Pinterest Advertising: How to Measure Your Success

If you’ve been following my work you might have heard me say “you’ve got to inspect what you expect”. 

When you look inside of the Pinterest advertising reporting tool there’s no doubt it can be intimidating especially if you’re not a numbers person.  Be patient with yourself; you can learn this stuff, just get through any awkward times in the beginning and it will eventually sink in, I promise. And like everything in life the more you do it the easier it gets.

In this tutorial on Pinterest Advertising I’m going to show you:

• How to check your progress
• The most important metrics to track 

Step 1: On the tab menu click on “Ads”, and then on the drop down menu click “Reporting”.  

Step 2: Select your Pinterest advertising filters.

• Use the filters below the graph to change the date range, objective, status or conversion settings. 
• Then click the checkbox you want to view. 
• You can also customize how  Pinterest advertising metrics are calculated in the reporting table by creating custom columns.

Let me explain how each filter works and what they mean.

1. Date range

• Select a predefined date range or customize a specific date range within the last year.
• If you launched a Pinterest advertising campaign within the last 24 hours and you do not see results in the graph, change the predefined date from “Last 7 days” to “Today” or “Hourly”. 
• The default date, “Last 7 days”, doesn’t include the current date. You can select any 3-day range within the most recent 7 days to pull reporting data on an hourly basis. 
• Selecting the “Hourly” predefined date will automatically display the most recent 3 days of reporting data on an hourly basis.

2. Objective

• Select one or more campaign objectives to view. 
• For multi-objective reporting, select each of the objectives you want to view, and then click “Spend” in the top-right of the graph to choose which metric to graph. Hover over a bar in the graph to see data broken out by campaign objective.

3. Status

• Select one or more campaign statuses to view. You can customize your view to see statuses at the campaign, ad group or ad level.

4. Conversion settings

Select a conversion window, date and source. 

• Conversion windows in Pinterest advertising tells us what conversion data to use when delivering ads to Pinners – this is what is used for optimization. 
• Attribution windows in Pinterest advertising, on the other hand, are about measuring value – this tells us which conversions you value to achieve your business objectives. 
• Both conversion windows and attribution windows are expressed using a lookback window (time from conversion event to ad event) as well as ad engagement type (post-click, post-engagement or post-view). The lookback windows Pinterest uses are: 30 days, 7 days and 1 day. 
• A longer attribution window will better measure how you influence people’s decision-making process on Pinterest. 
• Pinterest recommend 30 days for clicks, 30 days for engagements and 1 day for views (30/30/1).

When deciding on the right windows to use, keep in mind:

• Your business’ purchase cycle: Typically lower-priced (or staple) products are purchased more quickly than higher-priced (or durable/luxury) items. If your product has a long purchase consideration period, it’s especially important to choose a longer window.
• Align with the measurement attribution windows: Pinterest recommends aligning your conversion and attribution windows as closely as possible. 

Step 3: Campaign structure

Every Pinterest advertising campaign has three levels: Campaign, ad group, and ad. Campaigns house ad groups, and each ad group contains a collection of ads.

Campaigns: this is the head of the hierarchy. At the campaign level, you can select a campaign objective and set an optional campaign spend limit. If you’re running a campaign with the consideration objective, you can also set your budget at the campaign level. Each campaign can contain more than one ad group.

Ad Groups: all the targeting lives here. At the ad group level, you can choose where your ads will show on Pinterest and set the budget, bid, run dates, and targeting for all the ads housed within them. Ad groups let you address the different regions, product lines, and target audiences that may be a part of a single campaign. They also allow you to test the performance of various targeting and objective strategies without creating multiple campaigns.

Product Groups: all the targeting for products lives here.

Ads: this is where all the pins are for each campaign. Ads are the pins people see. Each ad sits within an ad group and has a unique URL and creative. You can create multiple ads in a single Pinterest advertising ad group to test which variations of creative work best with your targeted audience.

Keywords: are where all the keywords you optimize for lives. 

Step 4: Select table filters

Use existing table filters to edit the information in your table as shown below the image on the far right. 

• Overview: Include top-line metrics like impressions and Pin clicks
• Delivery: Include delivery metrics like paid and earned metrics
• Performance: Include conversion metrics for events captured by the Pinterest tag
• Video: Include views and completion rate metrics for video Pins

Step 5: Here are the metrics I track; the ones I feel matter most for successful Pinterest advertising

Choose “Performance” under Table as shown on the image above, top right corner.

a. Spend

This means the amount of money you spent during the reporting time period. You’ll notice in the above image it shows $600.06.

b. CPM

This means average cost per 1,000 impressions. That is what you are paying for. As you can see above shows $6.16.

c. CTR

This means total pin clicks divided by total number of impressions. 

A higher click through rate means you’ll get lower CPM which means you will reach more people.  According to Pinterest anything above .65 is good. We were able to get our clients at least 3.02% which is phenomenal. 

d. Total CPA (checkout)

This means average cost per checkout event.

e. Total ROAS (checkout)

This means average return on ad spend for checkout events. 

f. Total conversions (checkout) 

This means the total number of checkouts you received. The image above shows 3 checkout.

g. Total order value (checkout)

This is the total value of checkout event resulting from interactions with your ad. The image above shows $11,409. 

Summary

I must say this is fabulous ROI for my client. This Pinterest advertising campaign has only been running for two days, and they have already achieved 1901.31% return on his investment! If you want more audience or sales connect with me for a free 20 minute strategy session to get some help with Pinterest ads/ Promoted Pins to compliment your organic efforts and together you can maximize the power of Pinterest.