How To Promote Your Web Content Pins through Pinterest Ads In Step-by-step

Would you like to learn how Pinterest Ads & Marketing Campaigns are done? Especially, while utilizing the basic Google Tag Manager platform to convert leads in your promotional campaigns. If your answer is yes, please follow my leads.

Through Pinterest Ads Campaign, you’ve got the opportunity to tell the story of your business. For one thing, people come to Pinterest in search of inspiration, crafted goods, and a community of like-minded creatives.

In short, Pinterest Marketing is an ideal place for you to showcase the ideas and products that define your business. And that’s why you need to learn how Using Ads Manager is beneficial right away! And, that’s whether you’re a one-person team or a corporate entity.

What Is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a visual social media marketing site where users, or “pinners” can share images or videos from around the world with friends and family. These pinners also have the opportunity to create specific boards packed full of “pins” of the content that they like.

Often, each board will feature a description, and so will the individual pins on that board, making it easier for other people to find the content with keywords. For example, the jmexclusives Pinterest profile has a board entitled Campaign Marketing Promos.

In nutshell, Pinterest is a visual social media marketing site where users, or “pinners” can share images or videos from around the world with friends and family. These pinners also have the opportunity to create specific boards packed full of “pins” of the content that they like.

Pinterest is where people go to discover, dream, and do more. And, as can be seen, in the above-mentioned intro, the Pinterest board includes pins from the likes of jmexclusives web content. As well as re-pinned items from other Pinners who share similar content marketing tips.

What Are Pinterest Ads?

Pinterest Ads provide you with a great way to get your products and content in front of more people as they search, browse and discover on Pinterest. In the Pinterest Ads Manager, you can create, edit and manage your campaigns.

In general, when you think of social media marketing, you probably think of Facebook, Twitter, even Instagram. But, have you ever stopped to consider the benefits of Pinterest marketing? Though the channel is frequently overlooked and underappreciated, it’s actually an incredible place to facilitate brand growth.

At the beginning of 2019, Pinterest had 291 million monthly active users, and an average awareness reach of 72% too! Other channels like Facebook and Twitter continue to lose organic reach. While struggling to overcome the demands of a changing audience.

On the other hand, Pinterest is earning increasing engagement from its audience. Therefore, if you’re not using Pinterest as a solution for social engagement yet, then you could be missing out on an incredible opportunity.

Why You Should Use Pinterest Ads

Pinterest is bringing in huge results for businesses that know how to use it well, with average increases of 20-30% in traffic and coverage. It’s no joke when you read headlines such as “$41,254.34 in sales made from $775 investment” on Pinterest blog posts.

As a business user, you also have the option of running a competition, collaborating with other bloggers, or popular Pinterest accounts. Though, so it’s important to be clear on your reasons for wanting to advertise specifically. With this tool, users can make their boards public when they want to share their creativity with others.

Or preferably, keep it private if they’re using the content specifically for personal inspiration. What’s more, when it comes to finding images, pinners will be able to either manually upload and share visuals. As well as, re-pin content that their friends share, or re-pin material that they find online.

Though many people assume that Pinterest is reserved for moms and lifestyle bloggers, the truth is that any company can grow with a Pinterest account. Pins last forever and are repinned frequently (80% of the content is repinned content).

Learn More About Pinterest: How it Helps Businesses Convert Leads & Sales

So, promoted pins are a great way of drawing attention to an individual product, special article, or event. To understand whether your business can benefit read more about Pinterest demographics in detail. Some key details about it include:

Pinterest brings in BIG results, the average increase of 20-30% in traffic and coverage
Pins last forever, and 80% of Pinterest content is repinned
Ideal to sell a product by featuring visually
Works when you know your target demographic
Pinterest users spend on average $80 per purchase, more than twice that of some other platforms

Once you understand the main objective of your business or those of your marketing team, and the main features of Pinterest discussed here, you’ll know more. Especially, if there’s serious ROI to gain from Pinterest Ads. However, think about how Pinterest users measure up with your target demographics before doing any bigger strategy work.

The Key Goals of Advertising Campaigns

When you create a campaign, you’ll give it a title and an objective. Perhaps you’re looking to establish a loyal following, so increasing traffic is the perfect objective. Alternatively, you may want users to discover your merchandise, in which case opting to ‘build brand awareness’ would be a great fit.

Whatever objective you choose for your campaign, let it reflect your overall business goals. The objective will determine bidding and ad formats available to you and has the potential to set you up for great success.

Learn Also: Pinterest introduces Idea Pins globally and launches new creator discovery features

Ad groups are where the action happens. You set your budget, timeline, targeting audience, and bids for the Promoted Pins within the group. Creating multiple ad groups is a great way to explore how various Pinners engage with content.

You have flexibility in targeting certain ad groups towards a specific audience. At the end, which will allow you to gain an understanding of and observe trends for how your products and Pins appeal best to Pinners.

How Pinterest Advertising Works

In the first place, to advertise on Pinterest, you start by running a campaign. Whereby, your business has a story to tell and your campaign is where it all begins. Think of it as an umbrella that shapes your advertisement.

And then, under which all other tenants of advertising at Pinterest fall. Secondly, within any campaign lie multiple Ad groups – you can think of these as chapters. And this is where the action happens. Like setting a bid and budget, and targeting specific audiences.

You can create multiple ad groups to achieve a variety of goals and tell different parts of your business’ story.

Once your ad group has been created, you can play around with promoting Pins within it to best fit your campaign objective. You may find that changing your targeted audience or promoting a video Pin changes your campaign results in an exciting way.

Pinterest Users Are:

41% of women and 16% of men
31% from suburban areas
84% between the ages of 18 and 64
70% US mothers and 33% US dads
55% of shoppers

Everyone gathers information differently – through words, images, or videos. So, enjoy the freedom you have to promote a number of Pins that represent your business in different ways.

According to research, 50% of people make a purchase after seeing a promoted pin. And 67% even say they discovered a new product or brand from the network.

The Main Benefits of Promoted Pins

Of course, with six million advertisers on Facebook alone, it’s easy to think of it as the go-to advertising platform. But, with all the competition to contend with, there needs to be another option to consider. And under such circumstances, Pinterest Ads are the answer.

Pinterest Ads are underutilized — compared to a behemoth platform like Facebook. Whereby, has Pinterest only 1.5 million brands connecting with users every month. But, it offers tremendous opportunities to get in front of more people. Pick a Pin for a project, idea, or product you want to showcase.

Bearing in mind, that creating an image for your Pin that sparks interest is the key! And by the same fashion, you can create multiple Pins that promote the same product. So, have fun exploring which Pins capture different audiences, and which seem to meet your main objectives.

When your Pin has been curated and posted, you’ll pay to promote it. The Pin will then appear in your audience’s home feed and in relevant searches. You’ll be on your way to attracting fans, followers, and customers.

How Promoted Pins Work

In general, Promoted Pins run on an auction system, like many other pay-per-click systems. Whereby, Web Advertisers select a Promoted Pin, choose an objective they want to accomplish, and then they enter their targeting criteria.

Forthwith, they’ll place “bids” on having their ads shown to their target audience, and those who bid the most could win the placement. Technically, Promoted Pins can work in two different ways.

Your ads can be shown to users who are browsing on Pinterest

In this case, your ad would either be shown to users who are browsing categories that your Promoted Pin belongs to, or in the feeds of users that Pinterest believes would be interested in your product.

This interest is typically gauged based on past behavior on the platform, including the Pins they’ve saved, though advertisers can target specific users based on things like email lists or recent site visits.

Your Promoted Pins can also appear in search results on Pinterest

If someone is searching for a “handmade vase” and you happen to sell those, your ad could actually appear in their search results. As you can imagine, this option lets you promote your products to users who are intentionally seeking them out.

That said, in order to create Promoted Pins, you must have a Pinterest business account. Once you do, you’ll see the “Ads” tab in the top left-hand corner. Click on that drop-down menu in order to start creating your Promoted Pin campaign. Click “create ad” to get started.

Step #1: Choose Your Objectives

Definitely, the very first thing you’ll do is choose your campaign’s objective. Not forgetting, these essentially define what you want to get out of the campaign and how you’ll be charged. Your options are:

Brand awareness: The goal here is to have your Pin seen by as many relevant users as possible. You’ll be charged per 1,000 impressions.
Video views: This is closely tied with brand awareness, and the goal is to build awareness through video. You are charged for impressions as well.
Traffic: These campaigns seek to drive traffic to your site, though it’s important to note that all objectives still let you do this. With this option, however, you pay per click.
App installs: Encourage users to download your app. You’re charged per click.

In this section, you’ll also name your campaign, establish your budget, and decide whether you want to run search ads, browse ads, or both. And, as such, I often recommend using both. But, if you want to stick to one or the other, always enable search ads.

Step #2: Set Your Targeting Criteria

If you’d like, you can always add new Promoted Pins to an old campaign, which lets you have multiple individual ads under a single campaign title. This makes it easier to track everything, so if you’re running a brand awareness campaign for a specific offer or product, keep them together when possible.

In Step 2 of Promoted Pin creation, you’ll set up your ad group. You can have multiple ad groups under a campaign, and multiple individual ads (the actual Promoted Pins) under each ad group. Ad groups determine targeting, schedule, and a more specific budget.

When it comes to the actual targeting, you have several different options of how to proceed. So, this is what we’ll need in our next stage.

Step #3: Create Your Target Audiences

In this case, the first key option is to create Target Audiences, which work like Facebook’s custom audiences. Whereby, you can upload your entire email list (or sections of it). Or even create audiences based on recent site activity or users who interacted with a certain Pin.

Secondly, if you want to reach similar users to any of these audiences, you can create an “act-alike” audience. After all, which will show your ads to users with similar qualities.

Target your audience based on:

Visitors who went to your website
The customer’s list that you uploaded
An engagement audience that engaged with your confirmed domain content
The actual audience that behaves similarly to the one you already have

In addition to these options, you can also use any combination of basic targeting criteria like location, language, and gender, and more with interest targeting and keyword targeting.

Interest-Based Audience

In reality, interest-based targeting will affect where your ad shows up for browsing placements. More so, whenever your users are either browsing in certain categories or on their home feeds. Always remember, you want to choose the interests that are actually related to the Promoted Pin you’re going to select.

More so, in order to get the best results — even if someone likes photography. Meaning, they may not be overwhelmingly interested in your Pin about camera lenses when they’re intentionally browsing home decor feeds.

Keyword-Based Targeting

By all means, your keyword-based targeting will determine which searches your Promoted Pins appear in. Furthermore, this is the part of the campaign that I probably place the most importance on. Users who are searching, after all, are pretty far along in the buying cycle, and probably closer to actually purchasing.

When you enter in the keywords you want to target, Pinterest will show you a long list of related keywords and their monthly search volumes. Eventually, this will give you an idea of all the potential audience sizes you could reach.

However, while it’s easy to just go for the most obvious keywords, I’ve had the best luck when I think outside the box — to use a combination of broad and specific keywords. But, if you feel stumped, you can always go ahead and use the Keyword Tool to get some new ideas.

Step #4: Set Your Spending Limit

At the very bottom of this section, you’ll see the option to set a maximum cost per click (CPC). If you want to ensure that you never pay more for a single impression or click than a certain bid amount, you can enter that here. Pinterest will let you know whether or not it’s competitive.

After that, you can now go ahead and select your pin. Personally, I normally recommend having the Pin in mind before you go through the rest of the process. So that you can choose the right audience and keywords. On the selection screen, you’ll see all of your Pins, and all you have to do is to select them. And then, you can click to continue.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to enter the Pin’s name and establish the specific URL you want to send traffic to. When it comes to actually choosing a Pin and deciding which would be best to promote, there are several strategies you can use to make your choice. So, in that case, you can consider the following:

Use Pinterest’s Analytics:

It’s a useful tool to help you decide, find your top-performing Pins of all-time or within a set time frame. On the Analytics screen, you can actually sort Pins by which have been most saved or most clicked on in the last 30 days. Moreover, this gives you an idea of what Pins your audience is most responsive to.

Strategically Create New Pins:

If you want to, you can get away with being a little more promotional in a Promoted Pin. A great example of this is app installs. Likewise, if you’ll want more push app installs, you’ll almost definitely need to create new Pins for it. Simply, because you likely won’t have them already in any of your boards.

In addition, you can also consider opting for a content-based approach in order to easily track your campaign results.

Step #5: Track your Pinterest Ads result

Obviously, by this far, you’re now done with the first most important steps. So, once you’re all set here, you can submit your campaign for review. And, once it’s been approved, it will begin running on the scheduled start date. The next thing is to track the results.

Once you’re running your campaigns, you can monitor their progress and edit them at any time in the ads manager. Whereby, you can easily see which campaigns are running. As well as, how much you’re spending, and the results you’ve gotten so far.

As an example, I remember seeing a recipe for a breakfast parfait and saving it, only to realize later on that the recipe was from Fage, a Greek yogurt brand. And, as such, it featured a specific flavor of yogurt none of their competitors had.

Of course, it was a very smart move because content like recipes and DIY tutorials perform great on Pinterest. So, if you can feature your products in a similar way, this is a good strategy to try. Especially, for brand awareness campaigns.

Your ad manager allows you to see:

The number of impressions, the number of saves, and even clicks
Your overall web-based content Clickthrough rate (CTR)
How effective is your CTR
Average CPC or CPM
Total ad spend

Additionally, for your Pinterest Ads to be even more effective, there’s something more to consider. Let’s you have the conversion tag in place (which Shopify store owners can enable through the Pinterest Sales Channel). Well, you evenly track the actual return on ad spend when users convert.

Uniquely, this also factors in how much the ad costs you, and how much time users spend on your site. Overall, if you want to get the most out of your Promoted Pins, below are some other best practices and strategies you can apply. As you try to create Pins that will stand out in the feed and make users want to click.

Effective Pinterest Ads Placement & Targeting Tips

On one side, a great way to learn about how people engage with your content is to play with the Ads Placement and Ads Targeting Tools. When you first set up an ad group, the Pins within it will appear everywhere. Allowing people to browse their home feed or search for relevant keywords.

In time, you can change the placement so that some ad groups only display their Pins as people browse, and others only appear as Pinners search for related content. It’s a great tool to observe which behavior increases the impressions of your Pins.

1. Make the most out of your description

Your Pin’s image will be what catches the user’s eye, but the description adds a lot of contexts. It really explains to users what the Pin is and why they should click, so it can make all the difference. When it comes to Pinterest, it’s better to offer explanations as to why your product is valuable, instead of just stating what the product is.

2. Test your results and try different strategies

Experimentation will always be your best friend when you’re doing any kind of marketing, and this holds up for Promoted Pins as well. Ultimately, there’s no telling what your audience will really respond to and what they may be actually searching for, even if you’ve done your homework.

Because of this, it’s best to test different strategies, Pins, and even targeting options like keywords while you figure out what works best.

Want to run split tests quickly for Promoted Pins? You can now create multiple ads under a single ad group or campaign, and you can duplicate a past campaign and make some changes. This will allow you to test specific factors and see how they affect your results.

3. Try to skip the use of hashtags

Essentially, Pinterest is already a giant search engine. So, hashtags don’t really have a place, even on organic Pins. Not to mention, users won’t be overwhelmingly tempted to click on hashtags to take them to a new topic.

More so, when they’ve likely already searched to get where they want. So, try and skip the hashtags in your image description while running your Pinterest Ads. Instead, use that valuable copy space for something that will better serve you instead.

4. Carefully, choose your landing page

Basically, if you’ve run PPC campaigns before on any platform, you know how important the landing page is. You should be sending users directly to the target content — more so, that they’re expecting to see after they click on your Pin. But, don’t send them to your home page, or to a random lead offer or email subscriber page.

Instead, send them directly to the pages of the products or content you’re promoting. If you don’t, they’ll get frustrated and click away — even if they were interested in buying before. And, as a result, this will lower the chance of them clicking on your ads again. So, you don’t want to blow your opportunity.

5. Incorporate and use some videos

Eventually, you’ll find “use more video” in the best practices of a lot of blogs talking about marketing, and it’s true on Pinterest too. That’s why you don’t see a lot of videos on Pinterest — Promoted Pin videos autoplay on mobile devices. So, it will automatically help you stand out.

Consider the likes of how-to videos and video content that highlights products briefly — they both do very well on the platform. However, when creating your Pinterest video, there are a few things that you should always remember.

It should ideally be:

High resolution: Even if the video is small, if it’s even a little blurry, users aren’t going to click and it will reflect poorly on your brand.
Precisely Short: Pinners are browsing, and they aren’t necessarily ready to sit and watch a ten-minute video in the Pin. Instead, it’s better to use the Pin as a sort of teaser.
Not using sound as a crutch: When videos autoplay, they do so without sound. Users can choose to enable the sound, but you’re going to be better off if you can establish context and really reel them in without it. Use on-video text and subtitles for the best results here.

6. Follow Pinterest’s recommended pins dimension

When you’re scrolling through your Pinterest feed, you’ll notice that Pins come in a variety of shapes and sizes. In most cases, you’ll get the most attention on your Pins (and the most clicks) from the outlook. However, if only you’ll follow Pinterest’s recommended Pin dimensions.

To be on the safe side, they recommend a Pin image dimension ratio of 2:3 — with the image being taller than it is wide. They also recommend going for 600 x 900 Pixels too. For one thing, it will give users the high-resolution image that you want them to see.

7. Install the conversion tag onto your site

On one hand, a Pinterest Conversion Tag will give you incredibly valuable information. For instance, telling you what actions users take on a site after they’ve clicked on a Promoted Pin. Instead of just measuring the number of clicks, you can actually track how valuable that click was to you.

On the other hand, the conversion tag also lets you track the activity on your site period — so that you can set up retargeting campaigns. Notably, the pixel code is made up of two different parts as I’ll illustrate in brief below.

Base Code: It’s unique to every Pinterest account. Whereby, it lets you build retargeting campaigns based on the site activity.

Event Code: The event codes are attached to the base code on pages where you want to track specific events, like conversions, add to carts, and sign-ups. For example, you would add the checkout tag to the “thank you for your order page,” which might only flag if users purchase.

Generally, you’ll be shown all the steps to follow — giving you your base code and then the different event codes. After which you can easily customize and then add to the main tracking snippet.

All pages of your site should have the base code — you can add specific events to different key pages. Having said that, you can read and learn more about Google Tags Manager and Pinterest Tag Codes Implementation in detail as well.

Takeaway,

That’s all you needed to know about how Pinterest Ads work. In the long run, Pinterest Ads Targeting creates a unique opportunity for your business to reach the millions of people who come to Pinterest every day to find or shop for your products and services.

So, are you still unsure whether or not Promoted Pins are right for you? Well, it doesn’t hurt to run a few test campaigns and actually find out. One important thing to remember though is that Promoted Pins shouldn’t be your sole focus in Pinterest marketing.

Learn Also: How Viral Marketing Works | What Marketers Should Know

Rather, they’ll be much more effective alongside organic campaigns. For sure, Pinterest Ads can greatly help you gain a lot of traction on the platform. You’ll even acquire more users to discover your content if other users repin your content, for example.

Furthermore, that’s a long-term benefit that requires no financial investment from you. So, for best results, put emphasis on both organic and PPC marketing on Pinterest, just like you would with most other platforms.

Related Sources:

Advertising Networks | Everything you Should know
Social Media | Why is It such an Important Online Tool?
Brand Building Tools & Methods for Beginner Marketers
Lead Generation | How Do I Increase Online Conversions?
Page CTR | How to Increase your AdSense Click Rates

Finally, I hope that the above-revised guide on how to incorporate Pinterest Ads into your marketing plan will be helpful to you and your business. Or even the web marketing consultancy agency you work together with.

But, if you’ll need additional support in regards to this or even more of our blog topics, please Contact Us and let us know how we can sort you out. All in all, feel free to share your opinion thoughts, contribution inputs, and other related questions in our comments section below.

Related Topic: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) | 10 Tips to do it Right