Growth Marketing, Marketing Strategy
Tips from managing +1M USD/ month in Ad Spend on Pinterest
#Growth Marketing
Battle tested strategies that helped me to manage huge budgets at scale in Pinterest while maintaining profitability.
1. Optimize at Ad Level, a.k.a: Atomic optimizations
Pinterest is amazingly good to optimize your Ads and to find the best conversions, but when you see your Campaigns, you can see that sometimes they don't perform as expected, so, instead of analyzing your Ads Account Performance by Campaign, you should Zoom in and analyze them by AdGroup,, and if you see that your AdGroup is not working, you should go deeper and PAUSE ONLY AT Ad Level.
On Pinterest, you win the Battle by Highly performing Ads composition, so the quote is:
Highly performing Ads → compose Highly performing Ad Groups
Highly Performing Ad Groups → compose Highly Performing Campaigns
#2 Avoid all you can to create new campaigns to fix Performance
Pinterest can take up to 14 days to stabilize a campaign Performance for your conversion objective, so it is essential to touch your campaigns the lesser that you can. That's why the #1 Advice is the most important and valuable.
Also is strongly recommended to group the campaigns with clear criteria by Product + Layer + Special Date, so your campaigns will last longer, and you will need less to create a Campaign.
For example, you want to spend 100 USD per day on a Product, so you create:
3 Ad Groups with 5 Ads each, with a budget of 33.33 USD per day, so you can avoid pausing the entire Campaign if something doesn't work.
Don't pause campaigns as long as you can. Pinterest can take up to 14 days to stabilize your Campaigns.
3. Configure Budgets by Ad Groups.
Remember that we should try to protect our campaigns as much as we can, so a good rule to avoid modifying campaigns very heavily is to always set up your Budget at Ad Group Level.
4. Be careful modifying your Budget. It could reset the Algorithm.
When modifying your Ad Group budget, be careful not to make changes more than 50% to ower and 100% to increase. Doing this ensures that all the data you're observing now counts for the scaling you're doing. If you break this rule, you're at risk that the Algorithm is restarting at the backend of Pinterest and you will have your investment at higher risk.
A simple example to clarify this
As you can see, for an Example product, none of the changes on the daily Budget based on historical Performance are breaking the rule of decrease a Max of 50% and increase a Max of 100%.
That is a very subtle rule that can break your Campaign performance without you understanding the reason.
For Daily optimization: When decreasing, no more than 50% down. When increasing, no more than 100% Up.
5. Avoid optimization mistakes organizing your media buying
This step becomes critical when managing +3 products with a weekly production of +10 videos per product. I strongly recommend to you to create a naming structure that can help you determine how your campaigns are working and which ones are your Winner Ads at a glance. It will allow you to avoid the burden of downloading custom reports and creating custom dashboards to determine what is working.
6. Every 14 days, download a Custom report by Interest and KWS and optimize for the ones that are reaching your targets.
For this purpose you should click on:
After, you should configure with the following options.
And lastly, define which kind of option you want to analyze for a given period:
When you are testing Winning Interests and Winning Keywords, I strongly recommend creating a new Ad Group inside an active Campaign for the product you want to try, so you avoid increasing the complexity of the account while maintaining the good practices specified here.
Subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter
You will receive: Case studies, books recommendations, takeaways and insights, and my building in public. (I will not spam you, I promise)
Read more
