The Do’s and Don’ts of Advertising for Travel Brands on Pinterest

By Vanessa Jubis

With over 200 million monthly users and growing, Pinterest is an essential social media channel for any travel brand. In addition to food/recipes and fashion, travel is one of the ‘Top 10’ interests on Pinterest, with travel-related pins hitting a peak of 4 million repins a day during the month of June.

What is Pinterest?
In short, it’s a visual search and bookmarking tool. Users can search for content (pins) they are interested in via keywords, similar to how you would search in Google. Pins are images that can be clicked on right away to visit a related landing page, be saved for later reference, or repinned as a part of the users personal board.

These repins differentiate Pinterest from other social platforms. To be most effective on Pinterest, pins and their corresponding content should be evergreen. Unlike Twitter, where most views and engagement are reached within minutes of a tweet going live, it can take a pin 3.5 months to reach 50% of its engagement.

Pinterest Advertising
Brands and advertisers can choose to promote their pins through their business account — it’s easy to transfer a regular account to a business account, if you don’t already have one. There are five different types of ad objectives you can choose for your campaign depending on your goals, they mostly function the same way, making sure your pins are seen on Pinterest by your chosen target audience, but each offers unique features.

The Pinterest ad objectives are:

Awareness — If you want the most eyes on your pin, the awareness objective is the one for you. This ad type will ensure that your promoted pins get the most impressions/reach at the lowest cost. This objective can be used for brand awareness campaigns, or when you’re launching a new product, but we generally recommend a more action-oriented objective.

Engagement — With this type of objective, you pay for the engagement people take on your pins. Many advertisers expect engagement to only include website clicks and repins, but Pinterest also counts a ‘close up’ as an engagement. This is when a user taps on your pin to take a closer look at it.

Traffic — Looking to drive more traffic to your website? This objective prioritizes sending users to the landing page associated with your pin. Since your website is where users can learn more about your brand and take action, this is the ad objective we most frequently recommend. The content on your landing page should tie directly back to the content of your pin. If you send users to a generic landing or homepage, you can expect a high bounce rate.

Above are the three most popular types of Pinterest ads, but there are two additional objectives you can also choose:

Promoted App Pins — 85% of all Pinterest traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s a great platform to promote apps that relate to popular Pinterest topics. Users are encouraged to to install the app through promoted pins.

Video — Most content on Pinterest still uses static imagery, but you can also promote video content. Vertical, Instagram Story/Snapchat-style videos work best within the platform’s vertical layout.

Targeting
Pinterest has similar targeting options to Facebook and Twitter. You can upload custom audiences by email, or if you install the Pinterest Pixel you can retarget website visitors. Pinterest’s ‘actalike’ targeting is very similar to Facebook’s lookalike audience.

For more general targeting, you can select your audience based on age, gender, location, as well as interests. Pinterest’s real power however, lies in its keyword targeting, which connects your pin to users searching for similar content. Pinterest recommends using 20–30 keywords per promoted pin, but some experts, including Tailwind’s Content Marketing Manager, has suggested using 100+ keywords for optimal success.

Thanks to repins, promoted content on Pinterest gains additional lift. For every 100 promoted impressions, it’s estimated that you can expect to receive 30 free views.

Advertising Do’s and Don’ts
Now that you understand the basics behind how Pinterest and promoted pins work, here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind to get the best bang for your buck.

Do create a new ad set for each Pin. Even if you have the same targeting demographics for all of the pins you want to promote, you should create new ad sets based on the specific keywords related to each individual pin, for better targeting.

Don’t add more than one hashtag to a pin you plan on promoting. Pinterest only allows one hashtag per ad.

Do add custom utms or tagging to the pins you’re promoting. Pinterest’s proprietary reporting and analytics features are growing, but are still in their infancy, and at the moment, within the Pinterest dashboard you’re unable to separate organic vs paid performance metrics. Adding custom tagging can help to provide you with additional insights into the traffic coming from your Pinterest advertising. Pinterest also works with a number of third party measurement partners for added tracking and reporting.

Don’t trust Pinterest’s minimum bid suggestions. Your ads can often be effective at bids Pinterest identifies as ‘low’. Monitor your ads closely over the first few days and if the average daily spends are consistent, and you’re getting results you can keep them at the low bid costs. If it looks like the ad isn’t seeing much traction, given your budget, increase the big price slightly.

Do make sure the board you select your promoted pin from is related and topical to the pin itself. This will provide additional context to Pinterest to help target the promoted pin to an engaged audience.

Don’t forget to optimize any video content for viewers watching without sound, by adding captions if necessary. Video content is still rare on Pinterest, so users are likely unprepared to hear any sound.

Don’t just copy the same creative you’d use for Facebook or Twitter on Pinterest. According to Pinterest, the optimal pin ratio/size is 2:3, or 600 x 900 pixels.

Do vary up your creative. Pinterest is a visual medium so make sure your content stands out. Try adding text, using collages, or creating custom graphics and infographics.

Here are a few examples of creative that has performed well (and won awards) for a few of our clients:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/170151692155824081/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/34340015893276381/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/24910604171055710/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/50947039518100127/

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VERB Interactive is a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.