this objective you set a CPM bid which will be dynamically adjusted to optimize for people most likely to install your app and to reach your target CPI (cost per install).
Conversions 🛒
Drive pinners to take actions like checkout (purchase), sign up or add to cart on your website. Set your budget and target average cost per action (tCPA) to bid. This objective requires that you’ve implemented a Pinterest tag, follow this link to learn more about the tag and how to install it. However, Pinterest recommend to always start off with a traffic campaign before launching a conversion campaign in order to generate sufficient conversion data (aim for min. 50 Pinterest attributed conversions per week).
Shopping Catalogs 🛍
Helps people discover your products or services while searching Pinterest for inspiration. You set a maximum CPC or an oCPM bud (the optimised maximum you’re willing to pay for every 1000 impressions your Promoted Pins serves). Side note; when you set an oCPM, you’ll also set your target CPA.
There are of course tons of guidelines, tips and best practices in how to set up an optimal campaign structure, what campaign objective to start with, targeting, audiences etc. etc. And we’ll get you through this step by step in the following blog posts but we’ll keep it short and simple (yeah right🤞🏼) in this first introduction to Pinterest ads.
Creatives 🎨
To finish of this post we’ll want to give you a few tips for creating your Pinterest creatives. So here we go!
You can choose between standard ads (pictures), video ads or carousel ads:
Standard ads
- The golden ratio for standard ads is 2:3
- File type: PNG and JPEG
- Max file size: 32 MB
- Description copy up to 500 characters but prioritise first 1-2 sentences which are most likely to show up in feed
Video ads
- Must be shorter than 1:2 aspect ratio and taller than 1:91:1
- File type: .mp4 or .mov or .m4v
- Max file size: under 2GB
- Video length: minimum 4 sec, maximum 15 min (6-15 seconds are recommended)
Carousel Ads
- Minimum 2, maximum 5 images in a carousel
- File type: PNG and JPEG only
- Max file size: 32 MB per image
- Aspect ratio: all images must have the same aspect ratio, you can choose between aspect ratio 1:1 or 2:3.
And here are some more creative tips for your ads:
- include your logo in images, carousels an videos
- put your product in context, make it inspirational
- use a text overlay with a clear CTA
- different from other social advertising platform Pinterest doesn’t punish you for having to much text in your creatives, hence- keep it simple and tasty
OK, I think we’ll have to call it a day! We hope you found this blog post valuable and inspiring. If you feel like you want to learn more it’s a good idea to head over to Pinterest Academy to sign up for their free courses. And when you’re ready to start advertising and want a strategic (or operational) partner, don’t hesitate to reach out to hello@zalster.com, we are happy to partner up! 🤝