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Pinterest ads basics how to set up a successful promoted pin campaign
Do you know how to set up Pinterest ads to drive targeted traffic and sales? Do you know that Pinterest used to be a far cheaper ad option than Google and Facebook? Yes, and a lot more – Pinterest is the better bargain to promote your evergreen content and with Pinterest advertising you will get free downstream activity like future saves and traffic from promoted pins that are saved during while the ad was running! Sounds like a big deal, right? Here is a step by step guide on how to smart set up your Pinterest ad.
Steps to Pinterest Promoted Pins you should consider before set up your ad:
1. Pick a Pin – I would recommend you only one pin per campaign. When just starting out, it is the cleanest way to get started. You have to choose eye catching and clickable pin. My tip is to choose pin that already has very good organic performance as traffic. But, before, I want you to think well about which link to your site you will need to drive traffic the most – think well on what your landing page should be and be sure to include there a good reason the people to click J I mean the strong “call to action” message. Also, vertical Pins (that is, Pins that are portrait-oriented rather than landscape-oriented) take up a lot more screen real estate in the Pinterest results and are therefore more likely to draw Pinners’ attention.
2. Targeting – one thing you should know is that on Pinterest you have 2 options to target audiences:
– Targeting by keywords (similar to Google ads) – In this case you will need 20 and more niche keywords in your niche. You can choose keywords as most as you can for your business niche (such as these you use in your site) and check them on Pinterest search bar. An effective Pinterest ad campaign considers targeting by the following criteria: keywords, location, languages, device and gender. Exactly who is your target audience for the chosen product/service? Avoid targeting by interest because it is far too competitive and expensive for most small business budgets;
– Targeting by audiences (similar to Facebook ads) – you can choose to target only a specific audience based on few groups of people.
The first group as you can see are all the people who went on your site for some period behind.
The second group can be your email list or any other customer list – all the people who are familiar with you and your brand. This is great way to target and based on this list we can create additional list of people (an actalike audience similar to lookalike on Facebook). This is actually the fourth audience in the above list. With other words – Pinterest will create for you a new list of people who were acting similar to your email list of people (people who already know for you and are interested to hear from you). This is great way to reach new audience with similar to your email list interests, which is not familiar with your brand, but were looking for the same pins as yours in the past and can be interested to see your pins. Pinterest will show your ad to these people only – they may be good new subscribers or clients. We can target of course your email list – Pinterest will check if the people from your email list are having Pinterest accounts registered with these emails and will show your ad on their Pinterest feed.
The third audience is very interesting because is from people who are engaged with your Pinterest content so far. These are the people who save or click on your pins, leaded to your site already. They know you and your brand and if you target them, they will see your ad in their home feed with priority. You can target both ways – to test which type of targeting will work for you. For the keywords targeting you can reach the people who are looking for content as yours in the Pinterest search feed. For the audience targeting, you will target different group of people only, we don’t need to use keywords.
3. Choose the text for the pin’s description:
Adding a few words of text to your image makes it clear what viewers are looking at, and why they should click to learn more. But don’t go overboard — you want the text to enhance the image, not compete with it.
4. Choose only traffic campaigns (avoid engagement campaign – even close up is engagement!) – The only form of paid advertising on Pinterest you should ever use is Traffic Campaigns. Traffic campaigns send people from your Pinterest ads directly to your website, and you pay per click. The engagement campaign is when you pay per engagement – for any close look, save or click. It is not recommended to use this type of campaign, unless you are a big brand with a HUGE advertising budget and your goal is to simply raise awareness about your brand, this is the only type of campaign that will be worth the investment. As far as choosing which pins you want to promote, as I said, it’s a good idea to start with those that have already done well organically. But if you don’t have any, it’s OK. Promoted Pins are great for short-term seasonal campaigns as well.
5. Avoid one tap pin.
This Pinterest advertising format takes Pinners straight to the source. Normally, when someone taps on a Pin, they’re taken to a close-up with more details. But with One-tap Pinterest ads, one tap takes users straight to your website, where they can learn more or even purchase directly.
Shortly after launching One-tap Pins, Pinterest said in a blog post that “almost twice as many Pinners are finding items to buy through these new Pins.”
But if you choose to incorporate One-tap Pins in your Pinterest advertising mix, keep a close eye on your cost per conversion. Since people may still expect to see a close-up of the Pin when they tap on it, they could be surprised when they’re taken straight to your website. That means you may end up paying for click-through from people who didn’t actually intend to visit your site (and who don’t stick around very long).
6. Define your budget and bids.
The budgets you set here are simply the maximum amount you’re willing to spend over the entire campaign, or in a given day. These are caps to make sure you don’t go over your spending limit. Pinterest uses a “second-price auction model” for ad bids. While that sounds complicated, it just means that you only pay the amount needed to top the next-highest bidder, so you won’t be charged your full maximum bid unless it’s required.
So, the budget is up to you! But as a first Pinterest ad campaign for your brand, consider starting with a budget of $5-10 per day to test the waters and experiment. You can still see clicks even when you set the maximum bid per click to lower than the bid that Pinterest recommends, so you can try this method as a safety net of sorts for your campaign. The minimum bid you should start with is $0.20 per click. In more competitive niches, you’ll need to check back on a week-by-week basis and change this periodically.
You can spend $5-10 a day and see some activity, so you might start there while you’re learning. With suggested bids climbing all the time, you may not generate a LOT of traffic, but it will be enough to learn. Again, look at your bid per click. If you’re bidding $.10 (click that means you’re only going to get around 50 clicks a day), is that going to be enough to see if they are converting? Depends on how patient you are! Maybe is a good idea to start with 10 USD daily budget and max 0.20 per click to see how the market will react. But, if you have bigger budget, you should continue with more. This above is really low, but as it will be the first campaign, it is more for testing. You can never assume you know what’s going to work best for your campaign that is why always be testing!
7. Choose end of the campaign – when setting up a Pinterest ad, it is important that you remember to set an end date for the campaign. You don’t want to be confronted with an endless stream of fees. Always define the start and the end. It can be 10, 14 or 21 days, it depends on the budget you want to spend. You’ll have to wait up to 24 hours for Pinterest to review your Promoted Pin for compliance with its advertising standards. In the meantime, you will need to set up your billing details (the credit card and email address on file) so that there’s a payment method available to cover your daily budget once your Promoted Pin is approved. They will charge your credit card on the 1st of the month for the previous months spend, or whenever you hit your billing threshold (whichever comes first). They do not accept prepaid cards or PayPal. Of course, there are a lot more details to set up the right ad gaining results as you wish! It is all about testing – don’t forget that learning never stops! What worked in the past, may not work for the future! Be ready to be patient and consistent with your promoted pins!
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