GLOSSARY

Pinterest Advertising

Running advertisement campaigns on Pinterest, an image sharing and social media platform built around visual “pins” and “pinboards.”

What is Pinterest Advertising?

Pinterest advertising is leveraging Pinterest’s advertising platform to reach potential customers. Pinterest ads offer a 2.3x cost per conversion and 2x higher return on ad spend compared to other forms of social media, according to its website.

What are the six types of Pinterest Ads?

Pinterest allows advertisers to create six types of ads:

  1. Standard: A standard pin with a sponsored tag on it
  2. Video: A short promotional video pin
  3. Shopping: Pins that tie back to your product catalog, which allows users to go straight from the pin to your website to buy your product/service
  4. Carousel: A pin that contains between two and five images that can by cycled through after a user selects it
  5. Collections: A mobile-exclusive ad that displays a video/image along with three supporting pictures. If a user selects a collection, it can show them up to 24 different images.
  6. Idea: Video shorts that resemble Instagram Stories in content and length. These are typically educational.
A person’s hand holds a phone with the Pinterest app open on it.

What are product rich pins?

Unique to Pinterest, Product Rich Pins show up in the “Shop” tab. These pins show a product’s details, price, and even in-store availability. These cannot be promoted, but they update automatically if you set them up to work with your website.

What are Pinterest’s Ad Objectives?

When you create an ad campaign for Pinterest, you can choose from five categories, which decides the goal of your campaign and what you’ll be paying for:

  1. Brand awareness: Getting your brand in front of users. Charged per every 1,000 impressions. 
  2. Consideration: Driving traffic to your site. Pay-per-click pricing.
  3. Conversions: Getting users to take specific actions on your website.
  4. Offline sales: Encouraging consumers to view your product inventory. This one is designed with ecommerce and brick-and-mortar stores in mind. 
  5. Video views: Getting users to watch your product videos. You pay for impressions.

Social media platform Pinterest being viewed on a tablet.

How does bidding work on Pinterest?

On Pinterest, bids can either be customized (e.g., you pick your bids) or automated (e.g., Pinterest handles the bid process for you with the intention of getting the most out of your ad spend: its algorithm will even update these over the course of a single day).

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