The Ultimate Guide to Promoted Pins on Pinterest

Promoted pins on Pinterest can be a really amazing marketing tool for your blog or small business. To start with, your cost per conversion or click is usually much lower than running the same ad on Instagram or Facebook. Secondly, because Pinterest is a search engine and not a social media tool, the results you do generate are more targeted. There is a lot of confusion around setting up and running profitable promoted pin campaigns on Pinterest so I thought it was time to write up a complete guide to promoted pins on Pinterest for you! 

What Type of Pin Should You Promote?

It’s important right from the start to have a goal in mind for your campaign. Are you just wanting to drive more traffic to a couple of blog posts? Or, is there a certain blog post filled with affiliate links that you want to drive traffic to in order to make more affiliate marketing income?

Knowing what you hope to achieve with your promoted pin campaign is the first step to make sure you are setting it up correctly and for the right deliverables.

If you have a pin that is really performing well organically, that would be a good pin to add to a promoted pin campaign to drive even more traffic to it. No matter what, make sure your pin design is on point! You can have your campaign set up perfectly, but if your pin design isn’t getting the right people to click on it, it’s not going to be worth it.

 

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The Different Types of Campaigns You Can Run

The first tip – don’t use ‘quick ad creation’. If you do that, you might as well flush money down the toilet, honestly. You want to have some say and specifications on your ads to achieve your goal. That’s why it’s so important to learn and understand all of the options Pinterest provides when creating an advertising campaign.

The current type of campaigns you can run are for:

• Brand Awareness
• Video Views
• Traffic
• App Install
• Conversions
• Catalog Sales

Whatever you want to achieve with your campaign, is what you would choose for your campaign objective here. Do you just want to draw new visitors into a blog post? You might want to run a normal Traffic geared campaign. Do you want people to take action and sign up for your newsletter? Then you’ll want a Conversion campaign.

 

Campaign Ad Spend

On this first page, you have the option of choosing your ad campaign spend, either a daily or lifetime amount. An advertising campaign, much like with organic pins on Pinterest, requires some learning time so it’s essential that you plan to run a campaign for a minimum of 2 weeks for best results (even longer if your objective isn’t traffic or brand awareness). It usually takes a few days for your ad to be approved, and then a week for the algorithm to learn your campaign and target it to the right people and in the right way.

For me, I usually start most campaigns with a $50-$100 budget for 2 weeks, but it completely depends on your objective and budget. If you are running a conversion campaign, for example, you’ll likely need a higher overall budget to get great results.

 

Targeting on Promoted Pin Campaigns

Pinterest offers a lot of ways that you can niche down your ad targeting for your campaign. We’ll walk through all of them so you know what they are and what they can be used for:

1. Interests

Here you can choose categories that you’d like your target audience to be interested in. There aren’t currently a whole lot of options here for certain categories, so there might not be much to select here and that’s okay! 

But, for example, if I was promoting a blog titled ‘How to Find the Right Wedding Photographer for You’ and I was a wedding photographer, I could select the following interests that would apply:

2. Keywords

Good old keywords! My favorite place as an SEO obsessed person. Here is where you can really niche down the types of words and phrasing that your target audience might be searching for. Pinterest also provides you with information on the average number of searches that keyword or phrase currently has.

You generally want to have about 25-100 keywords here that are targeted for your ad’s purpose. Really think about what else your target audience might be searching for.

To stay with the wedding photographer blog post example, I might use the following keywords:

3. Demographics

You can also narrow down your ad audience for your promoted pins demographically by using the following. You’ll want to use these if your audience size is still really massive or if they truly do apply to who would be interested in your pin content.

Keeping with the example, as a wedding photographer, I might choose only Women, aged 18-44, only in the US. If I don’t have my website translated, I might only choose English language, too, to narrow down my targeting even more.

4. Ad Group Placement

Only want your promoted pin to appear in Search or in Browse only? You can select that here, but it’s generally not necessary. 99% of the time you’ll want to leave ‘All’ selected for this field.

 

Custom Audiences for Promoted Pin Campaigns

If you have a claimed website and installed the Pinterest tracking code you can set up a custom audience using one of the following audience lists:

• Website Traffic – people who have visited your website before
• List of Customers – you can upload a list of customers to target (for example, from your email list if it’s large enough)
• Engaged Audience – people who have engaged with your domain pins on Pinterest previously
• Actalike Audience – an audience that acts similar to an audience you already have

 

Budget and Schedule

When it comes to your budget for your promoted pin campaign, you have two options:

Daily Budget or Overall Budget

This is how much total you want to spend on your campaign and promoted pin. You can choose to either spend a certain amount per day or a total budget. I usually go with the total budget option as some days are going to be more active than others and I don’t want to run out of my budget spend by 2 pm every day or something.

Bid Per Click or Action

You can either let Pinterest choose your spend per click (or conversions, etc. depending on your campaign type), but it’s always better to pick your own budget and slowly increase or tweak it as needed. Pinterest normally suggests a range between $1-$3, depending on your keywords and audience size. 

My best advice – start at $0.20 and increase it as needed if you aren’t seeing results after the first 5-7 days.

Scheduling

How long do you want your promoted pin campaign to run? I normally suggest at least 2 weeks, because as I mentioned earlier, it takes about 5-7 days for the algorithm to understand and learn what your pin is about to show it to the right audience.

I would review results every 5-7 days to review your analytics and performance, and then tweak/adjust things as needed.

 

Analyzing Results and Metrics

When it comes to monitoring and reviewing your metrics for your promoted pin campaign, there are several things you can do to make them work better and figure out how to adjust them correctly.

Getting a lot of impressions but a low click-through rate (under .5%)?

You might need to add more keywords or switch out some keywords to find ones that are better suited for your audience. The people that are being shown your pin aren’t clicking on, why not? Either they aren’t being targeted properly through the keywords you set, or your pin design might need some improvements to encourage more clicks and draw attention.

Not getting many impressions?

You should try increasing your bid per click/action, increase it by 0.10 to 0.20, wait 5 days, and then check the performance since the change.

 

Final Thoughts

Promoted pin campaigns can be a great resource for driving more targeted traffic to your website or blog, but they aren’t a ‘set it and leave it’ kind of thing. You need to monitor and adjust your campaigns accordingly to really maximize your results. With the right tools and knowing what to look for, you’ll have amazing results in no time! 

Have any Pinterest or promoted pin questions? Let me know in the comments! If you’d like to work with me for Pinterest management, pin design, or promoted campaign set up, you can learn more right here about my packages and services offered.