New Pinterest Ads Will Appear Directly In Users’ Home Feeds

Indicating a move toward increasing its monetization potential, Pinterest has announced that it will be expanding the testing of its advertising product to place Promoted Pins directly in users’ home feeds.

The home feed is the first thing that a user sees when visiting Pinterest’s site, so this addition will make advertisements much more visible to users of the social bookmarking service. It was only last month that the company opened up access to Promoted Pins to all U.S.-based partners, and with this latest announcement, the company clearly has its sights set on increasing its usage by marketers.

Pinterest has provided insights around Promoted Pins that indicate that the ads perform as well as, or in some cases even better, than organic Pins. Pinterest has stated that brand advertisers were seeing a 30 percent bump in earned impressions, and equally importantly that the Pins continued to perform after campaigns ended.

Although Pinterest is calling the introduction of ads into users’ home feeds an experiment, the company is clearly picking up the pace of this initiative.

“I would say we are speeding things up because the advertisers are ready,” Joanne Bradford, Pinterest’s Head of Partnerships, told the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve worked very hard over the course of the beta period and took all those learnings and built a very aggressive roadmap for 2015.”

Pinterest has been carefully testing Promoted Pins on its service over the past year, with the first Promoted Pin ad product being launched with select brands in May 2014. These Pins were initially available only in search and in category feeds, as this allowed the service to effectively match ads with the category or search terms that a consumer expressed interest in.

Now, by allowing ads on the Pinterest home feed, the challenge is to ensure that the Pins that are displayed are still highly relevant to users’ interests. To help achieve this goal, the company has been building recommendation and personalization technologies, as well as acquiring companies that can assist it with automated methods. Last year, Pinterest acquired the image recognition and visual search startup VisualGraph. This month, the company announced its acquisition of the machine learning and recommendation engine Kosei.

These newly acquired technologies will help the company to enhance its own search, filtering and recommendation capabilities. This will not only help the platform to better personalize itself to users, but will also aid brands in targeting the right users in advertising campaigns.

What will be interesting to see is how well this new initiative is accepted by Pinterest users. With ads now appearing in the home feed, users may be more sensitive about whether or not they accurately match their interests. The company has indicated in its blog announcement that users will be able to hide individual ads and will also be able to provide feedback about the reasons for doing so, thereby helping the platform to improve its ads in the future. Pinterest is obviously cognizant about the importance of users’ reaction to its new advertising expansion, and has made it clear that all Promoted Pins will continue to be labeled as such to avoid any confusion about which Pins are ads and which are not.

“An ad will be shown in a home feed if it meets certain performance metrics, ensuring that only high quality Promoted Pins will be shown in the home feed,” a company spokesperson explained. “An advertiser cannot specifically target the home feed only, they will target a category related to their Promoted Pins and we will show the ads to people we think may be interested in the category.”

The company further explained that because of this additional quality bar, there will be fewer ads shown in the home feed than in the search and category feeds.

Earlier in 2014, reports indicated that Pinterest’s advertising was expensive at its launch, with the company asking for $1 million and more for ad buys and CPMs between $30-$40. However, the company later started to provide self-serve, performance-based offerings to bring the costs down in an attempt to appeal to small businesses with less available marketing dollars.

Pinterest hasn’t stated how many advertisers it is currently working with, or how many are testing the new home feed ads. The company has indicated that the ads that will be initially shown in the home feed include previous advertisers such as Kraft, Target, General Mills, Ziploc and others. The home feed ads will, at least initially, be priced at the same fixed CPM that’s charged for targeting the category feed.