Thinking about advertising on Pinterest? The first question most people ask is, “how much do Pinterest ads cost?” or possibly, “how much do I need to spend on Pinterest ads?”
We’ll cover Pinterest ad budgets and cost per click bids when using Consideration (formerly traffic) campaigns, which is where most people should start when beginning to promote their Pins. Awareness campaigns are best for large companies with large budgets, and conversion campaigns are a bit complicated when it comes to bidding.
How Much Should I Spend On Pinterest Ads?
What’s a Good Daily Budget for Pinterest Ads?
You can spend as much or as little as you like. Literally. You can put a $.50/day cap on your campaigns.
But I suggest $10-$20/day for dabbling and at least $50/day if you want to learn, adjust, and scale quickly.
If you have $10-20 to spend, you’ll run no more than 1-2 campaigns with 1 ad group each. Otherwise, you will struggle to get traction with your ads. Why is that? Well, if you are bidding $.25/Pin click, that allows for 40-80 clicks per day. When you factor in the roughly 70% of people who click the Pin but don’t intend to go to your site, that leaves you with 12-24 visits to your site per day. If your conversion rate is 1%, it’ll take you 4-7 days to even start looking for a conversion (and remember time to conversion is longer on Pinterest than other platforms). Split that across campaigns and ad groups, and it could be months before you can tell if it’s working.
With $50/day you have a little more wiggle room, but don’t spread it too thin across many campaigns and ad groups.
For How Long Do I Need to Run my Pinterest Ad Campaign?
For consideration campaigns, take your usual time to conversion and double it. That’s about when you can start looking for conversions on your ad. Not sure what that time frame is for you? If you run ads on other platforms, double that expected time to conversion. No other ads running? Give it 2-3 weeks to start to convert. At that point you can make adjustments, but it’s still too soon to determine it’s not working. Plan on a month.
And note that this doesn’t mean you are spending twice as much as you are on other platforms. It just takes a bit to get going, but it also continues to increase conversions after you stop running ads, which is not something that happens on other platforms.
What to Do With Budget of $10-$20/Day For Pinterest Ads
There are a couple of tactics you can try. One would be to target ONLY your audiences. That is, people who have been to your site or people who are on your email list. For most of us, that tends to be a relatively small audience. Retargeting is also the fastest and most affordable way to generate conversions (leads, signups, or sales) on your Pinterest ads.
The other approach to consider (and one of my favorites) is using Pinterest ads as a way to boost your organic traffic. Odd as it sounds, you’ll likely notice your organic traffic increasing in lockstep with your ad spend. AND, it doesn’t dry up the moment you turn off your ads. Use interest and keyword targeting and a low cost-per-click bid to get your Pin in front of more people who then may save and spread your content to others. Don’t judge the success of your campaign by conversions, though. Remember this is just a way to increase overall distribution and traffic. For this kind of campaign, you can go even lower than $10-20/day.
How Much Should I Bid on Pinterest Ads?
First, figure out what a Pin click is worth to you. Resist the urge to guess. And remember that what you are bidding on is a PIN CLICK, not an OUTBOUND CLICK. That’s right, you’re paying when people click on your Pin, whether or not they have any intention of visiting your website.
To get to your bid per Pin click:
- Determine the value of a conversion – what you are willing to pay for the desired result (be it email signup, sale, add to cart, etc.)
- Find the conversion rate of the page you will advertise
- Determine the number of visits to that page that are needed to generate a sale
- Divide value by the number of visits per sale (this is what an actual visit to your page is worth)
- Multiply by .2 -.4 to get from outbound click value to Pin click value.
There are lots of nuances here, of course. Your traffic from Pinterest may convert at a higher or lower rate than other traffic. Your targeting will also impact conversion rate. You’ll may be willing to pay more for a retargeted visitor than a new visitor because the former is more likely to convert.
And of course, if you’re just trying to boost your overall distribution, start with a very low bid and raise it slowly until is is scaled as much as you want.
Do remember as well, that you’re getting downstream lift from your spend, so you might nudge that bid up just a touch.
Grab this formula (with example) from my Ad Planner/Bid calculator pdf.
Pinterest Ad Bidding – How Low Can I Go?
Technically, you can bid as low as $.10/Pin click. You’ll find that tricky to scale, and especially from July – December when holiday spending peaks. Still, if you use Interest targeting, you can try a very low bid and see what happens. The worst that can happen is that you get no impressions and need to increase your bid.
How to Spend Less on Each Pinterest Ad Click
As with other platforms, Pinterest’s Promoted pins are priced based on supply and demand. From July onward can be pretty pricey because of holiday spending.
The amount you will pay varies by keyword, interests chosen and more. So, the best thing you can do is experiment and watch your analytics. That little “Targeting: Keyword” dropdown is your optimization magic wand.
If you see a keyword or two outperforming the rest, you can either remove the others or start a whole new campaign for the top performers and perhaps raise the bid a little bit and let the budget go towards those cheap clicks!
You can do something similar with targeting by gender, device, location, age, and more.
How to Increase Your Pinterest Ads ROI
The best way to reduce cost and improve results is to make sure the content you are sending people to via Promoted Pins converts really well. Could you take your 3% conversion rate all the way up to 10% on that page? What a difference that would make! A few things that will help:
- Generate trust immediately – for people coming to your site from Pinterest, this may be their first exposure to you, your site, brand, and product. Make sure the trust factor is huge. Easy-to-find and complete “about us,” “contact us” pages as well as privacy policies, shipping and return policies are a MUST.
- Make it easy to opt in fast – visitors from Pinterest are in browsing mode, so they may not read your entire article to the end. Put your CTAs and opt in forms throughout the content and consider a popup or slider.
- Make it pretty – Pinterest is pretty. People going to your site from Pinterest expect pretty.
- Make it mobile friendly – with 90% of activity from Pinterest coming from mobile, your site needs to work and convert well on Pinterest. Don’t assume. Test out the content you plan to promote.
You also want to make sure your ad features a strong call to action and actually LOOKS like an ad. You may get fewer clicks, but the ones you get will be more likely to convert. We talk about this extensively in my Pinterest ads mini course!
The Easy Answer to How Much Pinterest Ads Cost:
As much as you want!
Remember you’re bidding on a Pin click, not an actual intentional click to your site. Determine what a Pin click is worth to you by finding Outbound click value and multiplying that by .3. Or hire me for a consultation or ads management. 🙂
I’d love to hear about your experience with Pinterest ads. Have they worked for you?
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