I’ve worked with several eCommerce companies throughout my career, and the thing they all have in common is, "I tried Pinterest ads, and it didn’t work for us."

To start with, getting a 4X ROAS* with Pinterest is possible, and I’ve done it several times with many clients. I mentioned ROAS because it’s the metric most performance marketers are looking for, but the metric depends on a lot of factors that are external to Pinterest.

*ROAS: Return On Ad Spend=Revenue Generated By The Ads/Ad Spend

The main difference between Pinterest and Facebook or Google is the buying cycle. People on Pinterest are usually in the early stages of discovery, while many Facebook or Google users are more eager to buy now. The strong side of Pinterest is that the platform is designed for buyers; 85% of users bought something based on pins from brands.

I’ll give a couple of examples of campaigns that I use constantly and that work for me and my clients:

Shopping ads: For eCommerce companies in the apparel niche, I ALWAYS recommend shopping ads first. They’ll give you by far the highest ROAS. It’s simple: when people are looking for buyable pins, they are even more likely to buy, and that makes shopping ads very powerful.
Keyword Prospecting (Consideration or Traffic): I try to go against Pinterest's best practices when it comes to keyword marketing.They’ll recommend that a keyword prospecting campaign have at least 25 keywords and a sizable audience. What I discovered is that by having just one keyword in an ad group and making ads just for that keyword, it makes my campaigns super relevant, which results in a higher click through rate (CTR). With that high CTR, I then bid between $0.1 and $0.2 per click.
Website retargeting (consideration or traffic): A couple of months ago, before the IOS 14.5 update, 30-day website retargeting audiences used to work pretty well. Unfortunately, for a couple of months, I was in limbo with this type of campaign until I started testing 60-day website retargeting campaigns. This 60-day approach has helped me achieve my ROAS (return on ad spend) goals during the recession.
Conversion campaign: This is one of the campaigns that most medium-sized brands try to build on Pinterest. They usually come in with a $30,000 per month ad budget and decide to set up a kind of "set it and forget it" conversion campaign, and after a couple of weeks they turn everything off. For a conversion campaign on Pinterest, you need to have a daily budget of at least five times your CPA and a 100,000-person monthly active audience. Also take into account that you should have at least 50 checkout conversions per week if you want to run for checkouts as your goal.
Attribution Window: Pinterest is a planning platform, which means that it should consider a longer than normal attribution window. The least you could use for the platform is a 30/1/1 (click, engagement, and view). Also, the attribution window will depend on your niche and products. It’s very different from a $15 shirt and a wedding dress.

Another crucial part that you should always try to get better at is ad design. Make sure you follow best practices for best results.

After making hundreds of mistakes with paid campaigns, my best recommendation is to always run several types of campaigns at once, even if you feel tempted to just run the one generating the highest ROAS.

If you require additional assistance with your Pinterest ads campaign, please visit our paid advertising page and schedule a call with me.

How To Grow Your Sales With Pinterest Ads