Pinterest eases shopper engagement in time for holidays
Pinterest is helping retailers use its platform to inspire shoppers, and then measure the results.
The visually-oriented social media network reports searches by its users such as “Christmas gift ideas” spiked more than 3x year-over-year in April as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. In addition, the number of users engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest has grown over 85% in the past six months.
In response, Pinterest is releasing a new suite of tools designed to support retailers in efforts to inspire shoppers as they search Pinterest for holiday gift ideas, ultimately leading to more sales. Although the new solutions are being rolled out in time for the 2020 holiday season, they will remain available as permanent offerings.
An updated profile is designed to enables retailers to transform their shop tab into a digital storefront, with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations. When consumers search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they will see recommended retailers based on the product category.
In addition, Pinterest is testing an improved product tagging tool that gives retailers the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products. The update is intended to enable more seamless shopping and purchasing from a scene.
Pinterest is also unveiling a more intuitive catalog interface designed to enable retailers to upload catalogs and activate shopping ads with faster catalog feed ingestion, video as the main hero image in collections, collections as a new shopping ad format, and a new preferred scheduling tool that lets retailers upload all products to Pinterest on their own time.
Furthermore, Pinterest is bringing together catalogs and collections to make collections a shopping ad format. As part of this update, retailers can now also select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create a multi-image ad unit. Additionally, Pinterest is launching the option to use video as a hero in a collections ad unit to further tell a brand story. According to Pinterest, advertisers who used collections saw a 6-18% increase in average total basket size.
As part of these updates, Pinterest is also upgrading the processes retailers follow to purchase and measure ads. This includes a new capability to automatically bid for catalog sales in ad campaigns, meaning advertisers can dynamically adjust an ad group’s bid to aim for the maximum number of results.
New updates to conversion analysis allow retailers to see how customers are completing their path to purchase, summarized in a familiar funnel, in the visualizations tool. Retailers can follow customers’ purchase journeys and compare multiple attribution views to prove impact.