Pinterest Ads are now live for Australia
The retailer's best friend, visual marketing site Pinterest has finally opened up its advertising platform to Australian users, and smart small businesses and retailers are moving quickly to make the most of their established presence or rushing now to establish one.
Advertisers are now able to run one of three specialised Pinterest campaign types, each with its own distinct goal.
Pin Engagement campaigns are charged on a cost-per-click basis, and fairly simply put will show a specified pin in the home feed of your targeted audience. Established Pinners may have seen some of these in their own feed listed as "Promoted Pin". You are charged when a user interacts with (re-pins, saves, sends, likes, or clicks through) your pin.
This is an excellent tactic for publishers of new blogs or websites, or for those new to Pinterest. You may not have a huge personal following on the site yet, but that can easily be overcome through a little pay-to-play.
Similarly, Website Traffic campaigns are also cost-per-click, and are effectively a specialised form of Pin Engagement campaign where the only engagement you are charged for is the click through to your site.
Website traffic campaigns work by promoting one of your existing pins, so can be more effective for those who have already built up some "juice" on Pinterest, whereby users able to promote pins that have a demonstrated history of success on the platform should fare better.
Brand Awareness campaigns offer the same targeting options as other campaign types, but differ in that they are charged on a price-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis. In this type of campaign, therefore costs can be readily predicted and controlled, but the campaign metrics will ultimately be less defined, so success or failure much more difficult to measure.
Pinterest offers full analytics on all campaign types, so advertisers will obtain full data on any form of engagement with their pins.
Brand awareness campaigns, however, which lack a specific, measurable end user activity as their goal are generally not recommended as a startpoint. Pinterest, as a social platform, should not be somewhere users first encounter your brand in an advertising context.
Targeting Options
Pinterest Ads feature many of the usual demographic targeting options - User Interests, Gender, Device Type, etc., but the platform is FAR less developed than its competitors in that it is unable to target by Age, nor geotarget by a region more defined than "Australia". More established ad markets Canada and the US now have state-based geotargeting, so one assumes Aussies will also see this eventually.
Some basic retargeting options are also available, so users can upload an existing customer/target list by email, or target users by activity on your website or interaction with one of your pins. Pinterest Ads will also build lookalikes of any of these audiences.
So, now we have ANOTHER option in the seemingly endless array of digital advertising platforms on the market.
Pinterest Ads: Who should be doing it?
At Rattling Tram, we are currently recommending that RETAILERS, particularly those whose customer base skews more FEMALE and towards the GEN-Xer than Gen-Z, and most definitely anyone who is selling online, need to make Pinterest an urgent marketing priority. If that sounds like you, you're the sort we'd be recommending should be exploring the newly-unleashed potential of Pinterest Ads.
Likewise, if you have a large existing customer database, and particularly if that customer base skews female, finding these people on Pinterest should be an absolute push-over. Pinterest may well prove to be a cheaper and more effective means of remarketing to your existing customers than using Google's Display Network.
For everyone else, we'd recommend starting out with FREE Pinterest, getting to know the platform and building your own following organically for a few months before throwing any money at advertising.
Pinterest is a unique beast amongst social media platforms, and those coming to it from experience with those platforms may well find the learning curve steeper than expected. Which is of course one way Rattling Tram is here to help.
You'll find plenty of tips, hacks, pointers and infographics at our own Pinterest board - Pin-tastic Pinterest Marketing Depot - Australia.
Thinking about getting started? Questions? Contact Rattling Tram here, we just love helping out.
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