How to Set up Effective, Successful Pinterest Ad Campaigns

Pinterest is a visual marketing platform with over 537 million monthly active users, making it the perfect place for businesses with heavily visual products to create advertising campaigns. Especially because 85% of users have made a purchase from branded pins.

But knowing you should be advertising on Pinterest is the easy part. The hard part is knowing how to set up Pinterest ads that are effective and generate the results you’re looking for.

Whether you’re looking to create a Pinterest ad campaign for your own business or your client’s, we’ve got the ultimate guide on Pinterest advertising. Read on to get started creating your own campaign.

Benefits of Pinterest Advertising

We covered a couple of basic stats, but let’s dig even deeper. Why is Pinterest advertising so beneficial to certain businesses? 

Pinterest is a Visual Discovery Platform

People flock to Pinterest to use it as a visual search engine of sorts, searching for products, projects, and other queries that come in the form of image and video results. In Pinterest’s own words, its users are on the platform to “search, save and shop ideas.”

Users are browsing for inspiration and often actively shopping around for products. By running ads, you’re putting your products in front of people who are already in the mindset to buy—they just need to find the right product.

Pinterest Users Are Ready to Buy

Like we said, more than 8 out 10 users have made a purchase directly because of pins they saw on the platform. Pinterest users are actively looking for new products—and spending 2x more than they do on other platforms.

And with brands seeing results like a 7x increase in conversion rates due to Pinterest ads, it should come as no surprise that this is a platform perfect for businesses looking to reach more customers and generate more sales.

Pinterest Ads Produce Amazing Results

Not only are people actively searching for products to buy on the platform, the nature of the visual search engine and how seamlessly the ads fit into the feed help to produce incredible results.

Some of those results include:

• +4 lift in brand awareness per campaign
• 11.4x more prospects than other social media ads
• 2.3x lower cost per conversion compared to other social media platforms

In layman’s terms: reach more people for less money.

Pinterest Has a Longer Content Shelf Life

Pinterest ads are often based off of your already existing pins. Not only that, but users can save your ads to their boards, giving them even more life. This gives Pinterest a longer lifespan for its content than every other social media platform.

In fact, one study found that Pinterest’s content has a lifespan of nearly four months. Another blogger shared that in her own experience, she’s seen Pinterest posts go viral and generate results more than a year after its initial creation.

What does lifespan mean? Essentially, you can continue to get views, saves, and even conversions from a single pin months after it was created.

If you take nothing else from this, remember this: Pinterest advertising gives your business or your client’s business more bang for its buck. And when trying to stretch a marketing budget across many different platforms and strategies, that’s a powerful motivator.

Types of Pinterest Ads

There are several different types of Pinterest ads you can run as a part of your campaign. Learn more about each one so you can decide which type of ad will work best for your business or client.Types of Pinterest Ads: Summary Table

Standard Ads

Source: Pinterest.com

Standard ads are regular image ads that are made from pre-existing pins on your profile. These appear just like regular pins in a feed, denoted only by a “Promoted by” tag right underneath the image.

A standard ad leads directly to the landing page of your choice—usually the product page for the product you’re promoting. These are simple ads, but can still be extremely effective. You can create a standard ad using any ad objective.

Ad specs:

• Aspect ratio: 2:3, or 1000 x 1500 pixels
• File type: PNG or JPEG
• Max file size: 32MB

Video Ads

Video ads are a type of standard ad, but using video  as the ad creative rather than a static image. So users who click on this ad will simply be taken to your selected landing page, but they’re a bit more eye-catching due to the moving video.

Ad specs:

• Aspect ratio: 1:1, 2:3, 4:5, or 9:16
• File type: MP4, MOV, or M4V
• Video length: 4 seconds to 15 minutes
• Max file size: 2GB

Carousel Ads

A carousel ad is like a standard image ad—just with multiple images. This is a great way to showcase different perspectives of a product or different products within a collection. When a user clicks on it, the ad will still lead to your specified landing page.

Ad specs:

• Image quantity: 2-5 images
• Aspect ratio: 2:3, or 1000 x 1500 pixels or 1:1, or 1000 x 1000 pixels
• File type: PNG or JPEG
• Max file size: 20MB per image

Collection Ads

A collection ad allows you to include up to 24 images within a single ad, perfect for—as you may have guessed—promoting an entire product collection. In the feed, it looks like a single image with three smaller thumbnails underneath it, but once a user clicks on it, they’re taken to a full-screen experience that lets them scroll through each image you’ve included.

Ad specs:

• Image quantity: 1 featured image, 3-24 secondary images
• Aspect ratio: 2:3, or 1000 x 1500 pixels or 1:1, or 1000 x 1000 pixels
• File type: PNG or JPEG
• Max file size: 10MB

Showcase Ads

Showcase ads provide a more interactive experience. Using what the platform calls “cards,” advertisers can show off their products in action (think a living room full of products from a furniture retailer). Then, users can click around the tagged products within a single card to check out their product pages.

Ad specs:

• Image quantity: 1-4 card images, 1-3 feature images
• Aspect ratio: 2:3 for title pin and card, 1:1 for feature image
• File type: BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, MP4, M4V, or MOV
• Max file size: 32MB
• Video length: 3-60 seconds

Idea Ads

An idea ad is meant to share an idea with your audience, for lack of a better description. Include a video that showcases how your product could be used as a way to strike inspiration. These provide your viewer with the option to follow your account, save the pin, and click through to your selected landing page.

Ad specs:

• Aspect ratio: 9:16
• File type: BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, MP4, M4V, or MOV
• Max file size: 2GB
• Video length: 5 minutes

Quiz Ads

A quiz ad showcases a question for your audience to answer, and includes a different image for each potential result. This is a fun and interactive way to help your target customer find the right product for themselves. For example, a skincare product asking customers about their skin type in order to lead them to the right face wash.

Ad specs:

• Image quantity: 1 title pin, 1-3 results pins
• Aspect ratio: 2:3 
• File type: BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, MP4, M4V, or MOV
• Max file size: 32MB
• Video length: 3-60 seconds

Premiere Spotlight Ads

A premiere spotlight ad is one of the newest types of Pinterest ads. These use wide-screen video to create a fully immersive ad experience. Premiere spotlight ads get prominently featured on the home and search feeds for an entire day.

There are no ad specs for these publicly available as interested advertisers must get in touch with a Pinterest advertising representative. These ads must have space booked ahead of time and approval from their ad rep before placement.

Here’s a table breakdown of all the different Ad Type:

How to Set Up Pinterest Ads: Step-by-Step Tutorial

Ready to set up your first Pinterest ad campaign? Follow along with our step-by-step tutorial and you’ll be able to create an effective ad in no time.

Prerequisites

Let’s cover some basics first, like what you need in order to even be able to run ads, either for your own business or your new client. Get through this checklist before you move onto step one.

Create a Pinterest business account

Pinterest ads are only available to business accounts. This means you either need to create a new business account or convert a personal profile to a business account before you can get started. 

For the former, use this form. For the latter, log into your personal account, then head to Settings > Account management and click the option to Convert to a business account.

Install your Pinterest tag

A Pinterest tag connects your website to your Pinterest account. It’s a small code snippet that you install on your or your client’s website, letting the two speak to each other and give you capabilities like:

• Tracking conversions
• Measuring ad performance
• Building target audiences
• Becoming a verified merchant
• Getting conversion data

Access the Pinterest Ads Manager

Before you create your first ad, get a bit acquainted with the Ads Manager, as you’ll be spending a lot of time there. To access this, click on the hamburger menu in the top right corner of the screen. Then head to Ad account overview.

While this might look a bit blank for now, this is where you’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view of your overall ad performance, plus a quick glance at your active campaigns. 

Click around each of the options under the Ads section of the menu to gain a better understanding of the dashboard you’ll be working with.

Apply to the Verified Merchant Program

The Verified Merchant Program (VMP) lets customers buy from verified and trusted merchants on the Pinterest platform. To increase credibility around your brand, you’ll want to apply to become a Verified Merchant.

Benefits of this verification include:

• The ability to include your products within shopping experiences
• A blue checkmark on your profile and pins
• Access to exclusive features
• Pricing information on all of your product pins

You must meet the following eligibility requirements before you can apply:

• Your account must be at least three months old
• Your website must be claimed (via the Pinterest tag) and at least nine months old
• Your Pinterest profile must have a profile photo and completed “About” section
• You must meet the Merchant Guidelines

Once approved, you must then connect your product catalog and set up a conversion source. This way, you’re able to increase sales through the platform—and use this catalog to create shopping ads.

Step 1: Choose Your Campaign Objective

After your ad account is ready to go, it’s time to create your first ad. The first step anytime you’re starting a new campaign is to determine your overall objective.

With Pinterest, you can create ads in one of two ways: via an automated campaign option or by creating a manual campaign. With an automated campaign, you select your objective, choose a pin to promote (or create one from scratch), and Pinterest does the rest.

Both create effective campaigns, but we’re going to walk through how to create a Pinterest ad manually, as it’s a much more thorough process.

The main categories of objectives are:

• Build awareness: Increase eyes on your brand and its products, building overall awareness that it exists and what problems it can solve. This objective will be measured in overall reach and impressions.
• Drive consideration: Entice people to learn more about your product by clicking over to your selected landing page. This will be measured by clicks.
• Get conversions: Make sales directly because of your Pinterest ad campaign, whether they purchase on your website or via your Pinterest catalog. This will be measured by sales or other actions.

Decide what you want to get out of your Pinterest campaign. Or, create a campaign funnel that starts with building awareness before moving to consideration and finally to conversion.

Step 2: Set Your Budget and Bidding

Scroll down just a bit to get to the budget section of your campaign. Here, you have to set how much you want to spend, how you want that money to be spent, and how long you want your campaign to run.

Your options include:

• Performance+ Daily
• Performance+ Lifetime
• Fixed Daily

Performance+ is a relatively new feature that uses Pinterest’s automation and AI capabilities to boost campaign performance. We recommend giving it a try, but you can always stick to a fixed daily budget instead if you prefer.

Essentially, Performance+ campaigns will spend more or less day by day based on how it’s gauging your performance. Whereas, a fixed daily budget will spend the exact same amount each day regardless.

If you choose a daily budget, you can set your campaign to run for a select period of time, or to run continuously until you manually turn it off. However, if you select a lifetime budget, you have to provide start and end dates.

A continuous campaign is a good idea if you’re working to build brand awareness on the platform. Otherwise, input specific dates so that you can better analyze your results.

You’ll select your bidding strategy after you define your audience, but let’s talk about your options while we’re here. Again, there’s a Performance+ selection that will automatically optimize your bidding in an attempt to, in Pinterest’s words, “help you get the most awareness at the lowest cost.”

However, you can still choose to input custom bidding. This means you choose how much you want to spend per ad action. Those actions depend on your initial objective:

• Brand awareness means you’re bidding for CPM, or cost per 1,000 impressions, or CPV, or cost per video view
• Consideration means you’re bidding for CPC, or cost per click
• Conversions means you’re bidding for CPA, or cost per action

Average bid costs are:

• CPM: $0.00 – $1.50
• CPC: $0.00 – $0.10
• CPA: $0.00 – $2.00 

Step 3: Define Your Target Audience

Next, you need to choose who your ad will target. Reaching the right audience is key for improving your overall performance and getting the results you want (i.e., new customers, right?), so you’ll want to spend some time here.

There are three major targeting strategies that you can choose from:

• Reconnect with users: Target people who have already come in contact with your brand, whether it’s people who follow you on Pinterest, have visited your website, or even have already made a purchase.
• Find new customers: Reach an entirely new group of people (who fit the description of your target customer) by creating a list of people who behave similarly.
• Choose your own: Create your own custom audience by inputting their demographics, interests, and keywords.

The first two options allow you to start with an audience list. If you have the Pinterest tag installed, you can easily gather a list of site visitors to retarget with products they may already be acquainted with.

Otherwise you can use lists like:

• People who have engaged with your content on Pinterest
• People who have already made a purchase from your website
• People who behave like your customers do

Pinterest makes it easy to create these audience lists. Simply select the targeting strategy you want to use, then create a new audience list and follow the instructions required.

From there, you can input additional demographics data as well as choose your ad placements (browse or search—though both are recommended).

Step 4: Create Your Ad

Next, it’s time to create your ad. You can choose from Pins you already have saved, or create an ad from scratch.

If you choose to create a new Pin for your ad, the Pin builder will open up. 

From here, you’ll need to input:

• The board it will live in
• Your Pin title
• Your Pin description
• An image or video
• Your destination link

Some best practices for your ad include:

• Using a vertical image to maximize space in the feed
• Placing the product you’re promoting front and center in the image or video
• Including the brand’s logo
• Adding a big, bold text overlay to provide more context
• Incorporating the right keywords into your copy
• Creating clear and concise ad copy
• Ensuring your links are accurate

If you choose to create an ad using a different format, like a quiz or idea ad, design your graphics and follow the prompts to upload each image or graphic. Then it’s time to publish your ad and start watching the results.

Step 6: Tracking and Optimizing Your Pinterest Ad Campaigns

After you’ve turned on your new ad campaign, you need to monitor it to ensure it’s performing the way you want it to. 

Your Pinterest ad account overview will help provide a bird’s eye view of your active campaigns, so you can track everything from how much the campaign has spent so far to how many views and clicks it’s gotten to how much those views and clicks have cost.

If you’re not happy with the results, you can always pause or adjust your campaign, audience, bidding, or other factors and see how the ad improves.

Swydo can help you monitor your Pinterest Ads KPIs for your clients campaign as well to ensure you’re hitting the right goals for your client’s campaign.

Create Your First Pinterest Ad Campaign

Put together your first Pinterest ad campaign for your brand or your client by following these steps and taking advantage of the platform’s performance optimization capabilities. Monitor the ad campaign to make sure you’re getting the results you’re looking for.

And of course, when it comes to reporting on your results, consider Swydo’s comprehensive reporting features for your presentation.