How and why to test the Pinterest conversion optimization beta

Anna Mahon

Length

3 min read

Date

29 April 2019

As we all know, the holidays can be a crazy time of year, especially for e-commerce. In order to get a head start on your competitors, it’s important to get your holiday prospecting initiatives up and running early. Pinterest provides a great opportunity to take advantage of early holiday shoppers. Pinterest users are known to plan in advance and begin searching for holiday ideas 2x earlier than other platforms: and that’s not just for Christmas – think Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.

After not seeing much success with traffic campaigns on Pinterest, we decided to test the new conversion optimization beta during the holiday season. If you are new to Pinterest, the oCPM beta is a campaign optimization feature that drives conversions based on the target cost per conversion. In order to use the oCPM beta, you will need to hit a threshold of 50 conversions per week.

In comparison to the traffic campaigns, we immediately saw a higher conversion rate while remaining under the client’s target CPL and CPA goals.

Graph showing the launch of oCPM beta graph

Campaign setup

Pinterest offers 3 different campaign objectives: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions. To test the oCPM beta, select Conversions as the campaign objective.

Once you’ve selected your campaign goal, you will create your ad group, then select your audience and targeting details. The targeting allows you to pick gender, age group, location, language, device, and interests to further narrow your audience. For keyword targeting, you should aim for between 75 – 100+ keywords; I recommend breaking out your ad groups based on keyword match types in order to gain more insight into which keywords are performing the best.

Pinterest reps can also generate “keyword packages” based on relevant keywords that have worked well historically, which is a great starting point when building out new campaigns. Select Campaign Budget and Delivery. Next, you will select the conversion event that you would like your campaign to optimize towards. You can choose from Checkouts, Leads, Add To Carts, and Sign Ups. After selecting the conversion event you wish to optimize towards, you will set the target cost per conversion.

Finally, upload your pins. The last step is to create your pins and “pin” them to a specific board on your Pinterest profile. It is best practice to use eye-catching images that will grab pinners’ attention and include CTAs that will add more context to your pins.

You’re all set! If you want to drive leads or increase the overall conversion rate while staying within the client’s KPIs, I highly recommend testing the oCPM beta.