Pinterest starts to measure the in-store sales impact of Promoted Pins

Yesterday, Pinterest announced a relationship with Oracle Data Cloud to measure the company’s impact on in-store sales. Oracle owns Datalogix, among other martech brands.

Along with the announcement, Pinterest also publicized the results of a study that “measured in-store sales for 26 Promoted Pin campaigns across major food and drink, household goods and beauty brands.” The study reportedly found that “Promoted Pins drive 5x more incremental in-store sales per impression” vs. other online advertising.

The study also showed that “Pinners” were highly desirable prospects:

Nearly 40 percent of Pinners make over $100K each year. What’s more, the study found that compared to the national average, CPG brands are 3x more likely to reach existing customers on Pinterest — and those customers spent 16 percent more. . .

The study also found that more engaged Pinners are even more likely to have strong buying behavior. People who engage with Promoted Pins are 12 percent more likely to be buyers of that brand.

DataLogix measured incremental in-store traffic by using customer purchase and point-of-sale data that they can access based on historical grocery and retailer relationships. Like others measuring in-store visitation lift, the company creates control and exposed groups to see if exposure to digital ads results in incremental store purchases.

There are now a wide range of companies (perhaps more than 20) that are measuring store visits driven by online and mobile ads. I’ve written numerous times in the past about how online-to-offline measurement is rapidly becoming a critical KPI that will ultimately substitute for other online “proxy” metrics. For example, Google is expanding the Store Visits data available to marketers using mobile search ads.

While ecommerce now drives several hundred billion dollars in annual purchases, offline sales impacted by digital media represent multiple trillions of dollars. Indeed, the Pinterest data reflect not just store visitation lift but actual purchase behavior.