If you use Pinterest for commercial purposes, take note: The social network just added three ad tools to enhance marketing and advertising for business profiles.
Accounts using the Pinterest Ads Manager can now implement “customer list targeting,” which uses emails or mobile ad IDs to target promoted pins at existing customers; “visitor retargeting,” which reaches users who have already visited an account; and “lookalike targeting” that attracts Pinterest users who have similar interests and demographics to pre-existing followers, according to the Pinterest for Business Blog.
“Businesses who work with one of our Marketing Developer Partners will be able to target these audiences by the end of the month,” said Frank Fumarola, product manager at Pinterest, in the Pinterest for Business Blog post. “To make it easier for you to onboard your data, we’re also working with Epsilon and LiveRamp.”
The Marketing Developer Partners on Pinterest help businesses “manage, scale, and optimize their Promoted Pins.”
Fumarola’s blog post said businesses that tested the new marketing and advertising tools saw favorable results. Click-through rates increased up to three times for visitor retargeting and up to 63 percent for lookalike targeting, while reaches increased up to 30 times, according to the Fumarola.
Ad tools only targeted users based on their gender, location, device, keywords, and interests before the advancement, according to Ad Age.
These new ways to build e-commerce are comparable to features that Twitter and Facebook offer.
Customer list targeting “is similar to Twitter’s Tailored Audiences and Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which let brands serve ads to users by plugging in email addresses or mobile device IDs,” and Pinterest’s new lookalike targeting “is similar to Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences,” according to Ad Age.
That begs the question, will Pinterest come up with a new strategy if these ad tools yield more profit?
Pinterest was valued at $11 billion last March, according to Tech Crunch. A recent internet trend study by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins suggests that 55 percent of Pinterest account holders use the site for shopping. The Promoted Pins feature increases sales up to five times more than the industry average, according to an Oracle Data Cloud study.
With Pinterest’s recent investment in business marketing, it’s likely these numbers will only grow.
