Your guide to Pinterest ad targeting success
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A huge part of advertising on social media makes sure that you reach the right audience. Growing social media platform has its own targeting capabilities, and knowing the best ways to target the people on each one is crucial.

While you may know a great deal about creating great Pinterest advertising, do you show them to the right people?

Knowing how Pinterest ad targeting works is key to creating perfect advertising that will create your buck with the most excitement, visibility, traffic and conversions.

Let’s immerse yourself in everything you need to know about targeting Pinterest advertisements and how to put together the most effective Pinterest ads for your company.

Why use Pinterest advertising

Pinterest has more than 320 million active monthly users, giving you a broad audience for your advertising. In addition, 89 per cent of pinners use the site to shop for future purchases, making conversion chances even higher.

Native pinterest ads appear in feeds, integrating seamlessly with other content. This further increases the chances of users clicking and converting, making ads on Pinterest extremely powerful and effective.

Why your Pinterest ad targeting matters

It is important to target your Pinterest ads, as it helps you find the best audience for your product, service or content.

Ensure you target people with interests, search habits and demographics that suit your business issues so your ads are where they will have the greatest impact.

The first step in producing successful Pinterest advertising is to put the content in front of the people who may actually want to see it.

Let’s get into the different types of targeting, and how to make sure you find the right audience for your advertising.

Pinterest ad campaign objectives

Once you start your Pinterest ad the first step is to pick your target ad. This is similar to other sites like Facebook where you first need to state the target you’re hoping to achieve with your ad before you move forward.

There are six different campaign targets for you to choose from at Pinterest.

Pinterest ad campaign objectives
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Brand awareness

This is the perfect way to get the news about your company out there. Brand awareness ads are top-of – the-line funnel advertising that literally help people learn that it is your business. You will lead to top level landing pages to introduce people to what you’re doing by clicking through.

Video views

You can run video ads on Pinterest, and choosing that target will help put your video in front of as many people as possible. It’s another form of advertising knowledge that gives you the best opportunity to put your company front and new people middle.

Traffic

If your mission is to send traffic to a certain post, landing page, product or service, this is your best objective for you. It’s more than just getting people to see your ad, but it’s not going to drive sales and conversions entirely.

App install

If your company tries to promote an app and get users of Pinterest to install it on their mobile devices, Pinterest has an ad target just for you. Build an app install ad that will show you how good it is.

Conversions

In order to use this ad objective you need a verified Pinterest tag installed on your website, but it is a great way to track sales from your ads. Use this goal to increase conversions such as signups and transactions through your Pinterest ads.

Catalog sales

To use the catalog sales conversion you’ll need to upload a data source of products, but it’s a great way to showcase the items on Pinterest and increase sales. Once your data source has been accepted, product pins will be created automatically, and you can then sort products and create advertisements.

Pinterest ad targeting options

You switch over to the targeting section as soon as you pick your Pinterest ad objective. You want to be as precise as possible when choosing your targeting to ensure that your advertisements are identified by the right audience.

When deciding who to expose your ad to–demographic, interest and keyword targeting –there are three main targeting categories to work with, plus a few expanded targeting choices to further narrow the audience down.

Audience targeting

Targeting the market is where you can build an audience based on visits to your website, email list or an established Pinterest crowd.

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Once you have clicked to create a new audience, you will be taken to a new dashboard to begin. To choose the type of audience you want to build, click on the red Build audience button at the top.

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Targeting a group of people would give you a broad target before further narrowing it down, depending on the particular ad, content or product / service that you promote.

After selecting the group of people that you would like to reach, click Next and name your audience. Then through all other steps before continuing to the next targeting method.

Keyword targeting

The other major category is keyword targeting, which focuses on common words or phrases that are being searched by the target audience on the website.

Since Pinterest is a type of search engine, think about the targeted Pinterest keyword being identical to the Google and Bing advertising. It will show your ads based on the keywords and search terms that people are typing in.

Keyword targeting
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Pinterest suggests that you use at least 25 keywords, and it’s important to keep them specific to your particular ad and not just your business. If people are searching for the most popular keywords, you want your advertising to show so that your ad addresses their search query.

Not only can you add keywords for which you want your ad to appear, but you can also set certain keywords and phrases you don’t want to see your ads appear for.

There are a few different kinds of keyword matches to use when promoting Pinterest ads:

  • Broad match: Enter the broadest audience by combining related searches with your keywords.
  • Phrase match or exact match: Narrow in on quest for a more common keyword.
  • Negative match: Choose keywords for which you don’t want to see your ads appear.

Negative keyword matches are helpful when the name of your product or service is close to that of another industry and not correct. By using negative keyword matches, your ads will not appear where they aren’t useful in the results of those industry topics.