Pinterest is currently seeing an unprecedented change in the retail landscape with e-commerce more important than ever, as pinners turn to the platform for visual inspiration and discover new ideas to help them adapt to their new reality.
As consumers shift even more of their spending to online channels, brands that create a shopping experience that feels more like ‘real life’ can be inspirational, bringing a sense of normalcy to challenging times.
People have always used Pinterest for shopping inspiration, and it’s been a priority of the platform to surface the best products from retailers to people who are ready to shop at the right time.
Pinners are shoppers—looking for inspirational ideas especially in areas like home, self-care, and kids activities right now
Shoppers are turning to Pinterest as a key shopping destination: a place to get inspired and discover new ideas when they have had enough of reading about all the misery in the media.
They’re walking the virtual aisles of the platform, searching for visual ideas to help them create their new reality. In the past two weeks there have been increases in searches (compared to the prior two weeks) for topics like home organisation (+43 per cent), spa day at home (+19 per cent), makeup tutorial for beginners (+180 per cent), and kid-friendly recipes (+64 per cent).
Pinterest is introducing new features to help retailers of all sizes get discovered, and distribute their products in the spaces where pinners are most likely to shop, including the launch of the Verified Merchant Program, new conversion reporting opportunities, and updates to Catalogs and dynamic retargeting.
• Verified Merchant Program: Verified Merchants will display a checkmark on their profiles, and become eligible for increased distribution within high-intent shopping experiences and metrics like conversion reporting. Retailers interested in signing up for the program can learn more at pinterest.com/verified.
• Conversion Insights: Gain early access to organic and paid conversion insights so you can measure Pinterest’s impact on your site visits, checkouts and sales over multiple attribution windows.
• Catalogs updates: Pinterest has made significant updates to Catalogs that lessen the time from automatic feed ingestion to product pin creation, plus it is adding new metrics, real-time feed ingestion, multi-feed support, user experience enhancements, and feed ingestion scheduling.
• Dynamic retargeting: Advertisers in global markets can now reach pinners who have previously engaged with their brand online or who have unpurchased items in their cart by retargeting exact or similar products they search and save on Pinterest. More optimisation levers to give advertisers more control will be added.
Getting started
With a mix of existing and new features, to reach shoppers on Pinterest retailers should:
• upload all their products to Catalogs to generate product pins, which display price, availability and product descriptions, plus link directly to your ecommerce page.
• use shopping ads to promote their products to reach more pinners and optimise performance once they’ve set up their product groups within Catalogs.
• take advantage of dynamic retargeting to reach pinners who previously visited their site, but didn’t purchase, as they continue to browse home feed.
