You've decided to take the plunge into Pinterest Ads and studied everything on the Pinterest Help Desk regarding setting up a campaign and also read this great article from our own PBC Pioneer @heatherfarrisco - 6 Tips to Get Started with Pinterest Ads as a Total Beginner
You just hit publish on your very first promoted pin campaign. Congrats! But you might be thinking, what now?
Here are some tips to help you optimize your promoted pin campaign for success:
First thing to do is just WAIT.
As difficult as that may be, it is important to give your campaign time to work through it's "learning phase". I will check on it over the first couple days to make sure the ad has been approved and it's beginning to spend it's daily budget. Otherwise, you'll want to give it a good 7-10 days before making any adjustments to budget or targeting.
Check to see that your budget is spending
If the campaign is not spending after a few days or it is not spending your full budget, it could mean:
- Your targeting is too narrow. For a prospecting campaign (aka cold audience), only target with keywords and/or interests. Shoot for a minimum audience size of around 5M. Do not include custom audiences (i.e. email list subscribers, website visitors, engagement audiences) in campaigns you are targeting with keywords and interests. Reserve these audience groups for retargeting campaigns. Try adding more keywords or interests to your targeting.
- You are being outbid at the auction. Did you set your CPC bid manually? If its too low, you are losing ad placement to advertisers with higher budgets. Try switching to Auto-Bidding.
- Another thing that could affect if your ad is spending is your Click Through Rate (CTR). The platform average is around .55% so aim for a CTR higher than that for a better chance at winning ad placement. Try to add in different ad creatives (i.e. pins).
After 1-2 weeks assess your campaigns again.
By this time your campaign should be out of learning phase and you can start to make additional optimizations
Additional tips you can try:
- Turn on Outbound Click Optimization. This with help target people who are more likely to click through your ad (vs. pin clicks)
- Start to narrow in on the audience demographics that are converting. As you look at your stats, remove demographics that are not performing (gender, age, device, location)
- Scale your ad spend - if you have a good CTR and are starting to get conversions, it's a great time to slowing increase your budget to reach more people.
- Switch over to a Conversion Campaign - once you have enough conversions (around 50/week) I would switch your consideration campaign over to a conversion campaign. (Do this by duplicating the campaign so it saves all your targeting you've set)
- If CTR is looking good ( >55% ) but you are not getting conversions (Signups, add to carts, checkouts), you may want to take a look at your landing page. How can you optimize it more? Is there a clear call to action? Does the pin creative match what the landing page is offering?
Don't make too many changes too frequently
When you make a budget or targeting change, give the campaign a few days to optimize to that change. Too frequent or too many changes at once can hurt the campaigns algorithm.
Don't give up on your campaign too early
Plan to run a campaign for at least 4 weeks. Pinterest takes longer to optimize a campaign than other advertising platforms. Any less than that you haven't given the campaign enough time to fully optimize. After 4 weeks, if the campaign has low CTR, very low or no conversions or ROAS, and you've tried optimizing it without improvement, you can turn off the campaign.
I hope you found these tips helpful! Let me know in the comments below, what other optimization tips did I miss or that have worked for you?
