Pinterest is rolling out five new updates squarely aimed at helping merchants set up a storefront, generate sales, and measure their results.
Holiday shopping started well in advance this year, Pinterest says, with searches like “Christmas gift ideas” spiking in April (a 3x increase year over year).
Over the past six months, the number of Pinterest users engaging with shopping surfaces has grown over 85%.
However, there’s a difference between shopping and buying, and Pinterest wants to help merchants guide users toward taking that next step.
“Today we’re introducing our newest suite of merchant tools to help retailers reach customers this holiday season and beyond…”
Pinterest aims to assist merchants with updates to:
- Merchant storefront profile & discovery
- Product tagging
- Product catalogs
- Automatic bidding in ad campaigns
- Conversion analytics
Here’s more about each of these updates.
Helping Merchants Get Discovered
When Pinterest users search for shopping-related ideas they’ll now see recommended merchants based on the product category they searched for.
Merchant recommendations in Pinterest search results.When users visit a merchant on Pinterest they’ll be greeted with an updated profile which more closely resembles a storefront.
Example of updated merchant pages on Pinterest.An enhanced shopping experience can be found in the ‘shop’ tab.
The shop tab displays in-stock products organized by category, as well as featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations.
Example of the new Shop tab.New Product Tagging
Merchants can now tag their own images with exact products shown using a new tagging tool.
Example of new product tagging interface.This update makes it more seamless for shoppers to buy exactly what they see in a photo.
Example of tagged products from a shopper’s perspective.Pinterest notes the improved version of its product tagging tool is in “testing,” so there may be some minor issues early on.
Updates to Catalogs
Pinterest is rolling out a more intuitive interface for catalogs, which should make it easier to become a merchant.
The company states in an announcement:
“It’s now faster and simpler for merchants to upload their catalogs and activate shopping ads, with faster Catalog feed ingestion, video as the main hero image in collections, collections as a new shopping ad format, and a new preferred scheduling tool that lets retailers upload all products to Pinterest on their own time.”
With this update Pinterest is bringing catalogs and collections together to create a new shopping ad format.
The new ‘Collections’ ad format will allow merchants to select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create an ad unit with multiple images.
Merchants will also have the option to use video as the main asset if they prefer.
Example of creating a Collections ad.Pinterest says advertisers who have been able to use Collections ads early saw a 6-18% increase in average total basket size.
Automatic Bidding For Shopping
Merchants have a new way to scale sales with automatic bidding for shopping.
“Set it and forget it with automatic bidding for catalog sales,” Pinterest states.
Automatic bidding is designed to help retailers maximize their budget without constantly checking on their buy.
Now, retailers can dynamically adjust an ad group’s bid to aim for the maximum number of results.
Automatic bidding is now an option when creating a campaign“Retailers who tested Automatic Bidding for Catalog Sales saw 28% more conversions when optimizing for the ‘Conversion’ event and nearly 29% more clicks when optimizing for ‘Click’ event for the same budget.”
Conversion Analytics
Retailers can see how customers are completing their path to purchase with Pinterest’s new conversion analytics.
The visual tool offers a more granular look at conversion performance, with data all summarized in a familiar funnel.
These updates are now available to all retailers on Pinterest.
Source: Pinterest Newsroom
