How Pinterest is Helping Retailers Through Enhanced Discovery and New Ad Options

While COVID-19 may have closed brick and mortar stores, it also has proven the efficiency in e-commerce when it comes to scaling sales and setting up shop and platforms are finding their role in the shift. Pinterest, most recently introduced including a new storefront profile, faster Catalogs feed ingestion, collections as a shopping ad format, video for collections, automatic bidding, conversion insights and analysis, and an improved product tagging test. This follows a new finding, that is, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest has grown over 85 percent in the past six months.

Here’s a recap of the latest updates and how you can put them to work for your bramd.

Transforming Shop Tabs to Storefronts

In the absence of the physical in-store browsing experience, discovery is everything. Pinterest is supporting merchants in this regard by giving the storefront profile an overhaul complete with “featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations.”

With more ways to present their products on the tab, the goal is to encourage more online shopping behavior that nods to the in-store experience. Pinterest is also working on a product tagging option which would allow retailers to tag their products in scene images further instilling a sense of inspiration users of the platform notoriously crave. Finally, when searching for shopping-related ideas users will be shown recommended merchants based on the particular category. For instance, if you search ‘wool coat’ an option for Bluxome would appearch in addition to the product description including a link to purchase and the retail price.

Catalogs feed ingestion and video

Pinterest is also improving its catalog ingestion process. For brands, having an intuitive way to connect their product listings directly to their Pins is table stakes and the platform is eager to streamline this to take the hassle out of uploading catalogs and shorten the time required to activate shopping ads. Further, merchants will have the option to designate a main asset and a corresponding product image in their uploads to create a multi-image ad unit.

Beyond these more basic updates, the company is also using this opportunity to lean into video, a format that continues to be top of mind. With this feature, brands have the option to apply video as a hero in a Collections ad unit to share their store in more innovative and compelling ways that drive inspiration to action.

As part of its Q2 update, Pinterest revealed that catalog ingestion had grown 10x in the first half of 2020. Chances are this will increase even further as merchants look to add more shoppable Pins to augment sales on the platform and capitalize on the rise of e-commerce.

Automatic bidding & conversion analysis

A primary concern for marketers is ensuring their ad bids align with their objectives. At a high level, automatic bidding taps into internal insights including key metrics to map campaigns to the right users based on their interests, habits, and history.

Pinterest specifically introduced automatic budding for shopping aimed at maximizing sales for brands on the platform in an easy, automatic, and effective way. Advertisers keep control over an ad group’s bid and can adjust as necessary to aim for the maximum number of results while promotions are geared towards users with a history of buying or displaying purchase intent.

“On average, advertisers who tested Automatic Bidding for Catalog Sales saw 28 percent more conversions when optimizing for the ‘Conversion’ event and nearly 29 percent more clicks when optimizing for ‘Click’ event for the same budget,” the company shared.

Lastly, in today’s environment adaptability and a willingness to experiment is a core element of any strategy small or large. To help brands test and see how their campaigns are performing across different objectives Pinterest rolled out a series of new “Conversation Analysis” visualization tools that illustrate how a consumer is completing their path to purchase. By having these fundamental pieces of information presented in a familiar funnel, marketers not only gain a clearer picture of future expectations but immediate new ways to prove impact including a comparison of multiple attribution views.

It is important to note that Shoppable Product Pins has increased by 44 percent in 2020, while the number of Pinners engaging within shopping surfaces across the app has grown over 85 percent in the past six months. Pinterest also surpassed the 416 million monthly active users threshold demonstrating its evolving reach so finding new windows to help marketers advertise doesn’t seem all that far fetched and could further expand its offering.

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