Pinterest wants to woo advertisers with shoppability.
The social media platform unveiled several new ad products and ecommerce integrations during its third annual global advertiser summit, Pinterest Presents, on Wednesday.
“This year, we’ve tripled the number of ad products [we have] in the market,” CRO Bill Watkins told AdExchanger ahead of the event. And its focus is squarely on shoppability.
The platform’s goal to become a performance channel is nothing new, but advertisers have been asking it to pick up the pace on releasing new ad formats that help drive conversions and sales. And they also want more help managing and measuring their campaigns.
To keep up with these requests, 2023 has been all about increasing Pinterest’s “ad product velocity,” Watkins said.
Window shopping
New ad products include fresh formats such as quiz ads, where brands can ask preference-based questions to figure out which products to advertise to which users, and showcase ads, which let brands display multiple products in one unit that includes a link to its website.
Pinterest also expanded availability of its premiere spotlight ads – hero video ad units that brands can pay to take over for 24 hours – onto the home page. (Spotlight ads first launched earlier this year on the search page.) Designed to boost purchase consideration, Watkins said, the format is particularly popular with automotive and consumer-packaged goods brands.
Also new this fall is Pinterest Business Manager, a platform for brands to monitor and optimize their campaigns in one place. New ecommerce integrations with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce will work similarly to Pinterest’s partnership with Shopify and allow retailers to upload their most recent product catalogs.
Another product that’s in early testing, Creative Studio, will use generative AI to assist advertisers in making images for ad creatives. (Because, of course, it’s not an ad summit if no one mentions AI.)
Checking out
Pinterest is also trying to make it easier for users to actually buy items from brands once they click on an ad.
The platform launched direct links on its website this week. Users go directly to a retailer’s site page with one click (rather than having to click around within a Pinterest product page). It also expanded access to mobile deep links, its in-app version of direct links launched in July, to more advertisers.
Mobile deep links have already spiked brand conversion rates by 235% since the product launched, and they have reduced average cost per acquisition rates by 35%, said Julie Towns, VP and head of product marketing and operations, during the event.
The point of direct and deep links seems to differ from Pinterest’s checkout product, which it also launched last year. Turns out, people prefer product purchases to happen on the retailer’s site rather than on Pinterest, Watkins said.
“We’re not pursuing commerce [directly] on Pinterest at this moment,” Watkins said.
A measured approach
Using more direct links to boost conversion rates can improve attribution for Pinterest advertisers, which is essential for social media platforms that bear the dual brunt of signal loss from cookie deprecation and Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework.
That’s why Pinterest is heavily promoting its API for conversions, which it introduced last fall to help advertisers tie on-site activity (such as clicks, search or saving items) with first-party data, including sales.
So far, the company has seen 28% more conversions attributable to Pinterest since launching its conversions API last year, Watkins said, mostly because the platform is increasing its click rates with interactive ads and direct links to retailers.
The more shoppable Pinterest becomes, the more advertisers seem to pay attention to it.
