I’m going to break down every step of the buyer journey, I’m going to explain the Pinner behaviors, and I’m going to help guide you to understand as well, what to expect when it comes to running Pinterest ads, and how the Pinners’ behavior respond in conjunction with your Pinterest ads.
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Pinner Behavior
When Pinners go on Pinterest, they are not looking up something specific, they are looking up ideas. They’re there to get inspired, they’re there to get ideas, they want to browse, to see the options that are available to them based on this vague idea that they have in their head of what they want to achieve or do. You have to understand that as well when you’re running promoted pins, because it’s not like on Google, where people are looking up highly specific things. On Pinterest, they’re looking up more broader terms and therefore looking to find the right thing for them, with the options presented to them on Pinterest.
Because you’re hitting Pinners at the beginning of their customer journey, it becomes a bit of a longer buying journey than other platforms. On average, you can see a buyer journey that lasts between 14 and 30 days. That is usually because Pinners will see your pin, they’ll see your promoted pin, maybe they save it to one of their boards, they check out the link, and then they think about it for a few days, and then they come back and buy it later.
Pinterest Customer Journey Step 3: Inspire
Once they’ve made their executive decision and their ideas have now become more clarified. The first step of the buyer journey, I like to call “inspire.” That is because your role as an advertiser on Pinterest is to create graphics, images, videos that are so inspiring, that entice those customers to want to click on the link and check out your website. It’s very important. Especially on Pinterest. If you’re not inspiring your Pinterest audience, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. When it comes to running your promoted pins, you need to test different creatives until you see the ones that perform the best.
To give you the rule of thumb, to follow the Pinterest best practices, Pinterest wants you to use between two and four creatives for every single ad group that you create. If you have two ad groups in a campaign, you need between two and four for each ad group, so that becomes up to eight creatives for one campaign. Now, can you use the same creatives in both ad groups? Yes, you can. Is it preferable to switch it up?
I believe it’s preferable to switch it up. To use four creatives in one ad group, and four different creatives in the second ad group. What’s important to note as well, is that you need to let your creatives run for at least seven days before you evaluate which ones are performing for your business. Some of them are going to get lower click-through rates than others.
Metrics to Watch
If your click through rates are above 0.55 click-through rate, that is considered good on Pinterest. A click-through rate that’s above 1% is considered very, very good on Pinterest. Those are some rules of thumb, some metrics that you can take a look at when it comes to your click-through rate. If you’re seeing, for example, that you’re getting clicks, your click-through rate’s really good, but people aren’t adding to cart and checking out, it could be, A, too soon to even check out. Usually you only break even on the first month of running promoted pins, but option B could also be the fact that people aren’t resonating with the landing page that’s linked on the pin that you’re promoting.
There’s something to get done there on the landing page. If you want a free guide to understand how to optimize your campaigns better, I do have a cheat sheet guide code for your promoted pins that you can download here. It explains every single scenario that you could see, or a lot of different scenarios, as well as what to do when you see certain types of scenarios.
For example, it tells you what to do if you have a low click-through rate, or it tells you what to do if your ROAS is low, and things like that. If you’re interested in learning how to optimize your ads properly and following my cheat sheet code, you can download here.
Pinterest Customer Journey Step 2: Inform
The second step of the customer buyer journey is to inform. This is where, okay, you successfully inspired your Pinterest audience, they have landed on your website. Now is your job to inform them as to why they should buy your product or your service. Your landing page needs to be on point. You need to make sure that your user experience on your website is on point, and therefore delegating this task or hiring an expert that knows what they’re doing when it comes to user experience is very important here too. I strongly suggest you invest in finding somebody who knows what they’re doing to improve your user experience, who knows how to create amazing sales page and checkout pages and things like that, and somebody who can help increase the conversions on your website. This will help your Pinterest Customer Journey.
Pinterest Customer Journey Step 3: Decide
The last step to this buyer journey is to help them decide. You want to help the Pinner decide whether or not this is the right product for them, and to buy it at the end of the day. This all comes down to your sales copy on your landing page, too. This is also where a user-experience expert comes in.
Somebody who knows what they’re doing when it comes to sales copy. A copywriter would be somebody, for example, that you can hire in order to take a look at your landing pages and your checkout pages, just to make sure that you are giving yourself your best chance of helping these Pinners decide to buy your product at the end of the day. Once they’ve reached the last last tab, which is to decide to purchase your product, your Pinner has successfully completed an entire customer journey. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this video, it could take between 14 days and 30 days.
Sometimes you see it faster, sometimes you see it within the first seven days, and then other times for some clients, it can take up to three months to actually see checkouts and sales. That could be for a multitude of reasons.
Conclusion
All right, so now that you understand the Pinterest customer buyer journey, I hope this helped to understand why you should be a little bit more patient with Pinterest ads, as well as help educate as to how you can create your campaigns in a way that responds to the Pinterest customer buyer journey more effectively. If you want an expert like myself to look over your promoted pins, book a free call with me as well here. On that note, I learned all about this customer buyer journey from Kate Ahl from Simple Pin, so if you guys want to check her out, feel free to do so as well.
