Business
Pinterest Ads
Manager Guide
Use Promoted Pins to reach new customers
and grow your business
Version 04.25.2016
Business
What’s inside
1 Getting started
Overview.......................................................................................................................... 1
2 Promoted Pins
Create a campaign.................................................................................................... 2
Pick a Pin to promote............................................................................................... 2
Add details..................................................................................................................... 3
Review and promoted.............................................................................................. 4
Review and billing....................................................................................................... 5
Edit a campaign........................................................................................................... 5
Edit a Promoted Pin................................................................................................... 6
Add new Pins to a campaign................................................................................ 6
3 Tracking conversions
Overview..........................................................................................................................7
Get your code.............................................................................................................. 8
Add conversion tags................................................................................................. 8
Best practices.............................................................................................................. 8
4 Reporting & optimizing
Overview......................................................................................................................... 9
Understand the dashboard................................................................................... 9
Reporting by campaign type.............................................................................. 10
Exporting and reporting.........................................................................................11
Metrics glossary........................................................................................................12
Getting started | 1
Business
Getting started
People use Pinterest to find ideas on
what to do or buy. By promoting your
Pins, you can reach a highly receptive
audience as they’re planning what to
do next. Promoted Pins are great for
getting your products and content
in front of more people in the most
relevant places on Pinterest.
The Pinterest Ads Manager allows
you to create, edit and manage
Promoted Pins. This guide will show
you how to use the Pinterest Ads
Manager and provide tips and tricks
to set your campaigns up for success.
A few things you should know before starting
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You need a business account to use Promoted Pins.
Convert your existing account to get access.
Set your account location. This determines the
currency you're billed in and what taxes may apply.
(Note: You won't be able to edit this later.)
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To access the Pinterest Ads Manager, visit your
profile or bookmark ads.pinterest.com.
You can only promote Pins from your profile, so
make sure to add Pins before you start. Check out
our creative best practices for tips on great Pins.
Promoted Pins | 2
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Promoted Pins
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Step 1: Create a campaign
Campaigns help you organize your Promoted Pins, kind of like boards
on Pinterest. You can create campaigns for different seasonal moments,
product lines or to promote the same Pin with different targeting. You can
manage your budget, start and end dates at the campaign level. Ready to
create your first Promoted Pin?
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Click on the (+) button and select Create ad
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Select your goal: Choose the campaign goal that reflects the actions
most important to your business. The goal you pick for your campaign
determines how your Pins get delivered.
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• Boost engagement with your Pins: Track your audience’s signals of
intent. You get charged for each engagement (closeup, repin, click)
on your Pin.
• Get traffic to your website: Send a motivated audience to your
content. You get charged for clicks to your website.
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Enter your campaign details:
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• Name your campaign
• Select campaign dates (the end date is optional)
• Add your daily budget (this is not the same as your bid - this is the
most you want to spend on your campaign in a single day)
Tip: If you have a specific budget in mind, you can calculate the appropriate
daily budget by taking your total budget, divided by the number of days
your campaign will be live. For example, if you want to spend a max of $100 on
a 5 day campaign, your daily budget should be set to $100/5, or $20 per day.
Step 2: Pick a Pin to promote
Finding the right Pin: Remember, right now you can
only promote Pins that are already on your boards.
• You can see all of your Pins or filter for your most
clicked or repinned Pins in the last 30 days
• Or, if you know which Pin you want to promote, you
can search your Pins by URL or keyword
Buyable Pins, video, GIF and App Pins are not eligible
for promotion. You should only promote content you
own, and you can only promote Pins that link back to
a website.
Tip: Promote Pins that are already doing well so you can
reach even more people. Visit analytics to see your top
Pins, or use the most-clicked or most-repinned tab. Make
sure the Pins you promote follow our creative best practices.
Promoted Pins | 3
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Step 3: Add more details
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Name your Promoted Pin (optional)
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Update your destination URL (optional). This is
where you want your Promoted Pins to link off to.
You can utilize UTM tracking parameters.
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Interests: With interest targeting, you can reach
people based on their affinity for certain things,
such as healthy recipes, or yoga. People will see
your Promoted Pin as they browse their home and
category feeds. Make sure you consider related
interests to reach Pinners who could also be
interested in your business.
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Keywords: With keyword targeting, you can reach
your audience when they are looking for specific
things to make, buy or do within the search results
and related Pins.
Note: If you don’t add any interests, we’ll use your
keywords to deliver your Promoted Pins to relevant
people in the home feed and in category feeds.
How to find keywords
By search
Search for specific keywords in the
search box, and we’ll show you related
keywords.
Make sure you click (+) to add the
keyword. To remove, click (x).
By recommendation
Our recommended keywords are
based on trending searches relevant
to your Pin.
By import
You can also import a list of existing
keywords. Click on import keywords
and copy your list into the lightbox.
Add recommended keywords by
clicking on the keywords under
'Try these searches.'
Once a keyword has been added,
you’ll see it populate in the summary
on the right as well as below.
Tip: Pinners explore in a consideration mindset, open to new ideas for things to do in the future (compared to other search
platforms, where you already know what you’re looking for). Make sure your keywords provide full coverage across things
Pinners are likely to search for, but keep in mind we also broad match on your keywords to help you increase reach.
Promoted Pins | 4
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Step 3: Add more details (cont’d)
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Locations: Defaults to all US Locations. You can
select Pick specific locations to:
• Select US for All US, CA for All Canada and
GB for All UK
• Click on the arrow next to the country to see all
metro options
• Select a combination of countries and metros
(for example: All US + Quebec, or All UK + All
Canada)
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Languages: Defaults to All languages. You can
select specific languages.
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Devices: Defaults to All devices. You can select
specific devices.
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Genders: Defaults to All devices. Unspecified
means people didn’t specify a gender when they
signed up.
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Maximum bid: A bid tells us the most you’d like to
pay per desired action on Pinterest (click and
engagement).
You should bid what that action is worth to you,
but you can review bid guidance, which is under
bid entry, to understand how other advertisers are
bidding against similar targeting. Enter your bid
to see if it’s too low, low, good or a strong bid.
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Tip: We’re a second price auction, which means you’ll be
charged only what was necessary to beat the next highest
bidder in the auction.
Review and promote
Double-check your Promoted Pin.
Review the summary details on
the right to make sure the your
Promoted Pin is set up correctly.
Click Promote when you’re ready!
Promoted Pins | 5
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Send Promoted Pins for review
Once you promote your Pin, it gets reviewed to make
sure it follows our ad policies. It can take up to 24 hours
for approval.
We’ll notify you if a Pin wasn’t approved by email
and with notifications in the Pinterest Ads Manager
summary dashboard. If you update your targeting or
change the Pin description of your organic Pin, it will
need to be reviewed again.
Most common reasons why Pins don’t get approved:
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Images with promotions and prices
False sense of urgency
Excessive symbology or hashtags
No content on destination landing page
Images with calls to action
Images with confusing design elements
Images or descriptions with shocking content or
profanity
Set up billing
If it’s your first time creating a Promoted Pin, you’ll be
asked to set up your billing info. To update those details
and see how you’ve been charged, you can visit Billing
by clicking on your profile picture in the top right hand
corner and:
• See what card you have on file
• Understand when you were charged, what
campaigns you were charged for and what card
was charged
• Edit your billing information
If you’re having trouble with this section, please visit the
Help Center or reach out to our ads support team.
Note: If you don’t set this up, the details of the Pin will
not be saved. You must be a US-based business, with a
US payment method in order to use Promoted Pins.
Editing your campaign
You can edit a campaign’s name, end date or
daily budget. You can also pause a campaign
at any time. Just click Edit campaign on the
top-right of the campaign reporting page.
Promoted Pins | 6
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Edit a Promoted Pin
Click on the Pin you want to edit. Click Edit
Promoted Pin, and you’ll land back on the
targeting screen.
If you edit targeting, the Promoted Pin may go
back through the review process. If you want
to edit the description, you’ll need to update
the description on the organic Pin.
Add new Promoted Pins to
an existing campaign
You can add more Pins to an existing
campaign. Go back to Step 1, select your
campaign goal. Then, choose an existing
campaign.
Tip: Test different campaign set ups. Organize Pins with the same
target under one campaign—our system will optimize and show the
best-performing Pin more often. Or, set up one Pin per campaign if you
want to apply a specific budget to a Pin.
Business
Tracking conversions | 7
Tracking conversions
Conversion tracking helps you
understand how your Promoted Pins
are performing and what they’re
doing for your business.
A conversion is when someone
does something on your website,
like sign up for your newsletter or
buy a product. Track your Promoted
Pins to see how they’re affecting
conversions with a conversion tag,
a simple bit of code that you add to
your web pages.
Conversion types
Types of actions to track
You can track up to four different types of actions on
your site. Using multiple conversion tags can help you
track your progress against different objectives for your
Promoted Pins.
We track conversions against three types of high-intent
actions on Pinterest. You can adjust the attribution
window (1, 7, 14, 30 and 60 days) for each type of
Pinterest action.
Page visits:
A visit to a page on your site
Clicks:
When someone on Pinterest clicks your Pin and goes to
your site (leaving Pinterest)
Sign ups:
A signup for a newsletter, email, etc. from your site
Checkouts:
A purchase of a product or service from your site
Custom conversions:
Customizable to any action you want to track
Because we aggregate conversions by conversion type
in ads reporting, we recommend you create, at most, one
tag for each conversion type.
Tip: Pass order value and quantity through the
conversion tag. The additional data provides greater
visibility into performance and helps you evaluate and
optimize Promoted Pins in a more meaningful way.
Repins + closeups:
When someone repins your Pin or clicks to see it closeup (staying on Pinterest)
Views:
When somebody sees your Pin on a Pinterest feed
You can also view existing tags to see whether or not
they’ve been verified (have been implemented and fired
correctly) and make any changes as well.
Tip: Engagement is different on Pinterest compared
to other platforms. Because people use Pinterest to
plan, every closeup, repin and click is a strong signal of
consideration and intent.
Pins last forever. Repins generate even more earned
impressions, engagements and conversions on your site.
Tracking conversions | 8
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Get your code
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Click on Conversion tracking under the Ads menu
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Name your tag to help you identify it
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Select the type of conversion you want to track
(page visit, sign up, checkout, custom)
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Customize your attribution windows for the different
Pinterest actions
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Click on Create tag
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Copy the bit of code at the bottom of the page
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Add the conversion tag to
your site
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Once you’ve created the code, add it to your website.
If you have a website developer, you may want to ask
for their help.
Paste the copied code just before the closing <body>
tag (or in an existing container tag) on any page where
you want to track conversions. For example, if you want
to track purchases, you should put the code on your
order confirmation or thank you page.
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If you’re interested in enhanced tracking, update your
tags to dynamically pass back order value and quantity.
Note: You can edit your attribution windows, but edits
only apply to future tracking.
Conversion tracking best practices
Because Pinners come to Pinterest to plan for the future, select a longer
attribution window to capture the future intent.
People who repin and closeup are over twice as likely to signup and
purchase online. Make sure your attribution model accounts for these highintent signals on Pinterest.
We report on conversions based on when the Pinterest action happened,
not at the time of the conversion event. As such, we see CPAs decrease over
time. Make sure you pull running, historical reports to capture earned and
latent conversions and see your earned efficiencies over time.
Reporting & optimizing | 9
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Reporting & optimizing
A day or two after your campaigns start running, the Pinterest
Ads Manager will update so you can get daily performance data
from your Promoted Pins. All data is tracked in UTC time. This
section will teach you how to interpret this data and optimize your
campaigns to drive better results.
What do all these metrics mean?
At a high level, we report on paid and earned delivery metrics. Paid
metrics are all of the views and engagements you get from your
Promoted Pins in search and related Pin results, category feeds
and on the home feed.
Note: A glossary of all our metrics can be
found on page 12.
Earned metrics capture the value you get when someone repins
your Promoted Pin, distributing your content to their own followers.
Since Pins last forever, you’ll see earned engagement long after
your campaign is over. This extra value can help you drive down
cost over time.
Understanding the summary
dashboard
When you navigate to the Pinterest Ads Manager,
you’ll land on the summary dashboard. You can also
get to the summary dashboard by clicking on
Overview in the Ads menu.
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The summary dashboard provides an overview of your
Promoted Pin campaigns across goals. You’ll see:
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A topline summary over the last 30 days
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Next steps based on:
• Campaigns ending soon or running out
of budget
• Pins that weren’t approved
• Bid performance
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A summary by campaign type (last 30 days)
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Highest-performing/lowest-performing Pins by:
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• CTR if you’re driving traffic
• Engagement rate if you’re driving engagement
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Link to best practice guides
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Link to Promoted Pins support
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Reporting & optimizing | 10
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Reporting by
campaign type
Visit campaign reporting by
clicking View all or going to the
Ads menu and selecting your
objective.
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We provide reporting at the
campaign, Pin and targeting level.
Click into individual campaigns to
see how they’re performing.
Metrics in the dashboard change
as you switch from the Overview,
Activity or Spend tabs. Hover over
a metric label to read its definition.
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Different ways to view data
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Campaign level
Metrics tabs:
• Overview: General delivery metrics, including spend
and end date. View impressions, clicks, repins and CTRs.
• Activity: Specific delivery metrics (paid and earned).
View paid/earned impressions, paid/earned clicks,
paid/earned repins.
• Spend: Track your effective CPC or CPE, what you’ve
spent so far and see how many conversions you’ve driven
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Toggle between active, not started, paused and completed
campaigns
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Display up to 100 rows of campaigns at a time
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Filter by campaign name
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Sort by column—columns differ depending on the tab
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Export data at the campaign, Pin and targeting level.
Exporting is the best way to see more granular conversion
reporting
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View by last 7, 14 or 30 days. Customize date ranges by
clicking on the calendar.
Pin level
Tip: How to get more
volume for your campaign
• Increase your bids to stay competitive
• Expand your targeting to include broader interests and/or keywords
• Ensure you’re running ads on mobile since most people use Pinterest
on their mobile devices
• Keep an eye out for creative fatigue – monitor declining
performance and supplement with fresh creative
• Reduce bids or pause poorly performing creative
Targeting level
Reporting & optimizing | 11
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Exporting data
The raw data in the export files are intended to make it
easier for you to pull the data you need to optimize your
campaigns.
• Customize your report and pull reporting by selecting
the 'export data' button in the top right corner:
• Pull raw data for the 'current view' - this will allow
you to pull performance metrics by campaigns,
Pins and Pin-targeting, depending on your view
• Use the 'custom' selection to pull by campaign
or Pin, and by status (for example, all active
campaigns or all paused Pins)
• Pull custom conversion reporting to see conversion
data by campaign and by Pin and get cross-device
reporting by campaign
• Calculate metrics important to you: return on ad
spend, cost per action, average order value, cost per
visitor, etc.
Conversion reporting
Conversion reporting gives you more options to export
the conversion metrics you care about. By using
conversion reports, you can filter to see performance
by your campaign objectives and by specific conversion
types.
Select Conversion tracking under the Ads menu and
click on Export Data in the upper right hand corner.
Cross-device reporting
Cross-device reporting is available for conversion tracking only.
While most people use the Pinterest mobile app, a lot of conversions still
happen on desktop. We can map the Pinner’s path to purchase for you
with cross-device reporting. For example, a Pinner might interact with a
Pin from mobile and visit your website later from their desktop computer.
If you use conversion tracking, you can see this journey. Cross-device
reporting allows you to understand where Pinners engage and where they
convert—something you can’t track using other tools.
You can access cross device reporting in the account level export, or you
can access cross device reporting for a specific conversion type at the
campaign level, by pulling a conversion report.
Reporting & optimizing | 12
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Metrics glossary
Attribution window: The acceptable
length of time between the
conversion and ad engagement,
varies across partners
Budget remaining: How much money
you have left for a given campaign
Checkout conversion: A purchase of
a product or service from your site
Conversions: If you’re using
our conversion tracking tag, the
number of completed actions
(purchase, sign up, download,
etc.) on your website that can be
attributed to Promoted Pins
Conversions from clicks: When
someone on Pinterest clicks
your Pin and keeps going to
your site (leaving Pinterest)
Conversions from repins +
closeups: When someone repins
your Pin or clicks to see it closeup (staying on Pinterest)
Conversions from views: When
somebody sees your Pin on Pinterest
Cost per click (CPC): Cost per click,
the average amount you paid per click
to your website (cost/paid clicks)
Cost per engagement (CPE):
Cost per engagement, the average
amount you paid per engagement
(repin, closeup and click) on your
content (cost/total engagements)
CTR: The clickthrough rate
(clicks/paid impressions)
Custom conversion: An action
that does not fall into one of
the other conversion types
Earned clicks: The number of visits
to your website after your Promoted
Pins were repinned or viewed
Earned impressions: The number
of views your Promoted Pins
got after they were repinned
Paid impressions: The total
number of views your Promoted
Pins got from your paid campaign
Earned repins: The number of times
your Promoted Pins were Pinned by
people who saw it outside of your
paid campaign
Paid repins: The number of
times your Promoted Pins were
Pinned by people who saw it
from your paid campaign
Effective cost per engagement
(eCPC): Effective cost per
click, the average amount per
click including paid and earned
clicks (cost/total clicks)
Sign up conversion: A sign up for a
newsletter, email, etc. from your site
eCTR: Effective clickthrough
rate of Promoted Pins (total
clicks/total impressions)
Total clicks: The number of visits to
your website from Promoted Pins,
including visits earned from repins
Effective cost per engagement
(eCPE): Effective cost per
engagement, the average amount
per engagement (repin, closeup
and click) on your content, including
paid and earned engagements
(cost/total engagements)
Total closeups: Number of times
a Pinner took a closer look at your
Pin, including closeups earned from
repins (a closeup is a single tap or
click on the Pin that makes it appear
larger)
Effective engagement rate
(eER): The effective engagement
rate of Promoted Pins (total
repins + total closeups + total
clicks/paid impressions)
Engagement rate (ER):
Engagement rate (repins + close
ups + clicks/paid impressions)
Page visit conversion: A visit
to a page on your site
Paid clicks: The number of visits
to your website that come directly
from your Promoted Pins (these
are the only clicks you pay for)
Paid closeups: Number of times a
Pinner tapped on your Promoted Pin
Paid engagements: Closeups,
repins and clicks on your
Promoted Pins (these are only
the engagements you pay for)
Status: This is the status of your
campaign or Promoted Pins
Total engagements: Closeups,
repins and clicks on your Promoted
Pins, including engagements earned
from repins
Total impressions: The total number
of views your Promoted Pins got,
including impressions earned from
repins of your Promoted Pins
Total repins: The number of times
your Promoted Pins were Pinned by
others and repinned again
Total spend: The amount you’ve
spent during the selected date range
Additional resources: For more
support on your Promoted Pins,
visit business.pinterest.com