Pinterest is introducing a new suite of merchant tools to help retailers reach customers this festive season and beyond, including a new storefront profile, faster catalogues feed ingestion, collections as a shopping ad format, video for collections, automatic bidding, conversion insights and analysis, and an improved product tagging test.
The pandemic has changed retail forever, and accelerated online shopping in a way no one saw coming. In anticipation for holiday joy, shopping started earlier than ever on Pinterest this year. Searches spiked in April for queries like “Christmas gift ideas” (+3x year-over-year) and the percentage of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest has grown more than 85% in the past six months (Pinterest data: April 2019-May 2020).
Pinterest believes there is a difference between shopping and buying: inspiration. A more inspired online shopping experience takes the best of shopping everywhere and makes it possible anywhere.
And so Pinterest is launching its newest suite of merchant tools that includes:
- Catalogues updates: It’s now faster and more straightforward for retailers to upload their catalogues and activate shopping ads, with real-time Catalogue feed ingestion, video as the main image in collections, and the ability to bring together Catalogues and collections. And, a new preferred scheduling tool lets retailers upload all products to Pinterest on their own time. In the UK, advertisers who used collections saw a 6-18% increase in average total basket size.
- Automatic bidding for shopping: Thanks to automatic bidding for catalogue sales in ad campaigns, retailers can maximize their budget without over-monitoring their buy. Automatic bidding for shopping means advertisers can dynamically adjust an ad group’s bid to deliver the maximum number of results.
- Merchant storefront profile (US only): An updated profile enables merchants to transform their shop tab with featured in-stock products in a storefront organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations. When Pinterest users search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they will see recommended merchants based on the product category.
- Product tagging (US only): Updated and easier product tagging gives merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact match products so shoppers can go from inspiration from a scene right to the checkout on the retailer’s website.
“Remember shopping? Remember heading out for a new pair of jeans and ending up with a whole new outfit? Remember how much…fun it was? Online shopping, on the other hand, hasn’t brought shoppers much joy. Until now,” says Pinterest in a statement.
