The Complete Guide to Pinterest Advertising for the Holidays

There’s no place like Pinterest for the holidays.

With over 250 million monthly active users, the platform’s numbers speak for themselves: 90% of Pinners make purchase decisions on the platform and 70% use it to find new products. In fact, advertisers see $2 in profit for every $1 spent on Pinterest and Pinterest is 5 times more efficient at driving in-store sales than any other platform.

It’s no surprise, then, that Pinterest is ripe with opportunity for holiday advertisers. Here are some more impressive stats (holiday-themed, this time) that should perk up your ears:

• 67% of Pinners say Pinterest is important for planning holiday purchases.

• 62.7 million people use Pinterest to get ideas for the holidays.

• People saved 45% more “Black Friday” Pins year over year and 47% more “Cyber Monday” Pins.

• 67% of Pinners say they will spend more than $250 this holiday season.

Pinterest ad examples for Holiday Planning Stat

Ready to tap into Pinterest’s highly-engaged audience? Here are Pinterest ad examples of everything you need to rock your Pinterest advertising this holiday season.

6 Types of Ad Examples for Your Holiday Pinterest Campaign

Promoted Pins

Promoted Pins are Pins that you’ve already posted but want to boost to a target audience. By putting money behind a Pin, you can make sure it shows up in relevant search results and category feeds. For instance, here’s a Pin that L’Occitane promoted for its holiday fragrances:

Pinterest Fragrance holiday Ad example

According to Pinterest, 1 in 2 Pinners make a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin. And 61% of Pinners say they’ve discovered new brands or products from Promoted Pins. This should be particularly good news for marketers who want to boost sales during the holidays.

Buyable Pins

Buyable Pins help customers complete the buyer journey right within Pinterest. If you purchase a Buyable Pin, a blue price tag and “Buy It” button will show up on your Pins, and users can order your products without missing a beat.

During the 2015 holiday season, jewelry and gift retailer FlyAway BlueJay used Buyable Pins to reach new customers. As a result, Pinterest drove 20% of the brand’s overall sales and 28% of overall website traffic. Pinterest was also the shop’s number-one source of social traffic and sales.

Buyable Pin on Pinterest

Promoted Video Pins

Sixty-seven percent of Pinterest users say videos inspire them to take action. That’s why Pinterest launched Promoted Video Pins to help marketers get their videos in front of the right audiences.

With a goal of boosting holiday sales, advertisers can use Promoted Video to share product demonstrations, tell heartwarming stories, or offer behind-the-scenes peeks for their customers.

Pinterest also stepped up its video game by introducing Promoted Video at maximum width. This allows advertisers to choose from two formats when creating video ads:

Example of Pinterest Video Formats

Promoted Videos can run from four seconds to 30 minutes, but Pinterest recommends having a 10-20 second length.

Promoted App Pins

Promoted App Pins combine your Pin content with an “Install” button, inviting Pinners to download your app on their iOS or Android devices. Considering 80% of Pinterest traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s evident that there’s a large and engaged audience of mobile users to tap into.

Promoted App Pin Example

Rich Pins

Rich Pins let you add an extra, informative element to your Pins. They include:

• Product Pins, which can feature real-time pricing, availability, and store location.

• Recipe Pins, which can feature ingredients, cooking times, and serving sizes.

• Article Pins, which can feature a headline, author, and story description.

• App Pins, which can feature an “Install” button.

With these Pins, you can build more valuable and intuitive experiences for your target audiences and diversity your Pins by playing around with new formats.

Shop the Look Pins

Shop the Look Pins are similar to Buyable Pins because they let people shop directly from your Pinterest content. They differ because they let you highlight specific products within your Pins. These are signified by white dots, which users can then tap, see more about your product, and click through to your site to make a purchase.

Shop the Look Pinterest

Shop the Look Pins are only available for fashion and home decor Pins right now, but if you’re a retail brand, those verticals might fit right into your holiday marketing strategy.

Generating Leads From Your Holiday Pinterest Campaign

Pinterest provides a number of resources to help marketers generate leads from their campaigns. Let’s take a look.

Targeting Capabilities

Brands can target their ads across a variety of categories, including interests, location, device, gender, language, and even personas like Millennials and travelers. Brands can also target by keywords, which they can select by searching Pinterest or accepting recommendations from the Ads Manager. If you want your Promoted Pins to show up when users search for “holiday makeup gifts” or “holiday home decor,” you’ll want to include those relevant keywords.

Beyond those criteria, Pinterest allows marketers to retarget people who have already visited their site or app, even interacted with their Pins, or made a purchase from their business. Similar to Facebook, Pinterest also lets advertisers upload their own customer lists for targeting purposes and create “actalike” audiences of people who are similar to their most engaged customers.

Pinterest Tags

Pinterest Tags are conversion tracking tags that allow you to follow user actions from Pinterest to your website. Whether you want to drive customers to checkout pages, sign up forms, or special offers, these tags can help you see exactly how many people are contributing to your goals.

Say you promote a Pin in hopes of getting customers to click through to your holiday catalog. By putting a tracking tag on your purchase confirmation page, you can see who saw your Pin, clicked to your site, and eventually made a purchase.

Pincodes

Pincodes are like QR codes that users can scan on an in-store display or product packaging to be taken directly to your Pinterest content.

Screenshot of Pincodes

Nordstrom, for example, is placing Pincodes throughout its stores to reach holiday shoppers and engage people when they’re browsing and waiting in line. By just snapping a picture of the Pincode with their phone, they can immediately access Nordstrom’s Pinterest board of gifts under $100.

“This holiday season, when customers scan Pincodes in stores, they’ll instantly see even more Nordstrom gifting and beauty ideas on Pinterest,” said Brian Hovis, Nordstrom Vice President of Marketing. “This is an example of Nordstrom trying to creatively blend digital and in-store experiences to inspire, excite and make shopping that much more convenient for our customers.”

Advanced Analytics

By logging into the Pinterest Ads Manager, marketers can evaluate the performance of their Promoted Pins. For one, they can see the metrics they designed their campaign around, such as impressions, engagements, saves, closeups, or clicks to their website. They can also sort analytics by a targeting category; they can determine whether women are responding to their add more than men are, for example, or if mobile users are more engaged than desktop users.

Businesses can also works with Pinterest partners to track three additional metrics:

• Ad viewability and audience verification

• Brand lift

• Online and offline conversions

After viewing these analytics, advertisers can edit their campaigns right in the Ads Manager, or create new campaigns with optimized targeting and creative features.

3 Tips for Holiday Advertising on Pinterest

1. Try Pinterest’s Partner Programs

For brands new to Pinterest, the platform offers a range of partner programs to help. Sprinklr is proud to be part of Pinterest Marketing Partners, for instance, which can help advertisers develop creative, content marketing, target audiences, and analytics.

Other options include the Pin Collective, a go-to group of expert creators who will work directly with brands to create the best content for their consumers, and Pinterest Propel, which helps businesses get started with Pinterest Ads.

2. Get the “Save” Button

Engage with Pinners outside of Pinterest by putting a “Save” button on your website. This way, when people visit your site pages, they can click to add their favorite product to their Pinterest boards. From there, more people can discover what you have to offer. Pinterest analytics will even show you which content was saved and Pinned most, so you can either deliver more of the same content or promote pins to drive more engagement.

The “Save” button is already available on popular platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Tumblr. But you can easily create and customize your own Pinterest “Save” button.

3. Check Top Holiday Keywords

Pinterest has been kind enough to share top holiday keywords from searches and saved Pins last season. Now marketers can use them to better plan their strategies for the coming holidays.

Let’s take a look at popular keywords and terms for these categories:

• New Year: outfit ideas, food, resolutions, party ideas

• Thanksgiving: recipes, desserts, decorations, crafts

• Black Friday: deals, tips, shopping

• Holiday season: gift ideas, desserts, decorations, crafts

• Food: pressure cooker recipes, grab-and-go goodies, pie pops

• Decor: neutral tablescapes, natural centerpieces, green garland

• Fashion: velvet dresses, tulle skirts, faux fur jackets

• Makeup: gold eyeliner, star makeup, smokey glitter eyes

I Saw Mommy Pinning Santa Claus

Since it launched in 2010, Pinterest has gone from a place to find inspiration and cool ideas to a dynamic platform built for planning purchases and following through with actual buys. Armed with tools like Promoted Pins, Buyable Pins, and off-site “Save” buttons, Pinterest has also become one of the most effective advertising networks for brands.

Considering Pinners start saving holiday Pins as early as June it’s time for marketers to get started driving those leads and helping customers find their perfect holiday gifts.

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