At Smartly.io, we have noticed that these kind of questions might help you to identify improvement opportunities when planning and running your Pinterest campaigns.
Budget and goal
| Question | Best practice |
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What is your goal?
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| Are ad sets spending most of the budgets? | If ad sets are maxing out their daily budgets, Pinterest's oCPM algorithm will begin to decrease the bid multiplier, which will impact performance. Make sure ad set budgets aren't hit. |
| Are ad set budgets 5-10x CPA target? | This allows oCPM algorithm enough room to gather learnings and optimize. |
| Are campaign daily spend caps being met? | Make sure campaign daily spend caps are never hit because oCPM algorithm will decrease bid multiplier. |
Bidding
| Question | Best Practice |
| Which optimization goal is being used? | Bidding towards the event lowest in the funnel gives the best results. Exception to this is when the goal is maximize delivery and audience is highly qualified (custom audience / AAL). |
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Which attribution window is being used for bids? What is the time to conversions on this account? |
Extending the attribution window for bids might help increase volume especially when the business has large amounts of late conversions. |
| Which bid types are being used? | We generally recommend running oCPM campaigns. |
| What is the bid amount being used? | In theory: Bid your true value. In practice: You might need to increase bids every 2-3 days in order to see daily spend ramp up at the ad set level. A bid change of 10% will re-set learnings at the ad set level. Keep bid changes within +/- 10% and change bids max. every 2-3 days. |
Audiences & targeting
| Question | Best practice |
| Which custom audiences are bringing the most results? | Shift more budgets towards better performing audiences. |
| Have you tried using Actalike (AAL) audiences? | |
| Which seed audience / % AAL perform well? | It is generally better to have one bigger lookalike and let Pinterest optimize for you. |
| Are the most used AAL groups updating? | In Pinteres, check Ads => Audiences => search for the audience name => check the "Last Updated" column |
| Are you using all Placements – Browse and Search? | We recommend maximizing the number of placements included. |
| Are you using 'Expanded Targeting'? | Generally performance is better when using Expanded Targeting with Interest ad sets. We recommend not using 'Expanded Targeting' for keyword-targeted ad sets, because we have seen impressions for search queries vastly unrelated to search terms specified in ad set. |
| Look at the audience split in ad sets (by age): is it rational and necessary? |
Pinterest best practices dictate having separate ad sets for web vs mobile (mobile_web, android, ios) because ~80% of their traffic comes from mobile and desktop eCPMs are more expensive. Other targeting splits are not recommended. |
| Are you targeting your highest affinity interests by visiting the audience insights section? (Navigate to "Analytics" -> "Audience Insights") | |
| Are you pulling Interest and Keyword targeting reports to see which interests and keywords are non-performant? | We recommend running these reports periodically to trim non-performant interests and keywords from ad set targeting. |
| Are there many ad sets targeting the same audience? | Generally it's a good idea to avoid overlapping ad sets as it splits learnings across ad sets. However, if the audience is really large (many millions), overlapping is not an issue. |
| Are pixels firing correctly? | Use the Pinterest Tag Helper Chrome extension, click around their website, and check if events are firing. |
| Are you using 'Enhanced Match'? | We recommend enabling Enhanced Match in order to catch more attributed conversions. |
| Are you retargeting site visitors and engagers? | We recommend retargeting site visitors and users who have engaged with pins (saves, close-ups). |
Creative
| Question | Best practice |
| How many pins are there per ad set? | Pinterest best practices recommend having 2-4 pins per ad set. |
| What kind of creatives / messaging work well for this you / this geography? | |
| Have the creatives been modified to fit Pinterest specifically? | Creative best practices differ from Facebook. For example, you are encouraged to use text overlays in your creatives. |
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What types of creatives are you using?
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Pins should be vertical and have a 2:3 aspect ratio (1200x1800). Pinterest is a visual platform so CTAs should be clear. |
| Are there seasonal factors you could leverage in creatives? | |
| Are creatives adapted for local preferences? | |
| How do you evaluate creatives qualitatively speaking? |
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| Is your brand/logo and text overlay featured in the pin? | We recommend that you feature your brand in your pins. Text overlay, or the copy in your pins, should be concise so that people can read it on their phones. Keep in mind that roughly 80% of Pinterest traffic comes from mobile. |
| How often do you refresh and rotate in new creatives? | We recommend pausing the 2–3 worst‑performing pins every 2 weeks and rotating in new pins. Be careful in pausing pins with a high proportion of ad set spend because that will impact ad set pacing. |
Campaign structure
| Question | Best practice |
| Is there a naming convention for campaigns belonging to different funnel steps? | Having clear naming conventions will help you analyze results in reporting. |
| What is the budget split between Prospecting / Retargeting / Branding ? | |
| Are you under‑investing in Prospecting or missing out on Retargeting? | |
| What is the KPI for each funnel step? | Different funnel steps have different incrementality, which is why their CPA is not directly comparable. |