How Do I Target Audiences On Pinterest? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

6 min readJul 12, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In Part 1, I Spoke about what targeting audiences on Pinterest is and gave you an overview of the different targeting options that are available to you on the platform. I discussed some reasons that you should care about Pinterest targeting for your company, with some useful statistics to inspire you to use targeting options to execute successful ad campaigns. If you missed this article you can click here to read “How Do I Target Audiences On Pinterest? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”.

In this article, I will take you through the targeting options that are available to you in more detail, so that you can gain a more in-depth understanding of how using these strategies can help your ad campaigns see increased success. As marketing is such a key step in achieving success for your brand, it is always important to know how your efforts are affecting the bottom line.

How Can Targeting Audiences On Pinterest Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

In this article we will cover:
#1 Audience Targeting On Pinterest
#2 Pinterest Audience Statistics

Let’s get going…
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#1 Audience Targeting On Pinterest

On Pinterest there are three targeting categories that you can use to ensure that you are targeting the correct audience for your campaign, every time.

These are:

Interest Targeting
Keyword Targeting
Audience Targeting

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting options allow you to get your Promoted Pins in front of people based on what they like (such as recipes and home decor), as they browse their category and home feeds.

With nearly 50% of impressions occurring in home feeds, interest based targeting helps you build your brand with new audiences open to discovering your ideas.

Keyword Targeting

Keyword Targeting allows your brand to reach people ready to act on what they find with Promoted Pins targeted to appear in search results and as related Pins. Over 40% of clicks off Pinterest come from search results and related Pins. Keyword targeting helps increase in-store sales, boost traffic and drive online actions by showing your products to people ready to take the next step. As mentioned in my previous article, keyword targeting has now included features like match types, negative keywords and search term reports to target and optimize search terms with more precision.

Keyword Targeting allows you to target with more precision, and Pinterest has even developed a search term report that you can access in the Ads Manager to allow you to refine your keyword targeting options and monitor this targeting type’s performance to improve on your efforts.

Audience Targeting

Audience Targeting allows you to show your Promoted Pins to the people likely to be most receptive to your brand. You can target based on who they are (such as millennials, getting married), what they’re interested in (foodies, beauty mavens, and more), where they’re located and more. Boost traffic and drive online actions with audience targeted campaigns, which typically see a 28% increase in engagement rate.

Within the Audience Targeting category, there are four options you can choose from, which I will briefly mention below.

Actalike Targeting

Once you’ve identified your most valuable customers, you can use actalike audiences to find and target others like them. You might think that this is similar to Facebook’s lookalike audience targeting, but Pinterest call s this actalikes because it has a leg up on traditional lookalike audiences — as these audiences don’t just look similar, they have similar engagement activity too. This means that you are more easily able to identify and target user intent.

Customer Targeting

Customer targeting will help you reach people with an active interest in your brand when they’re most receptive to your messaging.

Depending on your goals, you might target existing customers to keep them engaged, or exclude them to focus on new customers.

Engagement Targeting

This targeting option helps you identify people who’ve interacted with your Pinterest campaigns in the past, so that you can reach them in the future with content personalized just for them.

You can create an audience and retarget Pin clicks, comments, saves and closeups. Or create an audience built on people’s interest in a specific Pin. With engagement targeting, you can encourage people who’ve already shown interest in your brand to take action — which usually drives higher conversion rates.

Visitor Targeting

Visitor targeting is the ability to actively target people who have visited your website or landing page. Use the Pinterest Tag to make the most of the traffic and engagement you get on your own website. This targeting option allows you to create audiences to retarget people on Pinterest based on things they did — like browsing a category, adding to a shopping cart, or signing up for your services.

“Its not just networking — its targeted networking.”— Jennifer Gluckow (Sales Trainer And Speaker) @JENinaNYminute

#2 Pinterest Audience Statistics

People use Pinterest to plan for what’s important in their lives, whether that’s easy dinner recipes, home renovation tips or the perfect pair of shoes. This is why brands should leverage the active interest Pinterest users have when they browse the site to their advantage.

As Pinterest users search for ideas or products that they are currently showing an interest in, brands are able to leverage this intent to drive higher conversion rates for their own products or services. Pinterest states that because of the high levels of user intent, marketers using paid ad campaigns on the platform, and appropriate ad targeting methods, see a 7x higher engagement level than those seen on more traditional sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

See how brands like ThirdLove used audience targeting on the platform to increase one-tap traffic from Promoted Pins. Read their success story here.

For this reason Pinterest has become a household social media site and have compiled a few stats on their audience, here they are:

200 million + people globally use Pinterest every month
This is a 40% increase from 2016
50% of these users are from outside the USA
70% of the people who use Pinterest monthly are women
60% of Pinterest households have children of 5 years old or younger
1 out of 2 Millennials use Pinterest every month
There has been a 50% increase in men using Pinterest
66% of the users on Pinterest are woman aged 25–54
40% of the households using Pinterest have an income of $100k+
61% of Pinterest users say they’ve discovered new brands and products from Promoted Pins
72% of Pinners say Pinterest helps them find ideas for everyday life
1 out of 2 Pinners have made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin

The shift from an “idea search” platform to a purchase decision driving platform over the years is evident and many brands have seen successful results when executing paid ad campaigns on the platform.

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Targeting on Pinterest makes sense after looking at all the stats that Pinterest has. People are 2x more likely to say that time’s well spent on Pinterest over any other platform. That creates a great environment to promote your brand to the exact customers you find most valuable to your business.

In my next article, “How Do I Target Audiences On Pinterest? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will cover what to watch out for when targeting and using Pinterest to help you get started on the right foot.