A few days ago, I started using Pinterest paid ads, or Promoted Pins for the first time. The setup process for Promoted Pins was simple, too simple. As a former heavy Adwords user, I need more! The Google Adwords and the Bing platforms have glorious settings and estimates. There are many ways to tune an ad campaign and get granular data from it. The most interesting data includes customer geographical location, gender, age, interests and income level. Pinterest Promoted Pins does not have that sophistication that Adwords does but of course, the social media platform is an infant compared to Google.
Below is a screenshot of the setup process. Pinterest Promoted Pins allows an advertiser to set a geographical region (sort of), gender, language, device, and search terms. On the positive side, it only took a few minutes to understand the setup process but there are some peculiarities to Promoted Pins.
First, the pin must already be pinned to your account to use it as a promoted pin. In other words, you cannot upload a pin directly to the paid platform. It must be pinned before you visit https://ads.pinterest.com/ to begin your campaign.
Second, although you can set a target geographical location, Promoted Pins does not give you the same kind of control that Adwords has. Adwords allows you to choose major metropolitan areas or use a radius. With a map and audience estimates, it is clear how many users you may reach. With Pinterest it is not clear how far your ad reaches.
