Pinterest is hard at work convincing businesses to advertise using its Promoted Pins. It’s been emailing profile admins suggesting pins to promote and it’s been selling itself as another option for marketers to spend money from their search budgets on.
CEO Ben Silbermann spoke at IAB Mixx in New York on Wednesday discussing how effective the ads are, and pointing out that few elect to not see them. Martin Beck at Marketing Land says recaps:
Promoted Pins, the main ad product, has been around for 14 months and have very low opt-out rates from users, “rates that are well below the industry,” Silbermann said.
People can’t opt out of the ads entirely, so that’s a little misleading, but they can tell Pinterest when they don’t want to see specific ads. They can also put limits on how Pinterest targets them. The company says this in its help center:
If you don’t like a Promoted Pin, tap the X button that appears on each Promoted Pin, and pick “Hide this Pin”. Pinterest uses your feedback to help make sure you see more interesting and relevant Promoted Pins in the future.
While you can’t turn off Promoted Pins, you can limit the kinds of information we use to pick which Promoted Pins you see.
So presumably, what Silbermann meant is that people aren’t doing any of this a whole lot. That’s actually not very surprising, because like search ads, these ads are typically geared toward what the user is browsing in the first place. The fact that a pin has been promoted is likely of little interest to those actually looking for something. To most people, the ad will be just another pin. That does bode well for the format in general.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Promoted Pins perform through the holidays. People are, in fact, already hard at work pinning holiday-themed content.
Pinterest recently announced that it has over 100 million users.
Image via Pinterest