Pinterest Shopping Features and Campaigns Come to Life

by Kristin Kusiak | Mar 7, 2019 | AAA Needs Updating, Pinterest | 4 comments

Pinterest just announced their top trends for March, which is packed full of shopping themed trends such as prom dresses, cleaning products and eye shadows. Regardless of your product types, Pinterest is just made for shopping inspiration.

So you can imagine our excitement over their announcement this week of Catalogs and the addition of shopping campaigns to their ad manager platform for all qualified advertisers (you previously had to apply for them). There are many key benefits of the Pinterest shopping changes, but I’m going to go over the logistics of the changes so you can easily implement them.

What is a Pinterest Catalog?

Basically, a Pinterest Catalog is the fastest and most efficient way to get your products into the platform. With the catalog, you can create pins for all of your products all at once. Please note that there are two prerequisites:

You must have a business account to get started.
You must have claimed your site already.

Here are a few steps on how to create your Pinterest catalog.

In Pinterest, go to Ads, then Catalogs.
You might see a summary screen of next steps. If so, just click “Get Started”.
Click “Add Data Source” You can see more details on the product data source formats and set-up.
Put in the data source URL and select the file format.

Note: if you don’t have a compatible data source, you can use Rich Pins instead, but this will require you to create each pin individually and these Rich pins are not available for Shopping ads.

Pinterest Product Groups

Once your catalog is created, you can create product groups to organize your pins and help them be shown appropriately.

In the Catalog section, go to “Product Groups” (seen under “Data source” in the screenshot above).
Click “Create”.
Name your product group as something you will easily recognize.
Find your products for this product group by filtering. The options for filtering include:
- Category (Google product category)
- Product type
- Brand
- Custom labels

Helpful Hints from Pinterest:

Keep similar products together by category. You can then layer on custom labels, such as brand type, best sellers, etc.

Since Product Groups are created based on filters from your data source, you need to make sure those values are always present in your data source. If the filter value is removed, then the number of products in your product group will be zero.

How Pinterest Shopping Pins Will Appear

Pinterest’s Shopping Recommendations

Your pins could be featured as part of Pinterest’s shopping recommendations:

If someone clicks on “Shop” above, they are taken to:

If they click on Rothy’s sneakers, they are taken to the Steel Grey Sneakers Product Pin:

From here, the pinner can follow the brand and/or visit the product page on the website.

Shop a Brand

Pinterest is rolling out a new section called “Shop a Brand” that will appear underneath your Product Pins, inviting pinners to view more from your brand. Pinners start at one of your product pins, such as this one.

They scroll down to see more from your brand:

If the pinner taps the Levi’s product in the lower left, they are then taken here:

Pinterest Ads Shopping Campaigns

Once you have your Catalog set up, you can create shopping campaigns. To do so, you can either click on “Ads,” then “Create ads” from the Pinterest main page or “Create campaign” from the campaign section in Ads Manager.

Pick “Shopping catalogs” as your campaign objective type.
Complete your campaign details. For results tracking, be sure to complete the tracking template campaign field with any of the following dynamic parameters:
1. {lpurl}
2. {unescapedlpurl}
3. {campaignid}
4. {adgroupid}
5. {product_partition_id}
6. {product_id}
7. {device}
Select “Continue”.
Fill in your ad group details including name, any audiences and targeting specifics.
Choose the product groups you want in your ad group.
Launch your shopping campaign after clicking “Continue”.

As with any shopping campaign, keyword negatives are crucial to eliminate unwanted searches and to protect your brand. Start thinking about carousel ads and dynamic remarketing!

Your Pinterest Tag

Don’t forget to set up your Pinterest Tag to track key events such as add to cart, check out, or page visit as well as data such as value, order ID or Product ID.

Pinterest Shopping Reporting

You can get an item-level shopping report.

Go to Reports.
Select “Shopping” under “Campaign objective.”
Select “Export”, then “Custom export”.
Make sure you select “Shopping” under “Campaign Type” and the Item level report under “Data to export”.