As most of you guys know, Pinterest is my best friend. I absolutely love the potential that it holds for bloggers and small businesses, plus, it’s incredibly fun to scroll through and get lost in sometimes! I wrote here about some of the ways that I more than tripled my Pinterest traffic in just a few months, but a few weeks ago I tried a new service offered by Pinterest (Promoted Pins) and wanted to share how it went!
How I set it up
If I’m being honest, I did very little research prior to setting up my very first Promoted Pin, but knew some of the basic ideas. I knew that I didn’t want to spend very much money on this little trial and I also knew that clicks and impressions can add up very quickly, especially if the promotion does what it’s supposed to do.
When you go to promote a pin, you can choose to do a Cost Per Click (CPC) Campaign or an Engagement Campaign.
With the CPC campaign, you will only be charged for a click to your post and you set a maximum “bid” to keep your budget within a comfortable range. This either means that you can end up paying well under your CPC (for instance, if the pin you pick is already well saturated on Pinterest), or that you will need to increase your CPC to compete with other pins in the same categories.
With the Engagement Campaign, you will pay for basically any kind of engagement on your pin. This means that you will be charged whenever someone enlarges, repins, or clicks your pin. If the same person enlarges or repins the pin and then clicks on the pin, you will be charged for the repin and the click. To me, this is not an option to choose if you’re just starting out. You should first get a feel for which pins work best, what kind of budget is good for you, and how much of a difference it will make to your site if the pin is successful. This option can add up very quickly and I honestly wish that the “enlarge” was not part of the engagement option. To me, someone enlarging your pin does nothing for your site or the success of the pin, so it seems odd to me that you would be charged for that!
Anyway, for my first campaign, I chose this pin, a CPC campaign, and set a daily budget of just $3 and a maximum CPC of $.20. I didn’t choose an end date, but planned to run the campaign for a full week to see how things went (with a daily budget of $3, that would only be a $21 investment). I did end up going for 8 days, but only because I forgot to pause the campaign! Oops!
You can choose to target a specific audience, so these are the parameters I set for mine:
- Terms: Baby, baby products, baby stuff, baby boy, baby girl, new baby, baby clothes, baby registry, baby registry essentials, baby essentials, registry
- Location: The U.S. simply because of affiliate links.
- Language: English (U.S.)
- Devices: iPhone, iPad, and Android (I did this because most of my traffic from Pinterest is mobile and I wanted to be able to capitalize on that even more!)
- Gender: Female (because I don’t know many dudes on Pinterest or dudes that would search the internet at all about baby stuff, haha)
Here’s what happened
As you can see from the screenshot above, after 8 days of promotion, my pin received:
- Over 19,000 impressions
- 88 repins
- 642 clicks (clicks aka page views were my main concern)
You may also notice above that even though I set my maximum CPC bid at $.20, I only had to spend $.04 per click to beat the previous person’s bid. This means that if a pin in the corresponding categories had a maximum bid of $.03, my pin would have shown up over theirs in a targeted feed. Basically, since my maximum bid was well above what was needed for my pin to show up, I got more bang for my buck!
Final thoughts
I am actually very pleased with the campaign that I ran on Promoted Pins. I spent a very small amount of money (just $24) and got a ton of engagement in return! I normally get about 4,000 clicks throughout a 30 day period from that specific pin, so to receive more than 500 clicks in just 7 days is pretty good, in my opinion!
The most beneficial part of promoting the pin, I think, was that while I only paid for actual clicks to my post, the pin saw a substantial increase in impressions, including those that were “trickle down” impressions.
I did try promoting a similar pin through Promoted Pins the same week that I ran the campaign mentioned above. Unfortunately, I would need to raise my maximum bid significantly to compete with other pins in the same category, so there were no stats to report! Finding specific pins that will be the most popular with my Pinterest audience will be trial-and-error, as well as finding the right CPC bid, so I will be updating this post in the coming months on what has worked best for me!
I will definitely be using Promoted Pins again in the future! If you are thinking about also giving it a try, here are a few things you should ask yourself:
- Is it within my budget to give this a try? How much can I afford each day? (If you have a small budget, consider starting with a daily budget of $1 or $2 because the money can add up quickly.)
- Do I have a post that would be especially helpful or interesting to my audience?
- Is my pin vertical, a high quality image, and contain text?
- Who is my ideal audience?
- Is my goal to increase page views or am I more concerned about increasing engagement on Pinterest in general?
Ready to try Promoted Pins for yourself? Get more tips and a step-by-step of the process here! If you haven’t been offered the opportunity to try Promoted Pins, be sure to get on the waitlist here!
Have you tried Promoted Pins? How did it go? Have questions? Leave them in the comment section below!
Visit Hayley | A Beautiful Exchange Blog’s profile on Pinterest.
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