Pinterest now offers audience targeting and lookalike targeting

Pinterest now offers audience targeting and lookalike targeting

In an effort to grab a larger share of social channel ad spend. Pinterest announced new audience targeting features for advertisers. Businesses that use paid posts, aka Promoted Pins, can now use their own data to target potential customers.

Promoted Pins are Pinterest’s answer to paid social advertising. Advertisers of any size or budget can pay to get their pins in front of a larger or more targeted audience. Buyable Pins and Cinematic Pins are another paid advertising feature on Pinterest.

Up until now, advertisers on Pinterest could only target their ads using interests, search keywords, device, and location data. I have not had much success using location data, since many Pinterest Pinners do not specify their location in their account bios.

With these new features, advertisers will now be able to use their own data to target their ads. This is the same features already available to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter advertisers.

Pinterest will offer targeting based on:

• Customer list targeting: Target existing customers using emails or mobile ad IDs
• Visitor retargeting: Reach people based on their activity on your website
• Lookalike targeting: Find Pinterest accounts that share similar interests with your existing customers

Pinterest’s “Customer list targeting” is known as “Custom Audiences” in Facebook terminology. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all offer retargeting (or remarketing) as well as “lookalike” audience targeting. Of course, Google Adwords was the original creator of this framework.

A lookalike (Pronounced “Look alike”) is using your own email list of existing customers, and allowing Pinterest methodology to find other Pinterest accounts that have similar demographics as your current customers.

The addition of these ad-targeting features will move Pinterest closer to a robust advertising platform that can compete with other social media giants. Unfortunately, this much-needed addition to targeting is only available to advertisers using the few Pinterest Marketing Developer Partners. This is also the case for Buyable Pins and Cinematic Pins. Buyable Pins require the use of large ecommerce platforms. Restrictions like these add costs for all advertisers and limits options for smaller advertisers.