Pinterest Ads 2024: Step-by-Step Guide to Promoted Pins (Free Templates)

It's often hard to know what you're looking at until you see it. That's the magic of Pinterest, your go to platform for inspiration and a powerful tool for marketing Pinterest ads are on the rise and in this video I'll share the benefits of having a Pinterest business account and guide you through setting up and managing Pinterest ad campaigns from scratch. I'll also show you how to craft the perfect ad creative and let you in on some expert tips around budgeting, targeting and optimizing for success. If you're watching this video right now and you're not sold on Pinterest ads, I have three very important things to tell you. More than 445 million monthly active users are using Pinterest. The average user spends more than 14 minutes on the app per visit. Pinterest users spend the most money of users on popular social networks, nearly double the amount of money spent from Facebook users and triple the amount from Twitter users. Ready to start your account? If you've never used Pinterest before or just want to create a new business account separate from your personal personal account, you can choose this option and if you have an existing account you can link your personal and business accounts to easily. Sign in with the same email. Do this by creating a linked business account or converting your personal account to a business account. Log in and click the down icon at the top right of the screen and add account. Choose Create a Free Business account, then create a linked account. Fill out the fields to build your profile, then click Next. Now fill out the fields to describe your business. Lets say you're a professional illustrator and use Pinterest to distribute and promote your work. You're also preparing to launch the next session of your digital Drawing with Procreate course and really want to generate more leads for your business. Click Next here. You'll be asked if you want to run ads, which you do. Choose where you'd like to start from the list of options we want to build a profile. First, add your cover photo and details about your business to your public profile. Be sure to complete the about section here to let Pinterest know when, what your brand is and who you're trying to get in front of to increase your organic reach. Now that you're all set up, let's take a quick look at Pinterest's Ad Manager. Ads Manager is built right into your business account and where you can create, manage and report on all of your Pinterest campaigns. Think of it as your one stop shop to set up ads, track results, and improve your performance over time. Select your currency and accept the terms. Here you'll see an overview of your account activity and in any active campaigns. Navigate back up to the Ads menu to Reporting to build and edit your campaigns or set up some custom targeting. On the Reporting page, you'll see a graph where you can apply filters to see a visual representation of your ad's performance, and a reporting table where you can view and export all of your data. Customize the data shown in the graph and the reporting table by selecting and creating filters. You can also customize how metrics are calculated in the reporting table by creating custom columns. Tools to switch your reporting table view to include your custom table filter, select the name of your table from the dropdown here. Now, one thing to note is that the Pinterest tag is essential for running Pinterest ads. By installing the Pinterest tag on your website, you'll be able to do two very important things. One Create a relevant and engaged audience of website visitors to target and future Pinterest ad campaigns. 2. Track conversions like signups and purchases or when potential customers visit your site from promoted pins. To do this, click Ads at the top of your screen, then click Conversions. If you've already claimed a domain and is eligible to use with an integration partner, you'll see these partners listed below. Click 1 to view instructions and get started. Now we are ready to start your campaign. Scroll down and click Create Campaign, then choose your campaign objective. Your objective determines how you bid in the ad auction and what ad formats are available to promote, but more on that in just a bit. You'll notice that there are three different options here. The first one is to build awareness, which is more top of funnel actions. Choose this to create awareness of your brand among your target audience and what it has to offer. The second is to drive consideration, which is to drive as much traffic to your website to capture contact information exclusively from people who are likely to be interested in your products and services and generate interest. And the last one is to get conversions. Choose this option if you want to directly inspire people to take action, like leading a user to an online checkout or newsletter signup with no extra steps. Now, if you want to run git conversions, you'll have to set up your Pinterest pixel and conversion actions, which we're not going to get into in this video, but could really be a video all on its own. Hmm, I'll think about that. Okay, let's set up this ad through a drive consideration which most brands and businesses will probably start out with Create a campaign name, status, budget schedule and choose an end date. And here we are at the Ad Group Details. This is where we'll set the targeting run dates, bid and budget for the single or multiple groups that'll house the ads you really want to run. Number one use vertical formats high quality images using a 2:3 aspect ratio are a great way to occupy maximum screen real estate. They're more effective on mobile too, but since only a small number of pins will show at the same time and will help your PIN stand out in people's feeds. Number two make your brand the focal point. Put your brand or service front and center. Avoid using abstract images or lifestyle imagery that doesn't really showcase your brand. Number three Include your logo. Put a logo on every pin you make, but keep it subtle. Avoid the lower right corner since that spot gets covered up by your product icons. Number four Add text overlay, but not too much. Keep your copy concise for readability on mobile and remember to create separate pins for each country you target so they can be translated into the local language. 5 Use video Keep your video short, straight to the point and lead with a clear hook in the first few seconds. Make sure your video makes sense with the sound off and select the COVID image when you upload your video so users can understand what your ad is about and at a quick glance. Number 6Optimize your pin copy. Clear titles and descriptions help your PIN get discovered in search. You can use up to 100 characters for your title and up to 500 characters for your description. Your PINS creative should tell people what to expect when they click. Make sure it matches your destination site's topic and imagery, and if your copy includes a link, make sure it's active and loads quickly. Alright, now that we've got the pin, it's time to perform. Targeting allows you to reach a precise audience, already searching for your current content and ready to actively engage. Targeting is an important step of promoted ads because without it you'll have less interest. You can target a group of people based on site visitors, an uploaded customer, list of emails, or an engaged audience that interacted with pins from your confirmed domain, or an afterlife audience that behaves similarly to the one you already have, or you can choose your own. For this, we want to target new customers who haven't interacted with your brand before. Next thing we'll want to do is come over here to interests and keywords here. We can also add an audience list on top of this, but let's keep Those campaigns separate for now, we want to find people who are interested in digital art and illustration. You'll see here the predicted number of people you may be able to reach with selected targeting. Now let's add relevant keywords to increase ad impressions in search results and related pins. The real benefit here is that you're able to narrow down your target audience by only showing your ad to someone who's actively searching for a keyword related to your brand. Choose relevant keywords to increase ad impressions and search results and related pins. You can also use the extend your reach feature to see how many people are searching for these keywords, as well as discover recommended keywords to add to your list. Next, we'll select our demographics. You can combine target criteria to create an audience as narrow or as broad as you'd like to. And the last thing down here is ad placement targeting. This lets you specify where you'd like your ads to appear on Pinterest. If you don't want your promoted pins to show up when someone is browsing and only appear in search results, you can specify that here. Okay, you've built your ad in targeting and Although you set your daily budget, you still need to set a maximum cost per click bid or cpc. This is how much you're willing to spend for someone to click on your PIN and get to your website. Remember, we set our daily budget at $10. For example, if you set your max CPC at 25 cents, it means that you're willing to pay $10 per day to receive 40 clicks on your ad. For anyone that's ran a paid search on Google AdWords, I think you'll agree that a 25 cent CPC is pretty great. Now, Pinterest works just like a browser, and for that reason ads are displayed according to bids. The brand that makes the highest bid gets its ad shown to the target audience. My advice is to start low, set your bid at 10 cents and see what the data says after the first day. If the impressions are low and you're not hitting your daily budget, then you know that you need to increase your bid to show more. Increase your bid in increments of $0.05 and continue testing until you find your sweet spot. The chosen objective determines how the auction is bid. Once you've decided your max cpc, it's time to set the campaign live. If you want to optimize your ads, improve your returns, and refine your Pinterest strategy, you'll need to tap into performance data and and monitor the delivery of your campaign. That's where the Pinterest analytics tool comes into play. Here you'll see metrics like impressions, engagements, clicks, video views, average CPC audience reach, and total spend, among others. When you first begin using it, you'll be greeted with a full overview of your Pinterest marketing performance. This overview is a convenient place to assess your Pinterest performance at a quick glance. For example, if you're seeing high volumes of Pinterest impressions but low numbers of views, then you may need to work on creating more engaging pins. However, if you're seeing high views but low impressions, you'll want to improve the visibility of your pins through keyword targeting and SEO. Here's another example. You may notice that many of your top pins are similar content types. This suggests that a large number of users are searching for related keywords. By creating similar pins based on these popular posts, you can rapidly increase the number of impressions that you're achieving. The more impressions that have been delivered, the more opportunities there are for your target audience to view and engage with your your pins. These insights can help you shape your content strategy, which is why impressions are so important to track. You can also use UTMs in your pin links to track PIN engagement in Google Analytics. A UTM code is a simple snippet code that you can add to the end of a URL to track the performance of campaigns and content. If you've got goals set up to track leads or sales, you'll now be able to attribute those goals to your promoted Pins campaign which will help you identify success and roi. Now you can use this data moving forward to decide if your campaign was really worth it and build off of your first campaign for further ad success. If there's just one takeaway from this video, it's this. Pinterest is a powerful customer acquisition channel for your brand or business. And because Pinterest users are actively searching the site for products and services just like yours to buy, visitors from your targeted ads are much more likely to convert into leads or sales or faster than from other social media sources. That's a huge potential reach when you include targeted campaigns for Pinterest audiences as part of your marketing strategy. Just remember, to do this effectively, you need to create quality pins that invite clicks and conversions. And luckily, HubSpot has created a set of professional Pinterest templates that'll help you get your click worthy content in front of a new audience in just minutes. The link for these templates can be found in the description below. Do you use Pinterest in your social media strategy? What's been your experience Please share your thoughts down in the comments below. And while you're down there, be sure to like and subscribe if you liked what you heard and want to hear more. Until next time, I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot grow better.