Advertising On Pinterest: A Simple Guide With Examples To Get You Started

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Updated: April 26th, 2024

What Is Pinterest Advertising?

Pinterest Advertising is a fast-pass ticket to increasing your social media reach by targeting more than 450 million active pinterest users every month.

By running promoted pins, marketers can drive traffic, increase conversions, and boost brand awareness effectively.

For startups, Pinterest Advertising is a great way to boost your business.

Pinterest Advertising Key Takeaways

To give your pins a competitive edge, use high-resolution images and focus on creating a captivating message.
Always stay within Pinterest's recommended ad specifications so you do not end up with truncated or a distorted pin.
Add an element of interactivity and personalization to make sure your Pinterest ads are successful.
Adding your business name or logo to your Pinterest ads is a great way to double on brand awareness and consideration.

Understanding Pinterest Advertising

The promoted pins run on an auction system. Therefore, the Pinterest advertiser places bids on having their pins shown to the target audience. That means that only advertisers who bid the most could win the placement.

Pinterest Ads will be shown to users who are browsing categories that your promoted pin belongs to, or to the feeds of users that Pinterest believes would be interested in your product. Alternatively, the promoted pins could appear in search results on Pinterest.

The Pinterest Ad campaigns require a fine-tuned targeting or a more creative angle to see good results. Just like promoted pins, organic content on Pinterest can generate a lot of sales potential.

The best approach to successful Pinterest advertising is scheduling pins into a queue such that they are pinned at least 5 times per day.

To schedule and queue pins use tools like Buffer or Tailwind

Real World Examples: Pinterest Advertising

1. IKEA USA

IKEA USA is one of the best examples of a global company that uses Pinterest to its advantage. The brand has reached over 500,000 followers on the IKEA USA page and has over 10 million monthly viewers.

IKEA has thousands of Pins featuring the company’s products.

IKEA followers can save the pins, and even share them with friends, which gives the company a marketing advantage over the competitors.

2. Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is a popular travel guide company is our second example of companies that have used Pinterest to their advantage.

With slightly above 790,000 followers on Pinterest, the travel company gets up to 9.3 million monthly views.

The company’s travel board is a super simple but effective tool boosting brand exposure on Pinterest.

How to Get Started

To run Pinterest advertising follow these steps

Create a new Pinterest account for your business
Install a Pinterest Tag so you can track actions visitors take after seeing your Pinterest Ads
Choose Pinterest Campaign goal
Set a Campaign budget
Create an Ad Group
Choose the target audience
Select the advert placement
Add interests and relevant keywords
Set the advert budget and schedule
Tailor the Pinterest ad for optimization and delivery
Determine the perfect pacing
Pick the promoted pins
Monitor the campaign's performance

For startups, running Pinterest Ads can be an overwhelming task. This is especially when you have dozens of responsibilities to attend to daily.

To simplify the experience, one option would be to hire experienced Pinterest marketers via platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and Guru.

Create ads on Pinterest

In addition to regular posting on Pinterest, you can also run ads on the platform.

This can be a great way to boost your business, especially if you're just getting started.

Case Study

Pay for Pinterest Ads

Nobody likes to hear this, but it is truly the key, and the spend is much less than facebook or instagram.

That being said, we find that pinterest is better for driving TRAFFIC than driving sales. Pinterest is the #1 traffic driver to our site, but from there, it is our job to educate the client through different channels and help them to convert.

Don’t pay for simple images or pins that don’t mean anything to your brand. Help create engaging titles to your content which can easily be done on Canva. Everything you see below in our examples was created there!

You can target your audience just like FB/Insta ads and really get direct on how people are searching and help your items show up.

Think of Pinterest like a search engine; like Google. It’s just a visual search engine so the better the image, the better the results!

Brittany Finkle, on starting Happily Ever Borrowed ($5,000/month) full story ➜

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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