Pinterest promoted pins are becoming a hot topic around the web these days and for good reason. With the increase in complexity that is Facebook ads Pinterest ads are becoming more of a go to.

Promoted pins are a great way to drive traffic to your site, build your email list and in general scale your business.

With any sort of ads though you need to be prepared for a bit of a learning curve and time to test.

If you’ve read any of my posts or interacted with me in person at all you know that I’m not a fan of fluff. This post won’t be any different. *Insert cheesy smiley face here*

So are you ready to learn about why you should be using Pinterest promoted pins and the 9 things you need to do before you get started?

Yeah? Yeah! Okay, let’s dive in.

>> Watch our full playlist for Pinterest Ads on YouTube.

What are Pinterest Promoted Pins?

Promoted pins are just like any other pin on Pinterest but they have been promoted by their pin owner on the platform with ad money.

Just like boosting a post or running an ad on Pinterest, promoted pins are the same thing.

This is a way for business owners, content creators, brands and more to gain more visibility to their content, sell products and even services.

Promoted pins act like any other pin on Pinterest but they will say “promoted by” on the bottom of the pin and will lead directly to the URL they are promoting now.

You will not see the description of a promoted pin, nor will Pinterest let you do a close up of that pin. You can, however, save a promoted pin to a board.

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I’m Ready to Learn How to Use Promoted Pins!

Great! Let’s dive in then and get into why you should use start using Pinterest promoted pins…

I would say start by understanding your goals, how much you’re willing to spend per lead or sale that way when you set your budget you can make a solid decision on overall strategy.

One benefit I want to mention is the fact that you can promote a pin and someone can save your pin to their boards. If they come back to it later and click through and you’ve now earned a click and maybe even a signup from that interaction that you didn’t pay for!

RELATED: The Ultimate Guide to Create Your Pinterest Board Strategy

Getting Started

These items on this list are vital to do before you go over to Pinterest and start promoting a pin! Trust me on this I’ve learned my lesson from not doing these in the past and so have my clients!

Install your base code to your website

If you don’t have a base code installed then you need to do this first. You can’t retarget website visitors and see what those visitors do on your site like signing up for a lead magnet.

To install a base code on WordPress with a Genesis them you will need to grab the base code from Pinterest and navigate to Genesis > Settings > Head Tag > Paste & Save.

Got a Squarespace site?

>> Learn how to install base code on Squarespace sites here.

Install your Pinterest Tag Helper

Install this chrome extension on your Google chrome so you can always be sure your tags are firing.

Determine your goal and budget 

Beyond the basics of setting your Pinterest tag up and getting your billing information uploaded the next most important step is determining your goals and budget.

Based on what your goals are will determine the content you create, your email funnel, what your conversion tag will be and even how you measure your results.

A few of the common goals I see when promoting pins for clients and myself are this:

• Encourage actions on your website such as email list sign ups
• Increase website traffic
• Drive app installs
• Increase sales of products online and offline

The most common goals I work with are sales and email list signups. Having a clear goal in mind here is key.

Once you know what you want to do you can figure out how much you want to make or create a goal for list growth.

Most commonly when I set up a promoted pin for sales we want to more than pay for our promoted pin. Our goal is to cover the cost of the pin first then everything else is cake.

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Setup your content including your email service provider 

We are going to take a quick break from the actual campaign set up and deviate to ensuring your creatives are created, your content is solid and your email funnel is set up right.

You will want to check your landing page or blog post for working links, call to action and set up a redirect to a thank you page. Once you have a thank you page you will need to install a conversion code there. For email list sign ups I generally use the signup conversion tag. For sales I use checkout.

You will also want to make sure your email service provider is set up right!

• Do you have a working form?
• Are you tagging email subs if they purchase?
• Are you sending them a sequence once they sign up or purchase?

These are all things you want to make sure you have in place so you aren’t just promoting a pin then doing nothing with your new email subscribers.

Now back to our Pinterest ads!

RELATED: Tripwire Funnel: How to Create a Powerful Lead Generation Machine

Determine your audience type  

Once you know your goals you can figure out which audience type is best for your Pinterest ads. There are a variety of different options for audiences on Pinterest.

Those can be warm or cold as well as actalike:

• Email list
• Site visitors (this is why you need that base code installed on your site pronto!)
• Engagement
• Actalike

These are typically warmer audiences because they have interacted with your content or are like your audience.

You can also go the cold audience route and just target based on interests or keywords.

You may even create a campaign then create different ad groups under that campaign and test different audiences in each.

If you are going to target your email list then you need to go ahead and export a .csv file from your email provider then upload it to Pinterest. Make sure you name it strategically!

Do your keyword research 

Here is where you will do your keyword research. I always include keywords in nearly off of my campaigns. Even if I’m running an ad to an audience I will do an ad group with keywords and one without keywords.

RELATED: How to Use Keywords to Optimize Your Pins on Pinterest

Choose your ad type 

Once you know what your goals, budget and audience are going to look like it’s time to figure out what ad type you will use.

Let’s go over what those ad types are before I give you my advice…

Those common types are:

• Brand awareness – to help people gain awareness of your brand
• Video views – to get video views and make people aware of your brand
• Traffic – increase visits to your website
• App install – to gain app installs
• Conversion – to make sales

My suggestion for the average promoted pins user is traffic campaigns.

The reasoning for this is simple… you aren’t a huge brand with tons of money to throw around, you probably aren’t promoting an app either.

So, for now, I would stick with traffic or conversion campaigns. From my experience and everything, I’ve read these are the most affordable type.

My Results Promoting Pins

Data speaks louder than words and I’m going to show you just that. I have ran many, many campaigns for myself and for clients over the last few years and this is by far the campaign I’m the most proud of that I ran for myself.

I used to run a mom blog and I had a pain point as a working mom myself when it came to meal planning and grocery shopping… so I made a simple product and put it up for sale. At first it didn’t do anything so I started promoting it on Pinterest.

I ran this ad for nearly 6 weeks straight when I was in the midst of traveling in order to drum up some extra cash while I wasn’t hustling for clients.

I was promoting a pin straight to a tripwire page selling a Trello Meal Planning course for $17.50. In that timeframe, I made 499.99 in revenue and spent $109 in ad spend.

Essentially, I gave Pinterest $1 and they gave me $4.

Additional Client Examples

So could you get down with Promoted Pins?

It’s time to set up your Pinterest promoted pins!

The only thing left here is to get your first promoted pin off of the ground.

You can do this by going back to the ads dropdown on Pinterest and clicking “create ad” then go through all of the steps with the information you’ve learned here.

If you’re still on the fence about promoting pins I encourage you to sign up for Pin Profit Academy & take our Pinterest Ads course for beginners and ask your questions in our community.

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