Pinterest: How to Run an Effective Promoted Pins Campaign on a Budget

This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Pete Schauer

If you're a digital marketer, you're probably already utilizing social media advertising to increase brand awareness and ROI. Facebook Ads and Twitter Cards are already a big part of your marketing mix, but there's still something missing, and it's Pinterest's Promoted Pins. Pinterest's Promoted Pins are still new to digital marketers. In fact, they haven't even been rolled out to every Pinterest account in the U.S. yet, so you may not have them at your disposal just yet. (Note: if you don't see an option to create Promoted Pins, click here to get on the waitlist). That being said, because we're still so unfamiliar with Promoted Pins, it's best to start with a small campaign budget and then increase the budget as we see positive data and return. To start small, you need to build a targeted yet effective campaign that will still produce results so that you can properly test whether Promoted Pins are right for you. Here's how to do so. Choose Your Objective You should know what your objective is before even getting to this point—are you looking to boost brand awareness, or are you an eCommerce brand trying to increase sales? Pinterest has options for the both of you, so choose one of the two: Boost engagement with your Pins or Get traffic to your website. For the purpose of this article, we're going to select the second option, because we want to drive traffic to our site. Give your campaign a name, a run time, and a daily budget. If you've used Facebook or Twitter Ads in the past, none of this should be new to you. Since this is unchartered territory for us, we're going to let this campaign run for a week and give it a daily budget of $10.00, so I know that I won't spend more than $70.00 total on this campaign. The last step for this section is to pick which pin you're going to promote. Just click the red "Pick a Pin" button at the bottom right to select your pin and continue down the path of building your ad. Pinterest Promoted Pins: Build your campaign Add Terms & Targeting Once you've selected which pin you're going to promote, it's time to create the targeting for your campaign. One thing that's pretty cool about the targeting for Promoted Pins is that you can target by keyword, which Pinterest calls "Terms." Basically, you select which keywords you want to trigger your ad—think of it like a keyword search campaign in Google AdWords. The real benefit here is that you're able to narrow down your target audience by only showing your ad to someone who's actively searching for a keyword related to your brand. Pinterest Promoted Pins: Terms targetingBeyond terms, Pinterest advertisers can utilize further targeting to narrow down the audience and reach a more targeted and relevant demographic. Additional targeting that's currently available to those using Promoted Pins are: Locations (210 different U.S. locations available) Languages (choose from 20 different languages) Devices (Desktop, Android phones/tablets, and Apple phones/tablets available) Genders (Male, Female, and Unknown) To keep your campaign targeted, you may want to key in on a certain location or device where you know your customer base is. Just remember that if you're going to show on mobile, your website should be mobile optimized or responsive. Set Your Maximum CPC Bid You're almost there. You've built your ad and the targeting, and although you've set your daily budget, you still need to set your maximum CPC (cost per click) bid, which is how much you're willing to spend for someone to click on your pin and get to your website. So for example, remember that we set our daily budget at $10.00. If we set our max CPC at $0.25, we're saying that we're willing to pay $10.00 per day to receive 40 clicks on the ad. For anyone that's ran paid search on Google AdWords, I think you'll agree that a $0.25 CPC is great. My advice is to start low. Set your bid at $0.10 and see what the data says after the first day. If the impressions are low and you're not hitting your daily budget, then you know that you need to increase your bid to show more. Increase your bid in increments of $0.05 and continue testing until you find your sweet spot. Once you've decided your max CPC bid, it's time to set the campaign live. Measure Your Results Head on over to the Analytics section of Pinterest so that you can track and measure the results of your campaign. You'll see metrics like Impressions, Clicks, Average CPC, CTR (click through rate), amd Total Spend, among others. Tip: Use UTMs in your Pin links so that you can track the engagement of your Pins in Google Analytics. If you have goals set up to track leads or sales, you'll be able to attribute those goals to your Promoted Pins campaign, which will really help you identify success and ROI. Now you can use this data moving forward to 1) Decide if the Promoted Pins campaign was worth it, and/or 2) Build off of your first campaign and deploy another campaign for further brand success. Good luck out there.

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Pete Schauer
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I'm the digital marketing manager at a digital agency in New Jersey. I'm also a published author and former sports writer.
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