<\/p>\n
Pinterest is adding another piece to its arsenal of advertising services, opening up search advertising to its partners and with companies advertising through the Kenshoo marketing suite.<\/p>\n
With Pinterest looking to continue to grow into a must-have tool for advertisers, it\u2019s begun building more and more products to capture all parts of a person\u2019s buying behavior. Pinterest users often come to discover new products and ideas, and the company has always generally done a good job of pitching marketers that Pinterest ads do a good job of building awareness, as well as getting users to convert to an eventual sale once they get to a product.<\/p>\n
Adding search gives Pinterest the ability to tap into another part of that buying behavior \u2014 searching with the intent of a purchase (whether the user realizes it or not). Nearly all of the searches on Pinterest aren\u2019t brand searches, global head of partnerships Jon Kaplan said. So Pinterest will now give some advertisers the ability to show ads against keywords and for shopping campaigns through Pinterest\u2019s search.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people come to Pinterest, they\u2019re starting earlier in their decision-making process,\u201d Kaplan said. \u201cWe saw this with the holidays \u2014 people were pinning holiday ideas as early as August. For brands, the implications to our business, that\u2019s an amazing opportunity\u00a0to reach someone at the earliest stages of decision-making. And when you search for something like modern furniture, a lot of times a text query doesn\u2019t capture the nuances of your individual tastes or what you actually want to see. So having something that\u2019s visual in nature for a lot of different queries is actually the most powerful way of demonstration or displaying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pinterest hopes to end up opening up the tool to more partners as time goes on, but for now it\u2019s going to be limited to its direct partners who can run campaigns and marketing campaigns run through Kenshoo. Pinterest will show up as an option for marketers using Kenshoo when they run search campaigns alongside Google and others. While Pinterest is tiny in the scheme of the search universe (the company sees around 2 billion searches a month), the hope is that it\u2019ll woo advertisers with a stronger return on their ad investments than other platforms, Kaplan said.<\/p>\n
Pinterest has typically been known to be stronger for marketers closer to building awareness for brands, rather than necessarily capturing the intent that users have when searching for products. However, Pinterest\u2019s new search ads exposed a rather unique element where it seemed like the effect of those search ads went beyond just pushing a user to a conversion online at the moment of seeing it.<\/p>\n
Some of its partners have seen the search ads drive in-store sales, signaling that Pinterest\u2019s search ads may be capturing a wider spectrum of a user\u2019s buying behavior during search, Kaplan said. Google has traditionally dominated in capturing search intent and converting it into sales, which has built a gargantuan business worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But behavior like this may pique the interest of advertisers, which may be looking for dollars to throw into nontraditional campaigns \u2014 even if they\u2019re just \u201cinnovation\u201d budgets for now.<\/p>\n