The perfect Pinterest Advertising campaign
Pinterest’s most powerful feature is its potential for traffic generation to your site. Nearly all of the images on Pinterest link to the original source of the image, artist work, blog post or affiliate links. With a couple of clicks of the mouse, viewers are taken from a visual search engine to your website to read your content and buy your products.
Pinterest has always been about the sharing and discovery of ideas. It’s
also becoming quite the powerful advertising platform to drive performance marketing through the concept of idea discovery.
What makes pinterest really powerful is that it combines the energy of a search engine with the personality of social media.
We recently spoke about Instagram ads and some of the research used there can be used for Pinterest Advertising too.
What are the first steps to setting Pinterest Advertising?
STEP 1: Setting up your Pinterest Account
The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have a Business account for Pinterest – once you have this set up, you will be able to access the Ad Manager. In the Pinterest Ads Manager, you can create, edit and manage your Pinterest campaigns.
STEP 2: Installing Tags and Rich Pins
Once you are set up you will want to install rich pins and tagging. Rich pins will pull the right information from your site and a Tag will help you determine your reach. With the Promoted Tag you’ll be able to track the actions people take on your website after seeing your Pinterest ads, including checkouts, sign ups, and searches.
Step 3: Defining your strategy
You will have some simple strategies outlined by Pinterest that you can follow; these include:
- Building awareness; by building brand awareness or drawing in video views
- Driving consideration; by driving traffic or delivering a new app
- Growing your sales and creating conversaions
Be clear about your strategy and do not go into this blindly creating a business strategy is critical to your success – if this is something you have not yet done – I would consider grabbing our freebies and doing the “What is your why” session.
Step 4: Create the Pinterest Ad on Ad Manager
You will then go through all the steps that set up the ad campaign within the Pinterest Ad Manager. This will take you through steps such as targeting the appropriate audience, setting the right budget, creating ad groups.
On this stage we also select where the advert might be located for display, in mobiles, desktop etc. This is where it is critical to review your analytics in Pinterest to make sure that you are targeting the right groups!
You can read Pinterest Advertising advice and Strategy here
How much should I spend on Pinterest Marketing?
Each Strategy and each campaign is worth different things, WebFx covered some really key costs in this process:
There are three main goals you can set with Pinterest ads: Building awareness, boosting engagement and driving web traffic. The average cost of these methods is as follows:
- Building brand awareness: $2.00-5.00 for 1000 impressions
- Boosting engagement: $0.10 – $1.50 per engagement
- Driving web traffic: $0.10 – $1.50 per engagement
Running an effective Pinterest Advertising campaign
Use ONE pin per campaign. This will help in A/B testing and Pinterest optimizes for CTR. Use the related keyword suggestions from the Ads Manager, and add keywords from Pinterest’s guided search. A good number to start with for campaigns would be 30 to 40 keywords; plan to expand from there after letting those build data. Another idea is to separate campaigns by mobile devices and desktop devices. As digital marketers know, mobile user behavior can vary greatly, and that also applies on Pinterest. One major benefit to separating out placements by campaign is that you can manage the costs separately, as mobile will have cheaper CPCs.
Deepa Jatania, Content Editor at e-Intelligence
How do I focus my Pinterest targeting for an ad campaign?
Pinterest analytics are rich and break down your audience down to the interests they have. If you already have a tag within your website, you are able to see the demographics of your website data translated to Pinterest.
One Pinterest advertising tip is to uncheck the general targeting methods before setting up your campaign. You want to only have audience and keyword specific targeting in place, since otherwise you will be showing your ads to a wide audience meaning fewer will need your product or service so fewer will convert.
Stacy Caprio, Founder, Accelerated Growth Marketing
Something we learned early on was that with all Pinterest campaigns, it’s essential to test what your audience will like organically first. Try
Lily Stern, Director of Social Media & Digital Marketing from TheClose.com
different creative, different pins sizes, and different overlay text until
you find the combo that works. See where your audience’s interests lie
before allocating any budget.
Ways to find the perfect keywords, interest
Pinterest analytics is a strong tool to allow you to discover your users key likes and interest – showing you the details of your audiance will make you better prepared for targeting!
First, I go to Buzzsumo and enter a broad keyword from my niche. And I filter the results for a large number of shares (>10 000).Second, I go to Pinterest and find the exact pin that had so many shares.Third, I create a landing page on my site targeting that pin’s topic, and of course, I create a similar looking (but better) pin.
Nikola Roza, SEO for the Poor and Determined
How should my Pinterest Ads Look?
Logistically, making sure you have a good looking, clickable pin is critical in making sure you have a successful Pinterest ad!
Your Images
Create pictures that have minimum 1000px height and try to make bigger
than the minimum level. Take up more space in your Pinterest news feed with more vertical images rather than horizontal images. Because the more swipes required the more time you have to express your brand. Making pins TOO long might mean that they get cut off.
Use bright, warm colors like red, orange, and brown to increase the number of clicks your Pins get. Also, try to use images with 50% color saturation (the color intensity of the image) these seem to get get 10X more repins compared to images with more saturation. You can see more statistic here
It’s also important to test your creative work. For example, Pinterest
Lily Stern, Director of Social Media & Digital Marketing from TheClose.com
recommends a 2:3 aspect ratio for pins, but we’ve found that longer pins
tend to give us better results since they take up more space in someone’s
feed.
Focus on mobile screen This era is all about mobile phone marketing and it is continuously evolving. Advertising while targeting mobile users is the key to a better ROI. The ad should be displayed perfectly on a smaller devices so balance the text overlay and present it properly.
Ali is a digital marketer with expertise in SEO and Social Media at F Jackets
Your Title and Content
Your title should have your key search word in, and your keywords should be added to the content and description areas. This is important to searches and showing up in searches, but for ads it critical to targeting the right people.
In your Pinterest feed, often headlines are non-existent and descriptions are barely read. So by include watermarks and styling your pins to match your branding you are able to capture some more attention with the pin.
When advertising on Pinterest, people make the mistake of using the title
of the content they’re promoting as the text overlay for the pin. Instead,
we’ve found that using text that will tell people what they will get out of clicking on your content works even better.For example, one of our longest-running profitable campaigns is for an
Lily Stern, Director of Social Media & Digital Marketing from TheClose.com
article titled, Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas. Rather than have that
title overlay the pin image, we found that our audience responded better to something shorter and more catchy: Get More Leads! This acts as a call to action without having to add a button to a pin.
The URL you use
Make sure that your landing page from the pin is not misleading and takes the user directly to the page you are wanting to promote or sales page you are wanting to increase traffic for.
Things to avoid when setting up your Pinterest Ad
My biggest tip is use one pin per campaign. I see so many people run campaigns with multiple pins and they have no idea which are truly effective. When you run multiple pins on a campaign the most effective pin will get the most impressions so you won’t truly get to test the other pins. Also Pinterest uses click thru rates to optimize so a poorly performing pin will drag down your well performing pins.
John Frigo, I’m the Digital Marketing Lead with My Supplement Store
Use a vertical or portrait aspect ratio for your pins. Through lots of A/B testing I’ve discovered they perform the best as they take up a lot of real estate on the screen and are more likely to get noticed, even more so on mobile which is how most pinterest users are accessing pinterest.
