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Pinterest Promoted Pins – 3 New Conversion-Boosting Options

Alisa Meredith

Promoted Pin Audience TargetingPinterest has released audience targeting to the masses. Hooray!

For ages, Facebook and Twitter have allowed us to target ads based on custom or saved audiences. So you could serve up ads to people who have visited your site or a lookalike audience – one that matches that list of your website visitors in certain ways. Now, with the arrival of Audience Targeting on Pinterest, promoted pins are a bonafide contender!

Why Audience Targeting Matters

When people visit your site from a social media platform, often it is their first visit to your site. A quick look at some of the sites in my analytics accounts shows about 80% of visitors from social are first timers. That means they don’t know you. They don’t have a reason to trust you. And they take some convincing to buy from you OR to become a lead. Their behavior is also a little different from visitors from many other sources, with bounce rate being slightly higher for new visitors.

So, if you serve up ads to people who have already been on your site, those people are more likely to become leads or customers. Yes!

3 New Audience Targeting Options for Better Conversions

Whether you go to the Audiences option in the promoted pin menu or you are already in the process of creating a promoted pin you can create your audience based on website visitors, an uploaded audience (ie, your email list), or a lookalike audience.

Naturally, you must have created either a website visitor list or an uploaded audience list before Pinterest can create a lookalike audience.

How to Create a List of Visitors Who Used Your Site

You’ll need to install a conversion pixel on your website, which you can grab here. For my WordPress site, I use a plugin called WP Insert Code and added the code in the Footer Code box. About two hours later, the pixel showed up as verified. You can see the options I chose here.

I want to track page visits, but you can also track signups, checkouts, or custom. Signups are great to put on the thank you pages people land on after joining your email list. Checkouts would go on your sales confirmation pages, and custom – well, that’s up to you!

The pixel allows you to track:

Note, these pixel tracking options appear to be useful for analytics, but not in the actual audience creation process.

Using Your Audience in Promoted Pin Campaigns

It’s as simple as choosing the audience you created and selecting a time period. So, if you want to target all website visitors who were on the site in the last 180 days, you can do that!

You can also EXCLUDE a custom audience. So if you wanted to show a pin ONLY to people who visited your site (pixel 1) and leave out those who converted on a certain offer (pixel 2), you could exclude that pixel 2 group. Cool!

You can target only by audience or you can combine targeting to include keyword, interest, and all the other targeting options available!

To Do Today:

At the very least, set up  your conversion pixel to track visitors to your site. That code goes on every page above the </body> tag. Again, you can use the WP Insert code plugin for WordPress. Put the code in the footer code box.

When you create offers with landing and thank you pages, or you have checkout pages, give those their own conversion pixels. Make sure you name them clearly so you’ll know what you’re choosing in your campaigns later!

Last, but not least, you need to add a notice to your site that you are using 3rd-party tracking. Here’s what Pinterest says:

“You must give notice to everyone on your customer lists letting them know how you’re using and sharing their information with third parties for targeted advertising.”

Sounds like if you intend to upload your email list, you need to let the subscribers know first. Also, this needs to go on your website with your privacy policy.

Does audience targeting make you want to try promoted pins?

h/t to Tina Gammon for spotting this first!

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Alisa Meredith

I've been creating marketing strategies for years - for both B2C and B2B businesses, formerly as co-owner and chief strategist of a HubSpot partner agency, and since 2015 right here. I have a passion for businesses that make the world a better place in ways large and small, and the people who run those businesses are the ones I enjoy working with. I am slightly obsessed with Pinterest. Not just because it is fun, but because it works amazingly well for traffic and lead generation.