Advertising On Pinterest What You Need to Know

Pinterest is one of the greatest platforms to showcase your business and what you sell. It is a place where you can find inspiration, drive traffic back to your website, and even turn your pins into sales! If you are unfamiliar with Pinterest, check out our blog, How Can Pinterest Help My Small Business! Not only is Pinterest a place for inspiration, but it is the prime place for visual marketing. So, why should you start advertising on Pinterest? Keep reading to find out!

Why Advertise on Pinterest?

When it comes to advertising on social platforms, Pinterest is an excellent place for promoting your business. Why? Well, Pinterest doesn't try rope users into staying on their platform all the time. Pinterest actually considers itself a search engine. What this means is that people typically use Pinterest to get ideas for what to do or buy next. Advertising on Pinterest is a great way to get your brand to reach a broader audience. Pinterest is all about visuals—pictures are king. Infographics, photos of products, and even blog posts are the kinds of content that thrive on Pinterest.

Ways to Advertise on Pinterest

There are multiple formats of ads on Pinterest. You have your promoted pins, video ads, and carousel ads. Video, in general, is huge on all social media platforms this year, so taking advantage of video advertising on Pinterest is guaranteed to get your brand the attention it deserves. With Pinterest video ads, you want your videos to show up in people's search results, feeds, and in the "More Like This section that is underneath a pin in a closeup. Video pins are used to help people learn about your brand and/or product, as well as drive views. Videos also help to increase visits to a destination on or off Pinterest (like your website!). However, video ads are a wonderful way to tell your brand story and drive actions such as checkouts, signups for newsletters, and leads.

Carousel ads are another up-and-coming format of ads. Now seen on Instagram, carousel ads on Pinterest contain multiple images for Pinners to swipe through. These ads grab attention and encourage people to engage with your content. With a Pinterest carousel ad, you can include up to five images to tell a deeper story about your brand or even five products you would like to drive sales for!

How Do I Start Advertising on Pinterest?

Well, let's start with promoted pins. Promoted pins are the basic ad format on Pinterest. The ads are only one single image, and anyone with a business account and active billing profile can use promoted pins for a variety of marketing goals. Check out these stats for promoted pins:

• "One out of two Pinterest users have made a purchase after seeing a promoted pin."
• "67% of users have discovered a new brand as a result of seeing a promoted pin."

(Source: Shopify)

While these statistics are on average, these results vary based on the type of business you run and the products and/or services you provide.

Promoted pins work on a pay-per-click system. When you are setting up your promoted pin, you're faced with the decisions on what your objective is and who exactly you want to target. There are two ways that your ads will be displayed: either to users that are browsing their home page on Pinterest or in search results on Pinterest. After all, Pinterest considers itself a search engine! If you are familiar with Facebook ads, great! Setting up a promoted pin will be rather easy for you. If you are not, check out this blog on everything you need to know regarding Facebook Ads!

Now, back to promoted pins. When it comes to who you are targeting with your ad, you can create a custom target audience (again, similar to Facebook's custom audiences). With advertising on Pinterest comes the options to choose between four different types of audiences: customer lists, people who went to your site, people who engaged with your pins on Pinterest, and people similar to an existing audience.

Customer lists allow you to upload existing customers' emails through an Excel or .CSV file. This way, Pinterest is able to analyze your customer list and compare it to its user database. Then, Pinterest matches it and allows you to target these types of people.

When targeting people who have visited your website, Pinterest is able to identify those people and allows you to target them directly on the platform.

You are also able to target those who have engaged with your pins from your website. Those who have saved your pins, zoomed into your pins, commented on your pins, clicked the link on your pin, and swiped through a carousel pin are able to be filtered out and targeted as well.

Finally, Pinterest gives you the option to target people that are similar to existing audiences. This is referred to as "Actalike" targeting. Pinterest builds actalike audiences by using information from pinners and their behavior on the platform. These types of audiences can be built from customer lists, those who have engaged with your pins, and visitor retargeting.

With audience targeting, you are able to reach a specific group of people via combining information about your customers with information about how exactly people use Pinterest.

What Are the Recommended Budgets for Advertising On Pinterest?

After deciding which type of targeting you think will work best for your brand, you have to set a bid. What this means is that you need to decide how much you are going to spend. The three types of bids are as follows:

1. Auction CPM (cost per mile) - bid per 1000 impressions
2. CPE (cost per engagement) - You pay when people save, zoom into, or click on your pins.
3. CPC (cost per click) - used to drive traffic to your website. You pay when someone clicks through to your website.

If your objective is to build brand awareness, you will likely be spending $2.00 to $5.00 for 1000 impressions. Remember, impressions are the number of times your pins are seen on Pinterest. Ads with this objective are based on a cost-per-mile (CPM) pay scale. You pay for every 1000 times your pin is seen. The minimum bid for this ad is $2.00.

If your objective is to boost engagement, ads will cost $0.10 to $1.50 per engagement. These types of ads run on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) model. This means that you pay when someone engages with your ad.

If your objective is to drive web traffic, ads will cost $0.10 to $1.50 per engagement as well. However, the difference here is that you are charged when someone accesses your site from your Pinterest ad directly, not if they engage with it.

How Long Should Your Ads Run?

There are two kinds of budgets that your ad can run on: daily and lifetime. A daily budget is the minimum amount you want to spend on the ad group each day. A lifetime budget is the total budget you have for as long as the ad runs. In other words, you can have a deadline for your ad or you can have a continuous ad.

While advertising on Pinterest is a lot to take in, it is worth the time and money. The key to advertising on Pinterest is knowing exactly who your audience should be. Knowing who you want to target is what makes advertising on Pinterest worth it. To wrap up, here are the three main reasons to advertise on Pinterest:

Drive traffic to your website and increase conversions

• If you have an online store and are selling a product that you want people to order online, this is why you need to be on Pinterest. 87% of pinners have purchased something that they have seen on the platform. It's a no brainer!

Increase engagement with users

• Pinterest is an online vision board. If you want people to engage with your pins, they need to be drawn in!

Promoting your organic, evergreen content to a wider audience

• Pinterest is the PLACE for evergreen content. When your organic content does well, promote it! The kinds of evergreen content that do well are the pins that people are searching for—the kind of content that does not become outdated.

Get Started!

There are plenty of more reasons why advertising on Pinterest is a good idea, but the above list identifies the three most beneficial and practical reasons for small businesses to start promoting pins. If you are a small business owner, and you are not already on Pinterest, it is time to get on the bandwagon! Here's a blog post on WHY you should be on Pinterest as a small business owner! If you are a small business owner and you are on Pinterest, it is time to start promoting your pins!