Hot on the heels of announcing they’re now a 150-million user platform, Pinterest released enhancements to Promoted Pin targeting. The updates involve exciting, money-saving options for visitor and engagement audience creation.
What the what?!??! You say? Let’s break it down – and get you saving money and achieving Promoted Pin greatness!
The Original Targeting Options
When Promoted Pins first came on the scene, you could target by:
- Keywords
- Locations (210 US cities)
- Languages
- Devices
- Gender
Easy, peasy! Ease of use and super-low bids made Pinterest Promoted pins a no-brainer for even the newest marketers. Still, the limited targeting options meant the results weren’t quite what we hoped for in a lot of cases.
It didn’t take long, though, before interest targeting was added to the mix. Now you could target people who showed they were interested in your topic by engaging with similar pins. While these campaigns could be a bit more expensive than their primitive predecessors, they often performed much better.
Then in June, Pinterest introduced Visitor Audience Targeting, allowing you to show pins only to people on your uploaded email list AND they released Engagement Targeting, which lets us target people who had acted on pins that go to your website (whether you pinned it or not).
In addition, you could now create an “Actalike” Audience of your uploaded or engagement audience and use any combination of inclusion or exclusion in your ad targeting. Actalike audiences are similar to Facebook lookalike audiences, except Pinterest looked at action, not demographics and stated interests. Cool! Now we are really humming along.
But, then Pinterest dropped the big one on us and Promoted Pins are a whole new animal.
Enhanced Visitor Targeting
Targeting a warm audience of people who have already been to your site predictably improved conversion rates. But we still couldn’t target only visitors to one particular page, or a list of pages. Until now!
Now you can create an audience of people who have visited all your pages that have to do with one particular topic, or maybe your pricing page, or a product, or product category page. Are you seeing how targeting this specifically could save you money and increase leads and sales from Pinterest?
Let’s say someone visited your event agenda and your event pricing pages on your website within the last 14 days. This is a pretty clear indication that they’re considering attending! You could serve up a pin with a special offer, or simply reminding them that it’s coming up and they don’t want to miss it! Let’s walk through how we might do that.
Set up an Advanced Visitor Targeting Audience
From Ads > Audiences, create a new audience and choose visitors. Name your audience and give it a description. I suggest adding descriptive text in the name for later clarity.
Now, choose a base tag which tracks all visitors to your site (create that here), and then tell it how many days you want it to go back and if you want want past traffic at all. Hint: You probably do.
Now, the fancy part. You’ve chosen your tag, so add a filter and choose URL. Now you can put in any URLs whose visitors you want to include (or exclude) from this audience.
How to Use Enhanced Audience Targeting – Examples
- Want to promote a pin for a downloadable offer that expands on a series of blog posts you wrote? Add people who have not been to (landing page URL) and then add another filter for those who have been to (URLs of the articles in your series).
- Keep your audience list updated! You can upload a list of your email subscribers, but that list will never update as your list grows. You’ll have to upload new lists – and you can’t delete old ones, so it gets messy fast! So, to capture new subscribers, target people who have signed up for your email list by using your thank you page URL. When you set up targeting for your pin, you’ll include both your updated list AND this list of people who have been to your thank you page URL. You could also segment just like you do with your email list – people who downloaded the Dog ebook v the Cat checklist, for example.
- Create an audience of people who have checked out (a page URL) and use it to target people with a pin for your latest blog post on the same subject.
- Target people who visited a product page with a pin for that product. A few more times seeing that pair of shoes in the home feed might get them from “just looking” to buyer!
Getting Fancy with Visitor Audience Targeting
IF you are handy with javascript, or you know someone who is, you can create and target an audience, for example, of people who bought Item X. Or people who spent $XX in the last 30 days. Think of the retargeting options!
Fortunately, there is a lot the rest of us can do to use URL targeting to our great advantage. So far, my tests have shown a much higher conversion rate for these warm audiences!
And don’t forget – you can create an actalike audience based on any of these audiences you’ve made.
Enhanced Engagement Audiences
From the start, engagement audiences have been a great way to reach people who enjoy your content, but who might not already follow you. But, originally, you could only target all people who engaged with ALL pins to your site.
Now, though, we can target engagement on a particular pin or a selection of pins, OR you can target all pins to a particular URL.
I suggest the latter because I’ll usually want to capture people who engaged with ANY pin to that content rather than one solitary instance of a pin. There could be hundreds or thousands of pins to that one URL – and you will naturally want to capture data on everyone who engaged with ANY of them. I’m sure you can think of exceptions, but as a general rule, let’s use URLs!
Target people who engaged with any pin to this URL, but who didn’t click!
Aside from targeting engagement on a particular pin, you can narrow the audience by the TYPE of action they took – or did not take!
That means if they liked, commented, did a close up, or saved, but did not click, you can serve that same pin up to them again – perhaps prompting them to click this time.
Or, if you’re hungry for repins (and we all are), you could target people who have already repinned your pins with new pins and your traffic could go way up.
Use Enhanced Visitor and Engagement Audiences Together!
These improvements are powerful when implemented on their own, but if you put them together, you could end up with Pinterest magic!!
Combine any audiences you want – and even exclude audiences from targeting to reach ONLY the people you want.
Say you want to serve up a promoted pin to people who engaged with X pin, but haven’t been to X URL. No problem! Want to promote to people who clicked on X pin and who went to your pricing page? Absolutely!
So, next time you have a new downloadable offer or a blog post you REALLY want people to see, think about how you could use these new options to get the most for your money.
If you think the people who downloaded your ebook on Investments for Beginners, maybe they’d like to come to your next webinar on a similar topic. Lead your visitors closer and closer to a sale by thinking about what they have already said they want and by taking them one little helpful step at a time closer to your business.
What other use cases do you see for these new options? Tweet me!
Alisa is a content marketing strategist who has (more than once!) been accused of having a Pinterest obsession. A blogger for Tailwind, Social Media Examiner and alisameredith.com, and speaker for Social Media Examiner and The Agents of Change, she’s also a consultant for other agencies and small businesses. A big believer in the power of visual marketing, she’s on a mission to coax businesses into making the most of it!
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