When you are ready to start running ads to your offer, whether a lead magnet, product, or service, you might be tempted to click over to conversion ads, especially if you are new to Pinterest or coming over from Facebook ads. After all, you want to convert those leads on Pinterest to subscribers or sales, right? I’m here to plead with you today to take your finger off the conversion ads button because there is a better, smarter way to run your Pinterest ads. I’m sharing the deets with you step-by-step in my Pinterest Consideration Ad Tutorial.
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Pinterest Consideration Ad Tutorial:
Although Pinterest offers many types of ad campaigns depending on your objective, the two options I use most frequently as a small business owner working with infopreneurs are conversion and consideration campaigns. Both are pretty simple to set up in comparison to Facebook ads IMO which are complex and subject to iOS changes.
Pinterest used to have a prerequisite that you had to have 50 conversions within a week before you could even run a conversion campaign. That has since been removed, so now essentially anyone can run a conversion campaign. This is a disservice, in my opinion. I’ve seen many business owners, especially those newer to Pinterest, jumping right into conversion without the necessary foundation in place.
What is a Pinterest consideration ad campaign?
Some terminology: consideration campaigns used to be called traffic campaigns. This was a little misleading, so I am glad they changed the name. Yes, you are running traffic to an offer. However, if people see your offer and are interested, they are likely to buy it. Remember, Pinterest ads are a great way to get more traffic, leads, and sales. That’s why we have the call to action on our pins and our pages, whether it’s a lead magnet or a sales page; you need to ask for the sale or what you want them to do. So, consideration campaigns are getting their eyes on your offer.
What are the benefits of a consideration campaign?
One of the most important things to note about consideration campaigns is they cost a lot less money. For the typical small business owner, it’s not a good financial decision to spend high sums of money when collecting data and revising your ads. If you want to be economical, step away from the conversion ads, and think consideration.
One of my favorite ways to run a consideration campaign is for a lead magnet. Your opt-in will have a call to action asking for a sign-up. The confirmation or thank you page will present a low ticket offer, something up to $97 would be a sweet spot for this. This is an easy impulse purchase point. People don’t think much of spending $97. Another option is setting up a tripwire. Maybe you have a $97 product, and then a countdown timer runs for 12 minutes allowing them to make that purchase only within that window of time.
Either way, you can present an offer and then use that money to cover your ad spend. One of my clients, Esther, has been doing this, and I have compiled a case study based on her results. You can download it here, but as of this posting date, it’s been 11 months since her consideration ad has been running this way, and she has added over 41,000 leads to her email list resulting in $500k plus in sales. So it’s safe for me to say that consideration campaigns work!
How to set up consideration ads:
The Pinterest Consideration step by step tutorial is in the video above. You can start watching this portion of the tutorial at 4:39 if you want to skip ahead.
The prerequisites: set up your Pinterest business account
More than likely, if you’re thinking of running ads, you already have the basics covered. I talk about the 5 things you’ll want to have set up before running your Pinterest ads, but just in case the essentials are:
– Claim your website (you can tell because there is a green checkmark next to your clickable URL).
– Set up rich pins if you haven’t already
– Add Pin Tags to your sales funnel. You’ll want to place these in the same place you would place a Facebook pixel in your funnel; it will be on the page after the action happens. In other words, the base code for gets places across the whole funnel and an event code gets added to track a sign-up, an add-to-cart, or a purchase.
If you are confused or want more details, I go over everything you need to know inside Pinning Foundations, so you don’t miss out on this essential tracking data.
Keyword research
For an easy campaign, use keywords or keyword interests that are relevant to whatever your product is. Depending on your niche, you may find there isn’t an interest in you’re area. I know for me, Pinterest Marketing doesn’t have interest, so I rely on keywords. You should know how to do keyword research, but you can refer to Pinning Foundations if you need a refresher.
– Gather a list of a minimum of 25 keywords that you’re going to use for your keyword campaign.
– If possible, collect up to 100 keywords if you can, but depending on your niche, you may not be able to find that many.
– Start with the obvious, but then consider different angles of how people might search for your product or service. Create a robust list and store it in a document to copy and paste when you are ready.
Create your first consideration ad
You’re ready to go!
– Select create an ad. Consideration is already highlighted so that you can continue through.
– Name your campaign something you’ll remember.
– Set your budget. I like to start with $20 per day.
– In targeting details, change your ad group name and find new customers. If you chose reconnecting with others, you’ll note this would allow you to upload an audience list, such as an email list, and create an act-alike audience. But for now, we will focus on a simple consideration campaign where Pinterest is going to go out and find new customers for you that match specific criteria.
– In keywords and interests, this is where you can select any applicable interest or something similar. You may or may not find something close to your niche. If not, don’t stress. Just skip to the next step and upload your keywords.
– Choose your demographics of who you’d like to target: women, men, unspecified, ages, locations, languages, devices, etc.
– Ad placement is you want it in browse and interest. This way, if someone searches on the top or browsing in a feed, your ad will be both places.
– Set to automatic bidding and then select the pins you wanted to promote. This will already be uploaded into Pinterest through best practices with the URL, title, description, etc.
What happens next?
When running consideration campaigns, the best practice is to use at least two images. It’s possible you may have three to four ads you are testing. While your consideration campaign is running, you can think of it as a race of sorts. Pinterest will put them all out in front of your audience. Pinterest users will pick which ones they like.
After a week to 14 days, you’ll come back and look at the ads and then turn off which ones are underperforming. You’ll want to look at your click through rate, or CTR. You’ll find some of your ads are performing better than others. Simply turn off the ads that are not performing well.
Do not touch your ads for at least seven days!
I know you may be tempted but just walk away. Come back in seven days, and then start narrowing down the creative.
Summary of Pinterest Consideration ad tutorial
The most important takeaway of this Pinterest consideration ad tutorial is that it’s about initially gathering data and testing your ads. You don’t want to spend money unnecessarily during this time. While consideration ads do cost money, they cost less than conversion ads. The feedback they provide about which ads perform best with your target audience will be a sound use of your marketing budget overall.
To run your own consideration campaign.
- Set up your business account
- Do your keyword research
- Create your pins according to best practices
- Set up your consideration campaign with two to four pins
- Wait 7 days before checking your pins for the click-through rate to see which are performing best
- Continue to let the top-performing pins run an additional seven days before tweaking the creative and narrowing down keywords, and demographic information.
There’s still so much to do…learn to read your data to see what’s working, how to troubleshoot if you don’t get the results you’re looking for, and how to scale! What do those analytics mean to your next step? Are your ads performing? Do you need to change ad creative? What if your ads got denied or it’s not spending your ad budget?
Those are the next steps where many business owners trying to DIY their ads might need handholding. You can learn more here about how we can work together.
