Pinterest Plans To Add Audience Targeting And Conversion Tracking To Its Ad Offerings

Pinterest, the popular social bookmarking site, will soon be offering targeted ads and conversion tracking to marketers in an attempt to compete with Twitter and Facebook for digital advertising dollars.

While Pinterest quietly disclosed its plans recently when it previewed an update to its privacy policy that will take effect next month, a company spokesperson from the company has confirmed its validity.

“While we don’t have the new features available to advertisers yet, we are developing conversion tracking and audience targeting and the privacy policy update allows us to launch them,” a Pinterest spokesperson explained. “We feel both features will help our partners understand how the ads impact their business and also make Promoted Pins even more relevant to Pinners.”

Pinterest initially started testing Promoted Pins last year and the company launched its first paid ads in May of this year. With the upcoming release of its audience targeting and conversion tracking tools, the company is well on its way to offering a robust ad product. The new functionality will bring Pinterest closer to the offerings from Facebook and Twitter, which provide businesses with the means to target existing customers with ads on their networks. However, Pinterest users will retain the ability to turn off the ad-targeting feature in their account.

The expectation is that digital marketers will be carefully investigating these new possibilities once they’re available, creating the potential for Pinterest to compete with the more mature ad programs that are currently offered by Twitter and Facebook. Pinterest’s customer-database targeting functionality is similar to Facebook’s Custom Audience tool, which allows advertisers to upload a list of the email addresses or phone numbers that are provided to a brand by its customers. Facebook then uses an encryption process called “hashing” that anonymizes the advertisers’ list and matches it to Facebook’s database of users’ email addresses and phone numbers. Matched users subsequently see the advertisers’ ads on Facebook. Earlier this year, Twitter added the same targeting option, and Pinterest is the latest network to enter this competitive space.

With its upcoming conversion-tracking tool, Pinterest is also following Facebook’s lead in this realm. A marketer will add a tracking tool called a pixel on its site that will be able to track the actions people take, such as products they browse and purchase. That pixel will then be able to refer back to the Promoted Pins shown to that person in order to link an ad someone saw or clicked on Pinterest with their behavior on the advertiser’s site. However, the tracking tool will be limited to measuring and attributing ad performance, and advertisers will not be able to target ads on Pinterest based on the actions taken on their sites that the pixel tracks. “We have no plans to retarget off the data collected via the pixel,” the Pinterest spokesperson explained.