Twenty months after Pinterest Inc. rolled out its first ads, the social network is making a pitch that it offers a unique set of tools and data that retail advertisers should be using.
Pinterest today rolled out its latest slew of advertising tools, which enable retailers to target consumers who have interacted with the merchant’s pins, as well as letting merchants target shoppers who have taken specific actions on their websites.
For instance, engagement retargeting allows retailers to target ads at consumers who have saved, clicked, or tapped on the merchant’s pins within the past 540 days. Merchants can retarget shoppers based on whether a shopper engaged with a promoted pin, which is a native ad unit on the platform, or a pin that a merchant didn’t to promote.
“Engaging with a pin is one of the best signals of buying intent on the internet,” says Frank Fumarola, a Pinterest product manager. Pinterest’s internal research suggests that consumers who have engaged with a pin are 2.2 times more likely to make a purchase from a retailer than other consumers.
The social network also rolled out the Pinterest Tag, which enables retailers to retarget consumers on Pinterest who have visited their website and taken at least one of nine actions, including searching for a product, adding an item to their shopping cart or making a purchase. The tag is a snippet of code that retailers add to their site in much the same way that they add other universal tracking tags like Facebook Inc.’s Facebook Pixel.
Building audiences off of actions a shopper has taken on a merchant’s website can drive consumers to take action, Fumarola says.
The social network also renamed its lookalikes targeting tool “actalikes.” The rebranding of the tool, which let a retailer target consumers who share traits or behaviors with a retailer’s visitor or customer list, is part of Pinterest’s effort to distinguish its tool from Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences, Google’s Similar Audiences and other competitors’ similar offerings.
“We want to emphasize what’s unique about Pinterest,” he says. “Lookalike suggests that you’re building audiences based on demographics. If a platform has a lot of demographic data, that’s great. But we have more than that: We have engagement data that other platforms don’t have. We know what our users like, what they want to do, what they’ve done. Actalikes more effectively communicates that we understand how our users think and act.”
While it is still early to proclaim success for Pinterest’s advanced ad targeting tools, the first results are promising. The social network says advertisers using those tools have seen an 80% increase in click-through rates to their websites compared to their ads on the platform. It declined to offer more specific details.
Fumarola argues that by gathering information about a shopper’s intent, it offers something distinct and more valuable than other data offered by Facebook, Google and other competitors. The numbers support his claim. Fully 55% of Pinterest users shop or find products on the social network, according to the recently released “Internet Trends 2016,” a presentation on the state of the internet by Mary Meeker of the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. That far outpaces its closest competitors Facebook (12%), Instagram (12%) and Twitter (9%).
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