Pinterest’s model for businesses is certainly exemplary, with there being a wealth of advertising options for marketers to choose from. With several new tools just launched, will the platform be able to entice a greater number of brands? 

The idea behind Pinterest’s latest tools are to help marketers advertise to users who have visited their sites in the past. Site developers will be able to add a Pinterest conversion tag, enabling marketers to track the user journey, and from there create highly targeted campaigns. The other tools just launched include the “lookalike targeting” tool, which will enable marketers to target users who share similar behavioural traits as their existing ones, and a tool to help compare their existing audience with others. Clearly, the new tools are completely focused on data acquisition- studying the trends in browsing habits, and using this information to formulate improved advertising. Currently, Pinterest allows brands to create Promoted Pins segmented into either Engagement and Traffic campaigns, with specific pins set up as ads for the purposes of measuring on site engagement and leads to the business’s external site. With new tools in place, advertisers will surely be able to better refine these campaigns, and hopefully drive more meaningful activity.

Added to this, Pinterest’s recent release of “Cinematic Pins” last year enabled marketers to start implementing video ad campaigns. Like on Facebook, these play when the user scrolls down, giving a more interactive feel to the platform. We imagine Pinterest’s new tools, combined with its existing ones, will also be helpful to show brands precisely which pins to feature as “buyable” too- those containing products which can be purchased directly in Pinterest. Last year’s Pinterest-commissioned Milward Brown survey showed that 75% of users went on to buying something on or offline, visit a brand, retailer or media website after browsing Pinterest- an already high result where both lead generation and conversions are concerned.

Brands have long understood the power of Pinterest, because in essence, it functions as a search engine, literally showing exactly what users are searching for, and from where they have arrived. In fact, its search model, “Guided Search” is arguably the most impressive and specific to be found on any social media site, enabling users to filter results based on their own pins vs all pins, pinners and boards. And the particularly unique beauty of its search model, is the fact that users can also conduct visual searches- those which allow him or her to highlight a specific portion of an image to search for, which results in similar content shown. Pinterest remarked that their search feature currently sees approximately 2 billion searches per month- not a bad amount when considering Google receives around 90 billion each month. Because of impressive figures such as these combined with positive revenue results, the platform has raised over $1.3 billion in investment capital to date, showing confident forecasting for the future of advertising on the site.

Do you use Pinterest for business and advertising purposes? Do you think the site’s new tools will result in a higher conversion rate? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.