Pinterest is quickly becoming the go to discovery tool for millennial women. Despite having an average age of 40-years-old, most active pinners are millennials. In fact, Pinterest reaches 52% of all millennials in the US.

For on and offline retailers, Pinterest is a vital part of your marketing plan.

• 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest
• 72% of Pinners use Pinterest to decide what to buy offline
• 93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases
• Every day nearly 2 million people pin product rich Pins

For service companies and B2B companies, Pinterest is still an important platform to utilize for SEO. Why? Over 5% of all referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest. Pinterest boasts a domain authority of 100 and a page authority of 97. That’s higher than LinkedIn, Instagram, Buzzfeed and even CNN.

Two-Thirds of the Pins on Pinterest represent brands and products. If you want your Pins to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to use some form of paid advertising whether it’s influencer or promoted Pins.

In an effort to increase revenue Pinterest has greatly expanded its targeting capabilities. There are now six primary opportunities, most of which can be combined to create highly targeted audiences. Best of all, Pinterest’s minimum audience size among the lowest of any platform. Facebook requires 1,000, Google 1,500 and LinkedIn 300.

Audience Targeting

• Actalike – It’s the Pinterest version of Lookalike (Facebook) and Similar (Google) audience targeting. The great thing about this feature is that it only requires an audience size of 100 users to create the Actalike/Lookalike/Similar audience, whereas Facebook and Google require much larger lists. Other pros of Actalike targeting include layering and variance of 1% to 10%. Not only do these audiences look similar to your audience list, they also have similar engagement activity too. When combined, these features allow for the targeting of new and niche audiences.
• Customer – Customer targeting uses your list of email addresses to target (or exclude) your current customers from your marketing campaigns. It can take up to 24 hours for Pinterest to process the list and match it to users. The minimum match to use this targeting is 100 people. Keyword targeting can be layered on top of customer targeting to further narrow the audience, however, the overall audience size still needs to be at least 100 pinners.
• Visitor – Visitor targeting is similar to Engagement in that it requires the Pinterest Tag be added to your site. Unlike Engagement targeting, Visitor targeting focuses on engagement within your site instead of your pins. This targeting method allows you to create an audience based on people who have visited specific pages of your site, such as the Shopping Cart or Contact Us page. You can also use Visitor targeting to create an audience of Pinners who have already converted on your site so that they can be excluded from future campaigns. This is especially important for Lead Gen campaigns. Whether you’re including or excluding this audience, it still needs to consist of at least 100 pinners.

Interest

Promoted Pins using this targeting method appear in the user’s home feed and is based on what they have saved, liked, or followed.

This Promoted Pin, which is also a Buyable Pin, is an example of interest targeting. It would appear in the home feed of a pinner that has interacted with fitness related pins. While the Pin below is also an example of interest targeting, appearing in the home feed of pinners who have interacted with “gift idea” related Pins, its purpose is to increase traffic to, and engagement on, their website.

Keyword

Promoted Pins that use Keyword targeting appear in search results and as Related Pins. This is a great targeting method for B2B service providers.

These Promoted Pins appeared for the keyword “digital marketing”. The one of the left is an example of brand awareness and engagement because it contains valuable information within the Pin itself as opposed to the Pin on the left, which requires the user to visit the advertiser’s website in order to get the free template. Important note: while the Pin on the left does give the searcher useful information within the Pin, it is also an example of a One-Tap Pin. One-Tap Pins take people straight to the business’s site. They are currently in beta and only available to the highest-performing advertisers.

In addition to these targeting methods, Pinterest also offers six ad formats. The type of targeting and ad format you use will depend on what your overall objective is. If you’re interested in learning more about how Pinterest advertising fits into your overall marketing strategy, contact us today!