Having nipped at Meta’s and Google’s heels for years, Pinterest is finished with being the underdog.
It’s been getting very “serious” about its investments in lower-funnel advertising products, says Pinterest CRO Bill Watkins on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Over the past couple of years, Pinterest has released its Conversions API and direct links that take users straight to an advertiser’s website. It’s also integrated with more than 50 measurement partners.
But the biggest announcement came two weeks ago with the rollout of Performance+, Pinterest’s answer to Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+ and other platform-provided AI-powered automated ad products.
Performance+ is at the heart of Pinterest’s reinvention of itself as a performance channel, Watkins says.
“We’ve transformed our monetization from what was two-thirds upper funnel just a few years ago to now two-thirds in the lower funnel,” he says.
Still, competing with the likes of Meta and Google for performance dollars is an uphill battle, if only from a scale perspective. More than 3.2 billion people use one of Meta’s apps on a daily basis, and “Google” is literally a verb. Pinterest has 522 million monthly users.
But there are other ways to stand in what Watkins calls a “Pinterest-y” way.
For example, there are more than 8 billion text queries every month on Pinterest, often product-related, the vast majority of which (97%) are unbranded. People are looking for inspiration, but many also have high commercial intent and they’re open to suggestions.
Pinterest is also leaning into its positioning as more positive and inclusive than other social media platforms. There’s a lot of toxicity out there, Watkins says.
“We’re aiming to prove to our industry that you can engineer for positive mental health and have a thriving business – this is not binary,” he says. “That is our message to the market.”
Also in this episode: Capitalizing on intent data, making Pinterest more shoppable, why Pinterest doesn’t support ecommerce transactions directly on its own site or app and whether marketers feel “trapped” by the duopoly. Plus: What it was like meeting – and getting acting feedback from – comedian and actor Ilana Glazer, who guest hosted Pinterest’s virtual event announcing Performance+ earlier this month.
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