Promoted Pins: How to Advertise on Pinterest

Do you use Pinterest promoted pins?

Want to discover how they work?

To explore everything you need to know about promoted pins on Pinterest, I interview Vincent Ng.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Vincent Ng, president of MCNG Marketing and author of Pinterest to Profits with Pintalysis. Vincent helps businesses succeed with Pinterest marketing and visual social media.

Vincent explores Pinterest promoted pins.

You'll discover what's new with promoted pins.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Promoted Pins
At a basic level, Vincent says, promoted pins are Pinterest advertising. As you scroll through your Pinterest feed and see "Promoted by" on a pin, that means it's advertising. He notes that any pin you want to promote must be a public pin, and says you can even promote something you've repinned!

What's New With Promoted Pins?

Pinterest recently announced promoted video pins, which, at the moment, are specifically for users on mobile. These pins show an animated GIF and lead you to a full video when you click on them.

What's really cool, Vincent shares, is that you can put up to six additional pins below the video on your promoted pin for no extra cost. The six additional pins display like a carousel under the video, and you can use them to promote the product in the video or share additional information about it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVJ3oqpQQ8

While video pins currently send users to third-party players like YouTube to view the video promoted in the pin, Pinterest is working on its own native video player, which will be rolled out to everybody soon. Once available, people will be able to upload videos directly to Pinterest.

Listen to the show to hear what video lengths Vincent has seen on Pinterest.

What Can You Do With Promoted Pins?

Vincent says you can reach a large audience with promoted pins, and that Pinterest allows you to create ad campaigns based on three main business goals: awareness, engagement, and traffic.

Brand awareness campaigns let you promote your pin to an audience and you pay based on a thousand impressions. With engagement campaigns, you're charged every time someone taps and enlarges your pin, repins your pin, saves your pin, or clicks your pin. During traffic campaigns, you pay for every click-through on your pin.

Vincent says the great thing about promoted pins is that you pay only for the direct promotion, meaning that if a user clicks on someone's share of your promoted pin, that click is free for you. In fact, Pinterest says users get an average of 30% free engagement when they conduct promoted pin campaigns.

Which type of campaign is the most cost-effective? Vincent says that he agrees with Pinterest peers Alisa Meredith and Jeff Sieh, who both find the cost-per-click campaigns offer the best bang for your buck versus engagement campaigns.

Why? About 80% of Pinterest users access the app on mobile, so they'll enlarge your pin to get a better look at your product. If it's not what they want, they don't necessarily click through.

Vincent says it's also possible to run split tests with promoted pins because each campaign type provides the same level of metrics. After you run your test, go to your advertising dashboard and export the data to see which campaign type is a more cost-effective option for your business

Pinterest also offers promoted pin users robust targeting capabilities, Vincent says, including by keywords and interests.

Pinterest users are asked to follow five interests when they sign up,