Pin This: How to Make Pinterest Work For You
Picture this: you’re in the middle of a great destination and have beautiful photos burning a hole in your album. Sound like you? Then head over to Pinterest! Pinterest is making serious moves on the travel front. Today, I’ll be sharing insights into trends, a few stats, new developments and creative advice. Now, if you’ve read any of my On the Radar’s or attended one of my coaching calls, you’ll know I’m a fan of Pinterest, so let’s get into it!
Trends & Stats
There were over 1 billion travel related searches in one year according to Pinterest’s latest travel report. Adventure Activities are trending this year, things like adventure camping, hiking, canoeing and more. All of these things can apply to so many destinations so, leaning into these trends can be worthwhile. If you have a hiking or biking trails that might be perfect for a quick, quiet daytrip, then another trend that might fit is solo travel. Solo travel is becoming quite popular across demographics but especially with the younger crowd. Gen Z is currently living for a road trip moment. If you want to search what’s trending before creating your pins, head over to trends in your Pinterest Business Manager and search the terms you’re interested in to see where they stand over your selected period of time. As you can see from the example, road trips, camping and hiking are all on the rise as we enter the summer months.
It’s no secret that the majority of Pinterest users are female and coincidentally women are typically the travel planners in the household, so you have the perfect audience right here on Pinterest! That being said, don’t leave the men out, you could create an A/B test of sorts here by creating an ad set for men and one for women just to see and understand your audience. Something else you can try is since the platform is millennial heavy, you can also break down age group at the ad set level to see what generational group is interested in your destination. Keep in mind that different themes will draw different people so we never want to leave anyone out, but this is a way to learn more about your customer.
New Development For Ads
A few other new developments have happened recently is including outbound clicks as an objective. This is important for destinations whose objective is to get people back to their site to check out what they have to offer. Pin Clicks used to be our only option, and this optimized for people to simply expand the pin, so this new optimization choice is huge for destinations that don’t have anything to sell directly from their site. To use this strategy when creating your next campaign be sure to check Outbound Clicks in the Ad Set level of the campaign.
I have seen a decent increase in outbound clicks when optimizing for it. In the past, I would see significantly more pin clicks than outbound clicks but now the two are very comparable as Pinterest is serving our pins to higher value users, meaning they’re more likely to click through to the website. If you want to create an A/B Test here as well to see the difference between the two, you can create one ad set optimized for Outbound Clicks and one for Pin Clicks.
Creative Advice
Now, this might be a little controversial as it’s in contradiction from what I’ve heard from Pinterest, but results don’t lie. We’ve gone through several different eras of the Pinterest Pin from the classic collage to crazy colors and borders and back again, but Pinterest is currently in her clean pin era. Think less is more when creating your ad. One beautiful photo and a logo. If you feel like you absolutely need to add text then do so minimally, just buzz words here. Stay away from multiple photos and call to actions as we want this ad to blend in with organic pins so that people are more inclined to click on it.
Let’s look at an example. The pin on the right with a beautiful waterfall photo and a subtle logo is performing significantly better than the left. The right pin has an engagement rate of 0.82% compared to the left with 0.36%. Outbound Clicks on the right are over 1,000, while the left hasn’t broken 100. The CPC for the right is $0.14 lower than the left. Pinterest’s algorithm is now serving this ad more than the others because it’s performing better so that gap may continue to grow bigger. You can definitely A/B test this one as well by couple different types of pins as I’ve done here.
Well, here we are at the end of the blog. I hope these tips and stats were helpful and maybe even useful when you create a new pin or even set up a campaign. Pinterest is always changing and evolving so our strategy needs to as well. So, I’ll say see you later until the next big development and as always happy pinning!
Digital Advertising Strategist