Pinterest to increase advertising revenues for marketers

Pinterest is set to lead a drive that will involve opening up user data to help target adverts and increase revenues. This will allow marketers to produce more targeted adverts. Head of operations stated that it would “focus on intent data” that shows exactly what users are interested in buying.

At this moment in time, Pinterest provides advert products based on very limited information, such as gender and location which has proved to be a struggle in increasing advertising revenues.

“Pinterest’s marketing is something we are focusing on in the future not in the present time,” wrote Nate Elliott of Forrester Research.

He further suggested that the user would post certain things that they were specifically interested in – information that would be incredibly valuable to a marketer.

“We are urging advertisers to hold back on Pinterest at this moment in time until the site has developed its targeting abilities.” He posted in a blog post shortly before the company’s announcement.

Pinterests executive, Don Faul has recently shown keen interest and willingness in doing so as he announced, “Our focus this year will be based on increasing and developing our intent data.”

Re-targeting

Don Faul agreed that Pinterest’s users would often save the things users wanted to buy, suggesting it was not a “generic content platform – it’s a place where people discover new brands products and services”.

Faul declared that the initial plan is to make this data available to marketers this year. At the moment, advertisers can only target their ads based on gender, and the topics they are involved in.

They will provide product to advertisers based on a broad database that will enable marketers to thoroughly analyse users’ interactions with the site. However, it’s important to note that personal data such as addresses, names and telephone numbers will be kept hidden.

It’s also said that advertising may be able to intertwine their own data with Pinterest’s so they can target their existing customers who are engaging on the site.

Pinterest had released their very first advertising product earlier last year called Promoted Pins. This was an evident success and therefore was widely available to all advertisers from January 1st 2015.

Although marketers will now be given the opportunity to delve deeper into user engagement and interests, they will not be provided any individual user data. Period.

Good news for us marketers; Pinterest may be worth interest after all…