New Tools To Curate, Feature & Measure eCommerce Offering

Pinterest has announced five new updates aimed at helping businesses create a storefront, sell their products and better understand results.

And, it’s not just Woolies and Countdown, getting the reindeers out early this year. Pinterest reports that users are searching for Christmas ideas earlier than ever before.

Anything to brighten up lockdown, I suppose…

Ahead of this, April saw a massive spike in Pinterest usage (x3 yoy), while engagement with the platform has increased by 85% over the last six months.

It’s alongside this news that Pinterest have announced their five updates, which should help brands and marketers to reach new markets and find extra ways to increase revenue.

Pinterest Blog

“We’re introducing our newest suite of merchant tools to help retailers reach customers this holiday season and beyond.”

So with that lovely message from the crew at Pinterest, let’s jump in and see what these five updates are all about.

Five Festive Updates

Merchant storefront profile & discovery. Merchants will be able to take advantage of an updated profile to create a new storefront that shows products organised by category, featured products and helpful recommendations.

Pinners will also be recommended merchants based on their shopping-related searches.

Such a highly personalised avenue for storefront discovery could well lead to increased revenue, exposure and success across Pinterest as shoppers get exactly what they want out of their experience.

New product tagging. Pinterest is testing a feature that will allow merchants to tag their own images with products, which will make it easier for shoppers to interact with merchants and purchase from them. Not dissimilar to shopping posts seen elsewhere on Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Catalogues updates. Designed to make it easier to become a merchant on Pinterest.

The update now makes it simpler to upload catalogues and adverts, has expanded the importance of video in collections and brought about a new ad format and scheduling tool. It’s also combining catalogues and collections to make collections a shopping ad format.

Pinterest claims advertisers who use this feature saw a 6-18% increase in average total basket size, so going by preliminary findings this is a very helpful update.

Pinterest Blog

“As part of this update, brands can now also select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create an inspiring, multi-image ad unit. Additionally, we’re launching the option to use video as a hero in a Collections ad unit to further tell a brand story.”

Automatic bidding for shopping. Automatic bidding has been driving 28% more conversion for Catalog sales, on average, and 29% more click when optimising for Click events – say Pinterest.

With growing automation across every ad channel, it comes as no surprise that Pinterest should be following Facebook and Google’s lead here. With every passing quarter, the role for manual digital campaign execution gets squeezed further as the robots take over… especially on ecommerce centric activity.

“Automatic bidding for shopping means advertisers can dynamically adjust an ad group’s bid to aim for the maximum number of results.”

Conversion Analysis. A swanky new visualisation tool will allow merchants to follow a customers’ purchase journey and how they completed a path to purchase.

Competitor-Smashing Numbers

Pinterest has really made the most of the rise of eCommerce in 2020. It’s added 23 million more users in Q3, and now has 442 million MAU. That means growth rates are higher than Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

Users are flooding to Pinterest because they want to replicate that in-store behaviour by browsing items, seeing how it’ll look in real life and completing a purchase.

Its numbers are great, and so is revenue. Q3 saw a 58% revenue jump, year on year. While Pinterest has seen that huge bounce, the platform did sound a warning that it might not be sustainable.

Big brands helped drive this increase, as they spent more and more money on adverts. Average revenue per user is up 15% year on year – while its US numbers are up 31%.