Scaling ads on Pinterest allows you to grow your brand, but it also comes at higher costs, so a lot of businesses hesitate. It’s understandable that you’re hesitant to scale Pinterest ads that work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
But if you want to reach a wider audience and build upon what already works for your company, then scaling is the best way to progress.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about how to scale ads on Pinterest, including choosing the right ad types and optimizing your campaigns for performance and cost effectiveness.
Pinterest Success Tips: How to Scale Your Ad Campaign
Scaling Pinterest ads is easy:
- Go to the Ad Set Level on Pinterest
- Select Ad Set, then Edit Budgets
- Increase your ad spend budget by a desired amount
If you’re not sure how much to scale, 20% is a good starting point. You should never go higher than double your current ad budget, and you can also set a safety amount for different groups. Safety amounts cap your spending, so you don’t go over budget, no matter how well your ads perform.
You can scale a Pinterest ad campaign using a fixed dollar amount or a percentage. So, whether you want to increase by $2,000 or 30% of your current budget, increasing is simple and straightforward.
Pinterest Ads – The Art of Targeting
Targeting is crucial to any ad campaign. Pinterest ad targeting allows you to fine-tune the algorithm and ensure the right people see what you’re promoting. You create ad groups to further segment your target audience. This allows you to more easily showcase particular products or content based on a group’s interests.
Shopping ads can be effective in a number of ways, whether you’re focusing on engagement or retargeting page viewers within the last 30 days. It all depends on your brand’s current consumer base and focal point.
But what you need to always remember is that targeting should be an ongoing process. You should choose audiences based on particular demographics, then separate them into ad groups that allow you to easy show them the content they’re most likely to resonate with.
Pinterest Ad Benefits
Pinterest ads build brand awareness, increase traffic, and drive sales. They can also generate leads and help you expand your company’s reach for less spending than Facebook. You might also find that Pinterest’s user base aligns better with your brand, making ads here more effective than Facebook and Instagram.
Promoted Pins Are a Turbo-Supercharger
Promoted pins are paid ads that you show to a particular demographic. You’re able to set promoted pins to be shown to people in specific locations, on specific devices, or in certain demographics (like women 24 to 34, for example).
Using promoted pins to drive traffic and increase brand awareness is one of the most effective ways to maximize your ad budget. While a fantastic design will still be key, optimizing promoted pins through Pinterest Ad Manager is what will make the difference between success and stagnation.
Pinterest Ad Types
In case you aren’t familiar with the different types of ad Pinterest allows, here’s a helpful list.
Awareness Campaigns
Awareness campaigns help you build an audience by showing ads to people with particular interests. You select topics that are relevant to your brand, like “health” or “skincare”, and promote pins to people that interact with content in these niches.
Engagement Campaigns
Engagement is all about interaction and increasing connection with your audience. Engagement targeting on Pinterest helps you interact with people who have already engaged with your brand in the last 180 days.
Traffic Campaigns
Traffic campaigns are designed to get people to click through a pin and land on a particular page. If you’re trying to get people to read a particular post or land on a content page to sign up for your mailing list, this is the type of campaign you want to run.
Traffic campaigns can benefit greatly from A/B testing to determine what types of images, page payouts, and keywords are most effective for your goals.
Conversion Campaigns
A conversion campaign is common in businesses running shopping ads. You want people to immediately take interest in what you’re offering and decide they want to have it for themselves. High-quality images are key here because visuals will play the largest role in enticing someone to take action here.
Audience Targeting
You can use audience targeting to make sure your ads reach the best possible audience. We believe that fine-tuning your targeting strategy is the best way to consistently scale ad performance while optimizing costs.
Pinterest Ads Retargeting Audience
Retargeting means showing ads to people who have already seen them or interacted with them in the past. People who previously clicked through to your site or saved one of your pins can be shown pins again in hopes of converting them into leads or customers.
Engagement Audience
Engagement audiences are people who already interact with your brand, so they’re great people to target when you’re scaling. You know that they are already interested in what you have on offer. Now the question is how you can show them more of what they like to reach your marketing goals.
Remember that visibility breeds familiarity, which in turn fosters trust. Tapping into already engaged audience members increase your conversion rates for less time and money.
Customer List Audiences
You can upload existing customers’ emails or mobile IDs to Pinterest Ad Manager and start promoting your content to them directly. Bear in mind that the final audience pool can be smaller than the list you uploaded, so this type of audience targeting is best for businesses with large mailing lists.
Act-alike Audiences
Act-alike audiences are Pinterest’s answer to Facebook’s Lookalike audiences. You can create a new audience based on things like user activity, consumer behavior, and recent engagement. Selecting people who have interacted with your boards and pins or made sales inquiries in the last 30 days are great ways to rapidly expand your reach to high-value prospects.
Keyword Targeting
Keywords targeting is simple — you run ads based on particular keywords or long-tail keyword phrases. This type of targeting shows promoted pins to people looking for a specific idea or product on the platform.
Language Targeting
You may not advertise to English-speaking people, and in that case, opting for language targeting is useful. International brands also use language targeting in their ads to increase conversions with foreign audiences.
Gender Targeting
Lastly, gender targeting helps you reach people who are in your target demographic more easily. Most of Pinterest’s users are female, but there are active subgroups of males who respond to ads just as well. Pinterest also has a unique gender option that allows people to enter their own preferred gender — you can use this to your advantage in some cases as well.
Data & Optimization
What is an Average Order Value, and How Do You Calculate it?
Average order value (AOV) is the average dollar amount your company earns every time someone places an order. To calculate average order value, divide your total revenue by the number of orders.
Why Your Average Order Value Matters for Your Brand
By calculating your AOV, you’ll find out how much you’re really making from ad-driven sales, which can help you determine which campaigns are worth keeping and which ones you should decrease or cancel altogether.
Savings on COGs? Here’s Where to Spend It
Cost of goods sold relates directly to how much your company spent to sell a product. When you realize that you’re saving on COGs, it can be a good idea to invest this into advertising to boost sales on the most cost-effective products.
This can create a positive sales loop that drives the most cost-effective sales for the lowest CPC (cost per click) keywords. In some cases, savings can also help you bid higher on keywords you normally scaled back on.
How To Decrease COGs to Increase Margins
There are several ways you can start cutting COGs to increase your profit margins:
- Use lower-costing materials
- Consider changing shippers or suppliers
- Target customers in the most affordable operating regions
- Require minimum purchase amounts for orders
- Buy in bulk
Reasons Why You Should Include Zenners In Your Pinterest Ads Strategy
Zenners are adults between 55 and 75 who make up a large portion of social media users. So many brands focus solely on Gen Z today, but their parents and grandparents are actually amazing markets to advertise to.
Zenners have bigger budgets, love shopping online, and are more likely to engage with websites over digital natives.
Slow but Mighty: Growing a Pinterest Account Organically
You might think that paying a lot for ads is your only way to grow on Pinterest, but you can still make progress organically, too. In fact, we recommend having a solid organic growth strategy, no matter what your ad budget may be.
Organic Traffic Is Key
Driving organic traffic will help you increase engagement and continually keep your audience engaged without spending. Make sure that you’re always using the best images for your niche, and engage on the platform to boost your own visibility.
Turning to your competitors’ page for research is also a great way to improve your own strategy. See what their top-performing pins are, and identify key qualities that make their content stand out from the crowd.
5 Things to Consider When Scaling Ads on Pinterest
Costs Will Increase
Naturally, scaling ads means increasing costs, so make sure your budget can handle it. When you’re running cost-per-click ads, you may run into a problem if your ads perform well but you don’t convert enough. Without making back what you spent, you actually lose money, despite driving more people to your site or increasing engagement.
You’ll need to balance your COGs, AOV, and CPC to strike the right balance when you scale.
Widen Your Audience
Paying more to be shown to the same people isn’t effective. Instead, you’ll want to broaden your target audience or segment further to make sure you’re effectively distributing your ad spend to the right prospects.
Ad Creatives Are Super Important – Think Outside the Box
Get creative with your pins! You don’t need to recycle the same design formula in all your ads. Being creative and working with new styles allows you to identify different interests and audience behaviors. You might be surprised how deviating from the norm actually lands you more business.
Attribution Can Be Complicated
You can sometimes wind up converting prospects that found you on Pinterest and ultimately converted via another platform. Before you scale ads, it’s a good time to align your other marketing campaigns with your pin strategy. You’ll want to know exactly how you’ll keep track of potential customers and ways you can retarget people based on their Pinterest engagement.
Also, Pinterest might consider certain actions a conversion, even if they don’t lead to any profit for your business. For example, if someone sees a promoted pin and clicks through to your site, Pinterest Ad Manager may report this as a conversion.
Make sure you understand how Pinterest’s algorithm operates, and have your own KPIs for tracking campaign success internally.
Effectiveness of a Campaign Goes Beyond the Ad Itself
Building upon our last point, your campaign success has far more to do with your business than any pin you promote. What’s really going to lead to success is a well-designed website, a relatable brand, and great products and valuable content.
Make sure that you aren’t just seeing ads as a means to an end. They need to be a part of a much larger advertising strategy that aligns with your brand’s value and mission.
What are the best practices for Pinterest video ads?
Video is phenomenal for increasing engagement, but it has to be done right for the most beneficial results. Remember, in marketing, it’s conversions that count, not just views. You want to optimize every dollar in your budget, which requires strategic video design and product placement.
To boost your Pinterest video ads, make sure you do the following:
- Keep them actionable. Present your main CTA within the first 3 seconds.
- Use a strong cover image that makes people want to watch.
- Keep your video between 6 and 15 seconds.
- Focus on visuals over descriptions.
- Use subtitles for users watching with volume off or the hearing impaired.
Can I promote my landing page on Pinterest?
Yes! Using promoted pins to drive traffic to a landing page is a great way to generate new leads. Pinterest can help you creatively promote a lead magnet to the right audience. Strong visuals showcasing what you’re offering makes it easier to get people to sign up for your mailing list or take action.
What are effective products you can advertise on Pinterest?
As with any platform, you should consider market demand before scaling your ads to reach more people. Pinterest is a creative-driven site that’s ideal for marketing products like kitchenware, home decor, art, and DIY/crafting items. Women’s and children’s appeal and beauty products are also popular.
How much should you spend per day on Pinterest ads?
How much you should spend is relative to your budget, but generally speaking, it’s good to dedicate at least $20 to $50 a day if you want to see results quickly. Setting your CPC too low will limit the number of people who interact, but bidding too high may result in wasteful spending with poor ROI.
What’s most important when determining your daily Pinterest ad budget is how much wiggle room you have. Avoid spreading a bigger budget too thinly across multiple ad groups; doing so can result in the same ineffectiveness as setting your budget too low.
What is a good clickthrough rate for Pinterest ads?
The benchmark for Pinterest clickthrough rates (CTR) is 0.20%, but you can boost this with high-quality images, strong keyword integration, and fine-tuned targeting. Expect your average clickthrough rate to be somewhere between 0.20% and 0.30%.
With the right strategy and integration, many businesses can get their CTR to 0.55% or even over 1%!
Just make sure you’re focusing on what comes after the click. People won’t automatically convert because they interact with your pin. You’ll need to have an entire customer journey mapped out to ensure that all your clicks actually lead to more business.