How has your strategy for Pinterest ads changed since the switch over to everyone having to use the one-tap version of pins to promote? Join us in our Facebook group www.growwithusmastermind.com where we will further discuss this and many topics related to our Teacher Pay Teachers businesses.
Disclaimer: This topic is new for all of us. We have spent the last few weeks learning as much as we can about this topic and we are sharing with you. Please remember to test and analyze your own data to see what is working for you and your audience.
Update: About halfway through the episode, we talked about closeups showing in the dashboard as more than clicks. My ad rep said that the extra “closeups” where we don’t get charged (subtract closeups from clicks) are in this situation: “As far as the swiping through closeups it is only on mobile. if you close up on an ad and swipe to the right it will show a closeup of the next ad on your feed and so on. Some people utilize the platform in this way so you aren’t charged when people swipe to a close up of your ads.” So to confirm, we get charged on the initial tap, but the weird closeups showing up in our data are because of this feature (which we didn’t even know about!)
What exactly are Pinterest one-tap ads?
One-tap ads are the new way that we can promote on Pinterest to send traffic to our blogs and stores. Traffic ads are not new and neither is the one-tap option. What is new, is that they took the option away and now all traffic ads are one-tap.
Before, users would click on your promoted pin and it would open a close-up version of the ad. Users would click again to be taken to the linked website. You would only pay once they made that second click to go to your website.
Now, on mobile, users will click the promoted pin and it will open a close up version of the pin with your website loading at the bottom. There will be a “see more” button users can then click to go to your website or they can just scroll down and the website will open. On desktop, users click on your promoted pin and it immediately takes them to your website with no close up.
This is really worrisome to us as we know users are not used to it and may be shocked it opens right into a website. They may click right back out. We pay for each person that clicks to our website and some people may not even end up seeing the site. Also, if sent right to TpT, we don’t even get our pixels to fire so we may end up getting nothing for our money if they end up clicking right out because they weren’t expecting to leave Pinterest.
We are still testing when exactly we get charged. A Pinterest rep told us the initial click is the charge so we may be paying even if they never open or get to out site. Some of our initial data is showing this *may not* be true so we are keeping a close eye on stats. Keep an eye out for a follow-up show in which we further discuss this topic when we have more data.
This is an example from mobile.
New Strategies
- No more letting your pin “ride”. We think there will now be seasons for your pins. Before we could let pins go all year long because we knew that we wouldn’t really pay unless people were looking for them. For instance, if you have a Christmas resource, you could let it go and you would only pay when people search and click around Christmas time. You really wouldn’t see much action the rest of the year. Now, our budgets are being fully spent everyday and so we have turned off all pins that aren’t necessarily for this time of year as we don’t want to pay if it’s not converting to sales.
- Less and more targeted key words! Before, we’d add as many key words as could that matched our resources. Since we only paid when they clicked through it worked really well. Now, it is recommended that you choose 5-10 highly targeted key words. For instance, instead of “text structure”, you may want to go with “text structure 5th grade” or “text structure worksheets 5th grade” or exactly what it is or who it’s for. Think “long tail key words”.
- Change the way you create pins. Make it clear on the pins who it is for and what it is so you don’t get curious people just clicking to see more. Put the grade level it is for or exactly what it is right on the pin. Our Pinterest rep also suggested that if it goes right to a resource, put something like “Shop Classroom Procedures Games” or “Click to see more about this resource.”
- Pin size recommendation: Also, the suggested size for you pins is 2:3 and we’ve heard that those sized pins will get priority…not sure how much truth there is to that as we have some longer pins that still do well. We are making all new pins this size though and will continue to track the data for both sizes.
- Drop your bids to $0.10. According to Pinterest reps, we should drop our bids as CPC should be less now.
Old Strategies We are Sticking With
- We are promoting our best sellers and our new products we want to get out there.
- Promote resources that are $5 or more.
- Linking straight to TpT or our blogs depending on our goals.
Things We’ve Noticed So Far
- We are spending our max budgets every day, even with only 10 key words.
- Conversion rates are LOW but we are attributing that to summer at the moment. We will reevaluate in a few months to see if these new ads are even converting.
- In our data so far, we have noticed that our close up numbers and click numbers are still way different so *maybe* they have to click the “see more” for us to get charged. We are watching this closely and will revisit when we have more data to look at.
- The clicks are matching up pretty close with the stats on TpT according to our UTM data.
- The experience for the one-tap ads is different depending on whether you are on mobile or on desktop.
- The pins we are promoting are our current top sellers but we are also running Facebook ads to most of them so we aren’t positive if it’s the pins or the Facebook ads.
- Wishlist numbers are jumping up on all of our promoted pins…even the ones we have running only on Pinterest.
Group Questions Answered
- Michele asked, “Should I bother?”
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- Short answer…yes. We are still collecting data to know the exact impact but any traffic to your store is good. Track your data and make sure the ads are working for you in some way. Track wishlist numbers too!
- Tara asked, “What will I see to know it switched over or will switch over?”
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- Everyone running traffic promoted pins with the two-tap should be switched over to all one-tap pins by early August. To check go to your campaign page and click the checkbox next to one of your ads. Then click “edit”. On that page there is a toggle button to switch from two-tap to one-tap. If it isn’t on one-tap, you haven’t switched yet. If it is missing, then you’ve probably already moved over to one-tap and you no longer have the option to switch. Another sign you’ve been switched is that you are suddenly spending your MAX budget.
- Kristin asked, “Where do we begin?”
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- Still go and promote pins but just change your thinking on how you do it. we believe/hope that promoting pins will still be a great marketing tool but we just need to change our mindsets on how we go about it. We also want to collect more data before we know exactly how to respond to the changes.
- Jillian asked, “Should these now be going to blog posts that market the resource to better engage? What data should we be looking at to best inform our key word choices?”We think if it’s a high priced big bundle and you have a blog post for it, it may be beneficial to link to a blog post. But, it’s really too early to tell what will convert better with these new one-tap pins.
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- If they are older pins, you can change the dates to when you were running it. Then click on the campaign and then the ad set. After that, you can click on the “keywords” area to see how each key word was performing. Use that data to help you make decisions about which keywords to keep and which to let go.
Join the group at www.growwithusmastermind.com. We definitely don’t have all of the answers, but it’s a good place to share your experiences with other people running promoted pins so that we can help each other.
