Pinterest Ad Plans Include Audience Targeting & Conversion Tracking

Pinterest’s advertising plans, further teased late last Friday when the company announced it would update its privacy policy on Oct. 19, became a little clearer today.

The social bookmarking site will offer advertisers the ability to target consumers in their database — for instance, from an email list — with ads on Pinterest. The company is also building a tool that will provide advertisers insight into whether clicks from Promoted Pins lead to purchases on businesses’ e-commerce sites. The plans were first reported today by Ad Age, which appears to have dug them out of a privacy page that Pinterest updated Friday:

Some of our advertisers may share information with us to measure and/or improve their Promoted Pins. Also, we may allow some advertisers to collect information from their Promoted Pins on Pinterest so they can understand how those ads are doing. Here’s how it works:

• An advertiser may add a pixel to their website to help us understand who’s bought something on their site. This pixel lets us measure purchases that come from Pinners viewing or clicking on the advertiser’s Promoted Pins. We may use that data to report to the advertiser how effective their Promoted Pins are. We may also use that data to customize your Pinterest experience. If you don’t want us to use this info to personalize the Promoted Pins you see, go to your account settings and turn off Personalization.
• An advertiser may share a “hash” (basically an anonymized scramble) of some identifiers (for example, email addresses). We can then match that with Pinterest users, and use the match to show targeted Promoted Pins to that group of people. If you don’t want us to target Promoted Pins to you this way, go to your account settings and turn off Personalization.
• We may allow an advertiser, or company working for an advertiser, to place a pixel or similar technology on its Promoted Pins. This pixel lets the advertiser collect info on how well the Promoted Pin is doing.

A Pinterest spokesperson confirmed the plans in an email to Marketing Land:

“While we don’t have the new features available to advertisers yet, we are developing conversion tracking and audience targeting and the privacy policy update allows us to launch them. We feel both features will help our partners understand how the ads impact their business and also make Promoted Pins even more relevant to Pinners.

Pinterest, which started testing Promoted Pins last October and launched its first paid ads in May, is steadily laying foundations for a robust ad product. The new options will pull it closer to the more mature ad programs offered by Facebook and Twitter, which both give businesses the means to target existing customers with ads on their networks.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.