Beyond Performance+: Why Manual Pinterest Campaigns Still Matter

The positive platform is back! Pinterest is still a place where users search, plan, and find inspiration. It’s also constantly evolving, introducing new tools that make advertising easier than ever. One of those tools is Performance+, Pinterest’s AI-powered campaign automation tool. While it significantly reduces campaign setup time and can improve efficiency, marketers who invest a little extra time into building manual campaigns gain more control over targeting, deeper audience insights, and greater flexibility to test what works. In this blog, we’ll explore why manual campaigns can be a smart strategy, how Pinterest Trends can guide targeting, and why creative, especially video, remains the key to performance.

By simply un-toggling the Performance+ button at the start of your Pinterest campaign, you unlock many more options when it comes to targeting such as demographics, locations including, state, city or DMA, interests and keywords. These options give you more control and allow you to hone in on your desired audience.

When building your campaign, your strategy should start with finding your audience. You may lose some impressions and not reach as far but those who you do find will be more inclined to click on your pin and get to your site. In this case, sometimes reaching fewer people leads to better results. By doing things the manual way, we are going after a quality audience. While it’s true that you can still use custom audiences based on email lists, website engagement and Pinterest engagement when using Performance+, layering this option with interests, keywords and location will help you further define your audience.

Geography matters. Most destinations have defined driving or feeder markets and by using manual campaign set-up you can select exactly where you want the ad to show up, so you’re spending your budget dollars wisely in places that are more apt to turn a click into a visit.

Search and discovery are huge parts of Pinterest and vacation planning plays a big role on the platform. By integrating interests and keywords into your campaign, you’re more likely to find your audience. Interests include selecting topics that go along with what your campaign is about, you can start with typing travel in the search bar and selecting what fits before getting more niche as shown below with waterpark, hiking, family and so on.

As for keywords, think about search terms people may use when trying to find the topic for your campaign. When layered with location targeting you can use phrases like lake near me, waterpark near me, family activities near me and so on. Another cool thing is that you can still enable Performance+ here at the ad set level, this will help find more relevant people based on YOUR interests and keywords. So, you’re getting the best of both worlds, the precision of manual targeting combined with the optimization power of Performance+.

Now you may be thinking, how many keywords do I have to come up with? More than 25 should be your goal and your follow-up question may be, how do I come up with that many? Once you’ve identified a couple like your city and state, think in search terms, what are people searching in relevance to my destination. Family getaway, family vacation, where to see fall colors, activities for kids near me and so on. AI platforms can help you come up with a few but one thing Pinterest provides that can help you be visible on the platform itself is Pinterest Trends.

Pinterest Trends is a resource within Pinterest Business Manager that can help you understand what is trending on the platform. You’re able to see search and seasonal trends based on time of year. It’s always changing and can be a great tool when planning or optimizing your campaign. You can search a specific word to see what the search volume is and when. Coming here when you’re stuck thinking of keywords can be a great tool. It can also be a good place to come back to improve your campaign results. You can always add more keywords later. So, if something related to what you’re promoting suddenly goes viral or you’re running a long campaign and need to switch out some seasonal search terms you can come back here and see what’s trending.

Using our targeting features, we are able to get pretty niche, which means sometimes the more niche the topic the better. Don’t be afraid to get away from general topics like events, or top things to do in the summer, try something specific, waterfalls, a light parade, etc. If you have good creative and put time into setting up the targeting, you have the power to create a winning campaign.

One thing about Pinterest is that the creative needs to be there, it’s a very visual platform. Sometimes, we don’t know what’s going to be a hit with the user so, options are a great thing to have on hand. When creating your visuals, sometimes simpler is better, just a photo and a logo, maybe one with a little text overlay to convey the point of your campaign and a video to round it out. Video is having a strong impact on the platform right now as it is across all platforms. Nothing too long, just short, sweet and attention grabbing to stop the scroll. Videos also blend in with the Pinterest feed, making it more likely to stop and click before they realize it’s an ad.

Have fun, use this as a chance to learn more about your audience. A/B test Performance+ campaigns up against a manual campaign and see the differences. Play around in your manual campaigns and set-up multiple ad-sets testing customer lists against interest and keywords. See if video resonates more than static photos by putting them up against each other. Try different calls to action, headlines, etc. The number of options you have to test is not quite infinite but pretty high with a manual campaign. Performance+ can be an excellent option for destination marketers looking to simplify campaign management, but it’s not the most strategic option nor will it necessarily yield good results. Manual campaigns give marketers greater visibility into audience behavior, more flexibility in targeting, and the opportunity to test and learn. When paired with beautiful photos and compelling video, this approach can help destinations connect with users in meaningful ways throughout their planning journey. Above all, taking the time to build a strategic manual campaign can help ensure your message reaches the right traveler at the right moment.

As always, happy pinning.