Pinterest  ads: Are you thinking about investing your marketing dollars in Pinterest ads? Warning!

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is that they are too quick to choose a conversion campaign. I mean c’mon isn’t that what we all want, faster sales?  Well sorry but as a Pinterest expert that is not always the best strategy. First, you need to make sure you are set up for success. One of the first things I look for is to make sure there are enough people to target. Do you know where to look for that? 🙂

Pinterest Ads: What is a conversion campaign?

It is a campaign that is aimed at moving a prospect to various events on the buying cycle.  From initial pin click, to outbound click to your website, to add to cart, to purchase.

Conversion campaign will optimize towards the next step in the buying journey. At first its goal can be to get you the cheapest traffic to your site.  Then conversion campaigns help you drive actions on your website, tracked by the Pinterest tag. Conversions campaigns are often linked to; Checkout, Signup, Lead, or Add to Cart events. 

How to Prepare for your Conversion Campaign 

Here are the steps you need to follow to start running a Conversion campaign:

1. Begin by placing the Pinterest ads tag on your website
2. Make sure that you are tracking at least one of the following supported events: Checkout, Add to Cart, Signup or Lead

Pinterest Ads: How to Create a Conversion campaign

Step 1. Select Conversions for your campaign objective.

• If it’s grayed out, you haven’t met the requirements.

Step 2. Fill in your Pinterest ads campaign details then click Continue to set up your ad group.

This is for your eyes only so you can name your campaign whatever you want.

Step 3. Fill in your ad group details then click Continue.

This is for your eyes only so you can name your campaign whatever you want.

Step 4. Choose your targeting details.

• For the sake of this tutorial I will choose “Find New Customer”. I will click “Select”

5. Add “Interests”.

 

• When choosing the topics for Pinterest ads think about which ones your products or services fall under.

• For example, one of our clients sells engagement rings. It this case it makes sense to choose “Wedding”. Next, narrow down your choices.

Step 6: Add keywords for Pinterest ads success

• Add your keywords.
• The number of keywords you add doesn’t really matter you just have to make sure they are very relevant to the product. 
• And in this example above we don’t need to do much with this type of campaign because “Interests” will take up most of the budget versus keywords. 

Step 7: Demographics

• Choose Gender
• Choose Age
• Choose Locations
• Choose Languages (I would choose “All”)
• Choose Devices (I would choose “All”)

Step 8: Budget and schedule

• I would choose “Daily”.

Budget should be at least $50. Setting your budget from day 1 is crucial because Pinterest has to learn more about your account in the beginning stages. This initial process is called the Learning Mode. 

During this phase, your campaign may experience some performance fluctuations.

Once the learning mode it is complete and Pinterest ads has enough data, they will show your ads to the people most likely to convert. At this point, your campaign’s performance should stabilize and you can make changes. 

One of the biggest mistakes advertisers and businesses make is that they make changes too quickly because they are impatient. Pinterest ads has an algorithm on their ads too it’s not only on organic activity. 

Pinterest will not just push your content the moment you hit publish because they need to learn more about your data. That means you should not make changes for at least 14 days. 

Give Pinterest the time they need to complete the initial learning process because if you mess with it too soon it will take you even longer and ultimately you’ll waste your money and leave thinking Pinterest doesn’t work. It works; in this case it was you who insisted on making changes in the first 14 days that kept screwing up results.

After that you don’t make more than 2 rounds of changes per week. Allow Pinterest ads 3-5 days for the campaign to re calibrate, learn, and adjust after each change so that it can deliver the best results. You’ll get a better idea of true campaign performance if you assess weekly or monthly rather than daily.

Choose “Run continuously” so the algorithm continues to work in your favor. 

Note: If you decide to add more keywords in step 6 it will not restart or hurt the learning mode. 

Step 9: Optimization and delivery

• Choose “add to cart” because that will typically be a bigger reach than compared to “checkout”. This will also help give the algorithm more data to work with. 
• Choose “automatic” bidding. 

Step 10: 

• Choose your pins, and hit “Publish”. 

Remember to always use Pinterest ads best practices when creating your images. Aim for lifestyle images if your budget allows it. If you want more audience or sales connect with me to get some help with Pinterest ads/ Promoted Pins to compliment your organic efforts and together you can maximize the power of Pinterest.