Pinterest?s Promoted Pins aim high in 2015
Beginning Jan. 1, all marketers will have access to Pinterest?s Promoted Pins, an offering that has been in beta for the past several months, with the expansion including new brand ad formats for more advanced targeting.
Pinterest's newly launched Pinstitute will aim to help businesses learn how to connect with their followers and see a greater return from Pinterest. The visual storytelling capabilities offered on Pinterest are appealing to brands as they continue to invest more heavily in digital marketing yet are still trying to find the strategies that help create deeper consumer connections.
?Pinterest is surprisingly late in its ad platform roll out,? said Shuli Lowy, marketing director of mobile at Ping Mobile. ?The social platform, which has amassed more than 70 million users and is currently valued at $5 billion, has generated virtually no revenue.
?Competing social platforms have been running ads for years,? she said. ?Early speculation is that Pinterest ads may outperform competitor social platforms because of the nature of Pinterest browsing.
Facebook and Instagram are known as social tools, and Twitter is known as a news tool. Pinterest, on the other hand, is used for aspirational content. It?s where people go to discover new things. We can more easily envision consumers responding to an ad in a discovery focused setting than a social setting.?
Ongoing research
Pinterest has found some promising results from its tests of Promoted Pins.
The social media site claims that Promoted Pins are just as effective, and sometimes more, than organic Pins. Brand advertisers achieved about a 30 percent bump in earned media, or free impressions, from their campaigns. The percentage is from people who saw a Promoted Pin and thought it was good enough to save to one of their own boards.
?Brands that are testing out the Promoted Pins are targeting users based on their gender, location, and pages of interest,? Ms. Lowy said. ?New additions to the Pinterest analytical tools will focus on attribution?namely, noticing which Pins ultimately lead directly to a sale.
?Ad attribution is key to growth as it enables advertisers to justify their budget,? she said. ?Pinterest will also send users more customized content based on which products individuals have purchased through Pins.
?Consumers can still opt to not be tracked.?
Engagement has also been strong; the average Pin in repined 11 times, which remains true for Promoted Pins if not higher.
Pinterest also believes its Pins continue to perform even after campaigns end. Since Pins last forever, the platform often saw an extra 5 percent bump in earned media in the month following the end of a campaign.
Also, brands both in and out of Pinterest?s core categories found success. From financial services to food to automotive, brands from a wide array of industries saw results, according to Pinterest?s research.
Auction-based Promoted Pins are also seeing success. Many of Pinterest?s self-serve beta partners are seeing gains in traffic and impressions. The platform is still making tweaks to the product and wants to make sure it is perfected before it is rolled out.
?Brands have been testing out Promoted Pins with select advertisers,? Ms. Lowy said. ?This is common practice on any social platform releasing a new ad format.
?Pinterest needs to make sure that the ad experience doesn?t completely jeopardize the site experience,? she said. ?It also needs to build up some case studies to show that the ads work.
?The social platform has already released several case studies demonstrating the boost provided by ads. The brand has stated that some campaigns are averaging 11 repins per ad, adding a 30 percent impression boost beyond the campaign budget.?
A new offering, the Pinstitute will focus on two aspects: creative and measurement. Through this solution, brands will learn what types of Pins perform well, what Pinners care about and how Pinterest?s products will play a role in the future. Pinterest also wants to use the Pinstitute as a source of feedback to see how it can do better.
The platform is inviting a select group of brands and agencies to attend quarterly Pinstitute workshops where they can learn, exchange ideas and meet with the Pinterest product team. The first workshop is scheduled for sometime in March.
For smaller businesses, Pinterest is planning a series of webinars and other online learning tools.
?Promoted Pins should focus on inspiring consumers with an image that is breathtaking, unique, or creative,? Ms. Lowy said. ?Advertisers who are planning on running campaigns on Pinterest should get on board with Pinstitute, a program through which the social platform plans to educate advertisers on ads that work best on their platform.
?Pinterest will also release webinars and other online learning tools for advertisers.?
The right platform
Numerous brands have relied on Pinterest to boost their marketing efforts.
For example, Kraftrecipes.com was one of the first to take advantage of Pinterest?s Promoted Pins as a way to reach its customers with the right content at the right time.
With the launch of paid Promoted Pins, which debuted with a handful of big brands such as General Mills, Nestlé, Expedia.com and Gap attached, Pinterest has taken its potential as a marketing platform to the next level. These big brands are betting that Pinterest?s unique positioning as a consumer destination throughout the entire discovery process for new products will translate to increased brand awareness and sales (see story).
The list of brands that joined to the program also included ABC Family, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Target. General Mills was similarly looking to inspire Pinterest users with new ways to use its products in their recipes. Its Promoted Pins have been focused on the brands Old El Paso and Yoplait.
For Expedia, Pinterest ads make a lot of sense because it is a place where consumers already do their planning for trips. Expedia has run several contests on Pinterest and seen thousands of consumers engage with its content.
?Of course, when Facebook first rolled out their ads they also had a slew of case studies to prove that their ads worked, but somehow the present day ads look nothing like the initial ad roll out,? Ms. Lowy said. ?Initial advertisers on a social platform will always be, in some way, guinea pigs.
?Promoted Pins certainly have a lot of potential,? she said. ?As time goes on Pinterest will become better at training brands about the types of ads that work and may likely evolve the ad unit to appease both consumers and advertisers.?
Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York