Ecommerce businesses should be jumping on the Pinterest Promoted Pins bandwagon and striking while the iron is hot. Paid pins simply drive sales and provide great ROI.
USA Today just announced that Pinterest promoted pins are open for all business starting January. This is big news for online businesses who are looking for better ways to increase sales.
Pinterest last January officially launched its first advertising product — Pinterest promoted pins target users based on their interests, location and other data, Pinterest’s equivalent of a sponsored Facebook post. Kendall says thousands of businesses are now paying for promoted pins, including “cinematic” pins, Pinterest’s first foray into video advertising. Jessica Guynn, USA Today.
Many small businesses got to take advantage of Pinterest’s beta version of promoted pins earlier this year. Some or our clients were able to take advantage of this opportunity. These clients were also running Facebook and Google Shopping campaigns and the overwhelming response was that the promoted Pinterest Pins drove significantly more qualified traffic that lead to approximately double the conversions that Google shopping and Facebook combined provided.
Ian Schafer, founder and chairman of digital ad agency Deep Focus, says he expects his clients, many of them in consumer packaged goods, to spend more of their 2016 digital ad dollars on Pinterest as the service continues to grow, ad products improve and new formats roll out.
One of the best and most detailed accounts of Pinterest promoted pins comes from Ezra Firestone on SmartMarketer.com;
Ezra provides some pretty stunning screenshots to account for the success of his campaign. I’ve included some highlights here, but read his full post here.
As you can see, I’ve spent $775 from which I’ve generated $21,969 in revenue. I used a google analytics tracking URL in my promoted pin so I could track back exactly how many visits and sales came from Pinterest ads. We have not seen this level of high quality traffic since Google Adwords way back in 2003. It’s ridiculous!
What Makes Pinterest Such A Powerhouse for Ecommerce Sales?
A study published by Shareaholic shows that Pinterest drove approximately 7.17% of all social media referral traffic to websites in March 2014 — second place only to Facebook.
Traffic is one thing, but more importantly, people pin stuff that they love.
According to a recent study by Millward Brown they claim that 87% of Pinterest users have purchased something because of Pinterest! It’s hard to resist when finding things that you love is so easy!
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest Pins stick around as relevant content that engages viewers and gets shared. The the half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes, while on Pinterest it’s 3.5 months. Pinterest paid pins also blend in almost seamlessly with all the other pins – a huge benefit to advertisers. Pinterests’s Monetization chief Tim Kendall recently made a statement that, “Pinterest has the potential to do for discovery what Google did for search.”
Pinterest Promoted pins is still in it’s early stages and I’m sure that over time paid ads on Pinterest will become more competitive and less cost effective, but for now they are a marketers gold mine for driving Ecommerce sales.
