Pinterest Preps For Holidays With New Retail Tools

Pinterest is getting ready for the holidays. The social media and imagery platform is offering new tools to help retailers better reach their customers. The suite of new tools includes an updated storefront profile and search feature along with automatic bidding, reported MediaPost.

“Prior to this launch, advertisers had to input a manual bid amount for their ad groups,” said Stephanie Johnson, Pinterest product marketing lead. “With automatic bidding, Pinterest bids on the advertisers’ behalf.”

The results appear to be a boon for advertisers. According to MediaPost, advertisers that tested automatic bidding for catalog sales saw nearly 28 percent more conversions. Pinterest said advertisers saw nearly 29 percent more clicks when optimizing for click events for the same budget.

With automatic bidding, Johnson explained, Pinterest adjusts the bids depending on market demand. At the same time, the new tool sticks to the advertiser’s set of criteria, including budget, targeting, and campaign start and end date.

Pinterest’s new profile feature allows retailers to change their shop tab into a storefront, which allows them to spotlight featured product groups and in-stock products organized by category.

Recent trends for Pinterest have been quite positive. Users and advertisers are on the uptick. The company’s value surged 37 percent in July after a slump during the COVID-19 crisis.

“In these tough times, we’re seeing more and more people rely on Pinterest to cook at home, plan kids’ activities and set up a home office,” said Ben Silbermann, Pinterest CEO, at the time. “Businesses are helping them turn their ideas into reality as people are increasingly discovering and buying products on Pinterest.”

The company was having trouble earlier in the pandemic, as it struggled to balance its need for more revenue with a desire to cater to its most prosperous advertisers, primarily retail and packaged-goods companies.

Pinterest also introduced a new feature in June that allows users to shop with their cameras. Users can tap the camera in their phone’s search bar and click a “shop” option to bring up product links on retailers’ online checkout pages.