Pinterest Ads: How to set up your first campaign

Article preview: In this article we will show you the benefits of Pinterest Ads (recently launched in Romania) in consolidating your brand and increasing sales. We will also guide you step by step in setting up your first campaign. 

As we have accustomed you so far, we will bring to the forefront the e-commerce activity (a segment that our agency specializes in). With the help of Pinterest Ads, you can communicate your brand's story by using innovative formats, attract users to your profile, direct them to your products, and measure the impact of your advertisements on your business.

Advertising on this platform became available in Romania less than 3 months ago and since then we have begun to use it for some of our clients. In this article, we will briefly outline the steps for creating a campaign and will return with more advanced insights after a period of testing and experimenting.

Why Pinterest Ads?

Pinterest is the place where users are looking for ideas, images, and stories that inspire them and give them confidence, through the way products are presented by those who expose them. They use this environment as a shopping catalog, so the platform is the right place where brands can creatively display their products as pins that they can organize as groups of advertisements set in accordance with business objectives. 

Online stores that promote themselves through this method can register more followers on their account, ultimately turning them into loyal customers of the brand. This works due to the popularity of this platform. Did you know that 87% of those who use Pinterest have made purchases based on the pins they have seen from brands? Furthermore, the platform has seen a significant increase of 51 million monthly users at the beginning of 2019 and is continuously growing (of which approximately 90% are female).

What are the benefits of advertising with Pinterest Ads?

• Users feel more motivated to buy because they find products that best suit them in a certain context
• You have access to a wider market segment
• There is a chance for exposure of the promoted products on the global market
• It is an ideal method for e-commerce promotion
• A complete funnel can be approached for conversions

How to set up a campaign on Pinterest Ads?

Step 1: The first thing you need to do when thinking of running campaigns on Pinterest Ads is to have a strategy outlined based on the purchase funnel. Afterwards, you can include this type of promotion in the mix of channels through which you want to reach your target audience. 

When you want to set up a campaign in Pinterest Ads to start running ads, you need to have a business account. You can register with one or even turn your personal account into a business account. The main advantage of a business account is that you can easily access statistics and data that give you the opportunity to analyze your account activity in detail.

Unlike Facebook Ads, to run advertising campaigns in Pinterest Ads you must have pins (posts) in your Pinterest account. You can post images and videos, but to launch advertising campaigns, a single image must be 1000×1500 px. Find more creative best practices here.

Formats in which the ads are visible on this platform are pins promoted as an image:

Video pins:

Step 2: Starting promotion on Pinterest Ads involves implementing tracking tags for your website. This way, you can track activity and measure results (impressions, clicks, saves, conversions, etc.). You can see detailed information about your audience and measure the profitability of expenses for optimizing ROAS based on your business objectives. Find here more information on how to set up the Pinterest tag.

Step 3: Once the setup is ready, the next step is to create the campaign - Start by choosing the campaign objective that is closely related to the business objective, then name it and set a budget.

For example, this is how we have set up a traffic campaign for the online store muranos.ro:

Setting the objective and naming the campaign:

The structure of the account in Pinterest Ads is similar to Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Therefore, the next step is to form the ad groups in which the desired ad will be included and the audience that will see the promoted pin.

The audience will be chosen based on your conversion funnel (with addressing a new audience or remarketing).

On the other hand, the public that will see the promoted pin can also be established based on the interests that you will select to target that segment that is interested in your product. You can only select those interests that you consider relevant to your business. 

Step 4: The next step is to establish a minimum of 25 relevant keywords for the pin we want to promote. Then, demographic characteristics (such as age and gender) are set according to the targeted audience. As in the case of Google Search campaigns, you can set exact words, phrases, or add negative keywords.

Next, you can choose where you want your ad to be displayed. In the search network or in their feed.

Step 5: In the Budget & Schedule step, you can set the start and end date for your campaign to run. 

We continue with the settings, and we choose the maximum CPC for our ad.

Step 6: The final step is choosing the pin that you want to promote. 

You can choose multiple pins to add to your ad group. ad groups tău.

In the end, your ad will look like this:

Pinterest Ads is a platform in continuous development and can represent an important channel to add to your online promotion strategy. 

About Optimized

At Optimized we are specialized in e-commerce PPC campaigns (Google Ads and Facebook Ads). Unlike other local agencies, our portfolio only includes online stores and our approach is based on clear performance objectives (CPA, ROAS. ROI). Our team consists of PPC specialists and certified Google trainers, as well as people with hands-on experience in e-commerce.

Our strategies are not generic, but strictly applied to e-commerce. We work with stores that want to scale their PPC campaigns profitably, that have clear objectives and know that marketing is an investment..