As people use Pinterest to discover new brands and products, you have the opportunity to bring your brand's products or services in front of the right people at the right time, when they're deciding what to buy.

Running shopping ads on Pinterest is the equivalent to running dynamic product ads on Facebook. It's a way to boost your distribution and help your products stand out. By using your product catalog or feed for dynamic retargeting and prospecting, shopping ads allow you to showcase product Pins that pull in real-time pricing, availability, and product descriptions to drive transactions to your site.

See how to get started with Pinterest shopping ads.

Launch shopping ads at scale with Smartly

With Smartly for Pinterest, you can turn your entire product catalog into beautiful product shopping ads to drive better performance.

• Use dynamic Smartly Image Templates to remove boring white backgrounds and apply your logo, descriptions, and overlays to Pins directly from your catalog.
• Update the aspect ratio of your images to 2:3 to make them compatible with shopping ads.
• With the help of Smartly, configure your catalog to make it compatible with shopping ads. You can also use more complex feed structures and setups through a URL, API endpoint, or SFTP.

Components of Pinterest shopping ads

A Pinterest Merchant account is the top level entity that ties Pinterest ad accounts and catalogs together. You can have multiple Pinterest ad accounts and up to 50 catalogs under each ad account, but each Pinterest ad account and catalog can be only tied to one Pinterest Merchant account.

Catalogs (sometimes also referred to as Shopping feeds) hold the product information. Each catalog has a defined country and locale, which enables you to use location-specific product information in ads. In Pinterest, you can have only one retail catalog, but multiple feeds in it. The product groups are then define per feed using filters. For Hotel vertical there can be multiple catalogs, but only one feed in each of them.

In order to make the catalog management easier, Smartly has harmonised the structural logic across channels & verticals, and creates a "virtual" catalog for each Pinterest retail feed in Smartly. This way the catalog management works in the same way as with other channels.

Pinterest ad accounts contain the campaigns and related assets. When you launch a Pinterest shopping ad campaign, you select the catalog and related product groups under the ad group.

As a notable difference to other Paid Social platforms, with Pinterest you can use product groups from multiple catalogs in the same ad account.

Organic Pins for feed items

When you upload items to the catalog, an organic Pin is created for each item. The visibility of these organic Pins and the product information in them is decided by the country and locale selections in the data source settings of the catalog.

It's possible to have the same product uploaded with different catalogs using different country and locale settings. On the ad side, the campaign's targeting settings determine who the ads are shown to.

When you use Image Templates with catalogs, this effectively replaces the main image of the product. This means that the Image Template is also used in the organic Pins that are created for each product in the feed. You can currently only use one Image Template with a catalog.

Limitations related to changing images in catalogs

The Image Template automatically substitutes the image_link field in the catalog that Smartly produces for Pinterest. This also means that any changes in the catalog's Image Template settings are automatically reflected in the ads.

When the image of a product is changed in the catalog (for example, by changing the Image Template selection in Smartly), the old image remains in the catalog for up to 1 week as one of the images on the multi-image side bar for the product. The old image (and the related Pin) are removed from the catalog after the image hasn't been sent by the feed to the product for 1 week.

Unfortunately, there are currently no explicit controls for setting a limit to showing the old images nor for removing old images. Because Pinterest creates image signatures for each image based on the content, changing the image URL won't make a difference either.

We also recommend that you don't use temporary promotions as part of the Image Templates. If a user saves a Pin with the old image to a board, the old image remains on that board as long as the Pin is saved there. However, it won't be served as a shopping ad.

To avoid the automatically created pins from being saved or repinned, send field "saved_pin_disabled" with value "true" in the feed for wanted items in the catalog. This is recommended for items that have limited licensing or that are time sensitive. Items indicated as save-disabled in the feed will not be able to be saved or re-pinned, however this does not block organic distribution. For now using the field requires allowlisting from Pinterest.