What Are Pinterest Conversion Campaigns?

In April, Pinterest announced a new feature for its advertising platform: Conversion campaigns. Previously, Pinterest only offered pins that could be optimized towards brand awareness and traffic to your website. This new objective is a gamechanger for Pinterest and its advertisers, allowing brands to achieve their business goals and actually measure performance. 

Conversion campaigns allow advertisers to optimize towards specific actions on their website. These actions can include signups, leads, checkouts, and even adds to carts. 

According to Pinterest’s news blog, “With active conversion campaigns, a brand’s ads can reach people on Pinterest who are more likely to take the business’ desired action. Advertisers who care solely about performance have been able to achieve their business goals using manual inputs, but the new conversions objective allows them to hit their goals quickly and easily without additional effort.” 

Pinterest’s features are now making it easier for businesses to advertise on their platform and to drive desired actions. Read on to learn how to get started with this new advertising feature. 

Related: Pinterest is the Dark Horse for 2019

Getting Started with Conversion Campaigns

Before running any sort of advertising campaign on Pinterest, you need to make sure that you have a business account. Once you have your business account set up, you can then implement the Pinterest tag on your website to ensure that the events you want to optimize towards are being tracked correctly. You can optimize your conversion campaigns towards the following:

• Checkout
• Signup
• Lead
• Add to Cart

While you may be tracking these events with your Pinterest tag, you won’t necessarily be able to start Conversion campaigns for these right off the bat. You will need to be driving 50 conversions per week of your desired event type on a Traffic campaign before you can start running Conversion campaigns. For example, if you want to drive a Conversion campaign optimized towards Leads, you will first need to be driving 50 lead conversions per week on a Traffic campaign. 

Pro Tip: If you’re not driving 50 conversions of your desired event type, start with retargeting first! Retargeting users that are already familiar with your brand will more likely drive your desired actions than targeting brand new users. 

After you meet the requirement of 50 minimum conversions, you can then choose this event type when building your Conversion campaign. You can then enter your target CPA and your daily or lifetime budget. 

Related: 5 Tips to Leverage Pinterest in your Paid Social Media Strategy

Learning Mode

Once your Conversion campaigns are set up, it goes through “Learning Mode” where your Pins are shown to different users so that it can learn who is more likely to convert. It’s important to not make any changes to your campaigns during Learning Mode so that the Pinterest algorithm can learn and gather data. If you make a change during Learning Mode, it will reset and take longer to optimize. Learning Mode generally lasts for 1-2 weeks. 

After there is enough data gathered and Learning Mode is complete, Pinterest will be able to optimize accordingly and show your pins to users that are most likely to convert. While you are able to make changes to your campaigns at this point, it’s recommended that you only do so 2 times a week. After any changes, allow a few days for the campaign to learn and adjust for the best results. This is different from Traffic campaigns because instead of analyzing your data daily, you should analyze your Conversion campaigns weekly or monthly. 

Wrapping Up

 With its new release of conversion campaigns, this makes Pinterest an even more appealing platform for advertisers. Especially with the recent heavy saturation of other social media advertising platforms, Pinterest is on the right track with this new offering, and I’m assuming this is just the beginning. With it’s high-intent, visual nature, Pinterest’s new conversion campaigns give brands another way to measure, analyze and drive certain actions on their website.