Let's talk about Pinterest.
Pinterest has been around a while. Most marketers have turned up their nose at it, writing it off as just a place where girls plan their weddings. Which isn’t wrong, but also isn’t the whole picture.
We've been watching Pinterest really closely at Northbeam for the past three years. We think the platform is having a renaissance right now.
Under new CEO Bill Ready, who took over in 2022, Pinterest has been investing heavily in ad performance tech, AI, and market repositioning. The whole vibe has shifted, which has me thinking…
Is Pinterest the next frontier for serious performance marketing?
Understanding Pinterest in 2025 and beyond
Understanding if a channel is going to be a good fit for your ads requires us to look holistically at what the channel is, who uses it, and probably most importantly, their headspace while they're using the platform.
Every social media platform has its own aesthetic. Its own culture. Its own headspace. And that has a huge influence on whether users are actually going to discover products, purchase directly from your ads, or even remember the ads you place there.
Instagram is super polished influencer world. TikTok is the home of chaotic Gen Z shitposting. YouTube is the realm of meal time videos and children's content.
For the longest time, Pinterest was basically known as the place where girls would plan their weddings. It had a life as a fashion catalog. And that's probably how you remember it.
But we're quick to forget that Pinterest is actually the fourth most popular social media site in the USA. The budget share charts in this newsletter surely don’t represent that reality.
The public's perception of Pinterest, especially Gen Z's perception, has shifted massively since the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of algorithmically-led social media. People are starting to recognize that not all social media is made equal. Or that it might not even be good for you.
There's an increasing movement, especially among young people, to control their social media use for the sake of their own mental health.
Thanks to these trends, the rise of social video, and the rise of the algorithm, Pinterest suddenly inhabits a very different place in the overall mosaic of social media. What is Pinterest in the Trump era and beyond?
Pinterest is jumping on the anti-social-media wave. They're positioning themselves as a healthy social media app, which is a pretty shrewd choice in the shadow of Zuckerberg.
Pinterest is rebranding itself as a place where users can aspire and dream rather than doomscrolling. Recent features in Elle magazine and The New York Times support these perspectives.
And Pinterest's advertising tech has evolved. From their partnership with Instacart that opens up the possibility of CPG ads, to shoppable search ads, the platform is really making a play to lock down the future of social spending, which is mostly going to be driven by Gen Z.
But as with any channel, you need to do the logistical work on your end to prove that Pinterest is going to be successful for you before you start.
Should you run ads on Pinterest?
Here's what you need to evaluate:
Do you have a strong content machine in place already?
Pinterest is like every other platform. You need content. You need video and photography and blog content that appeals to the Pinterest mentality. Do you have somebody on your staff or in your creative team that understands Pinterest and knows how to use it now and is a power user? If so, you might be able to adjust your creative engine to support Pinterest relatively easily. If getting creative is a chore for you, then I would focus on just one platform and don't try experimenting yet.
Are similar businesses in your category using Pinterest successfully?
This is an easy one. Is your competition on Pinterest? Are they investing time and resources there? If you have a competitor that you know is pretty smart and they're doing a lot of work on Pinterest, you can assume to some degree that Pinterest is working for them as a demand generation channel.
Are your clients or customers actually on Pinterest?
If you already have customers who use Pinterest regularly, advertising there can help you reach the rest of that segment. What's important to understand is do you have future customers on Pinterest as well? Are there specific user behaviors or trends or segments that you feel like you can't reach on any other platform that maybe are on Pinterest? Do some research and see if there is a culture on Pinterest, either a visual aesthetic or a content culture, that you feel like you can dive into and be a part of. Because if so, then Pinterest is probably a good place for you to start.
Are you already getting Pinterest traffic without even trying?
This is just proof of concept. Are you already getting Pinterest traffic? Because if you are, it means that the content you're already creating is successfully driving interest to your site and your brand. That's a pretty good proof of concept that your paid ads might succeed there as well. What content is driving that traffic to your site already?
Do you sell a visual product that will appeal in the feed?
The products that perform best in growth marketing contexts are products that are usually easily visually understood. Does that count for you? Do you have a strong visual brand identity and a strong aesthetic that would succeed in the Gen Z Pinterest fashion lifestyle space? Because if so, you're more likely to succeed in your ad campaigns than somebody who sells carburetors.
How to fix the measurement problem
Similar to what we've seen on other platforms like TikTok, we know that views are more important on Pinterest than just clicks. Pinterest recently reported that 88% of sales attributable to Pinterest start with a view, not a click.
This means if you're trying to run campaigns on Pinterest only looking at one-day clicks, only looking at last-click attribution, you're not going to get a full image of what's actually performing on that platform.
You're not going to be able to scale your ad campaigns there effectively without good data.
Pinterest has put together a pretty good guide on Pinterest Performance+, their answer to automated campaign management and creative optimization. If you start anywhere, start there.
We recommend looking at your Pinterest campaigns using Northbeam's Clicks + Deterministic Views (C+DV) attribution model. As we've written before, C+DV shows you which ad campaigns are actually driving true demand. Reach and traffic objectives are typically better represented in their impacts on your ad sales when you're using the C+DV model.
This means for your view-heavy platforms like Pinterest, you'll want to use C+DV as your model.
Compare clicks-only versus C+DV models by objective. Then drill in at the campaign level to identify incrementality by each of your Pinterest ad campaigns. Clicks + Deterministic Views is the real secret to properly measuring the impact of your Pinterest campaigns.
Check out our blog for how to use Clicks + Deterministic Views properly when looking at it for the first time in your ad accounts.
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