Pinterest marketing for businesses

Pinterest isn't a social network like Instagram or TikTok, it's a visual search engine. People don't come to follow friends, they come to search for ideas: a new kitchen, an outfit, a recipe, a gift. That makes Pinterest Marketing fundamentally different from advertising on Meta or TikTok, and for many businesses that's exactly what makes it interesting: content and ads stay visible in search results for months, instead of disappearing from a feed after a day. This article shows how Pinterest works, who it works for (and who it doesn't), and how you get results organically and with Pinterest Ads.

What Pinterest is and how it works

Pinterest is a platform where users save "Pins" (images or videos with a link) onto "boards," organized by topic or project. You search for a term like "small garden ideas" and get visual results you can save for later. That search behaviour is the key difference from other platforms: people plan on Pinterest (a renovation, wedding, trip, gift), they're not just scrolling to kill time.

Three building blocks form the basis:

• Pins: the individual content items, usually a vertical image or short video with a title, description and a link to your website.
• Boards: collections of Pins around a theme, both from users and from your business account.
• Idea Pins: a video or multi-page format without an outbound link, meant for inspiration and reach within Pinterest itself.

Pinterest attracts hundreds of millions of monthly users worldwide, with an audience that has traditionally skewed female (home decor, fashion, weddings, food), though it has broadened in recent years, including among men and younger generations (DIY, gaming, finance, travel). Check current user numbers on Pinterest's own press or advertising pages, since they keep growing and shifting.

Who Pinterest works for, and who it doesn't

Pinterest works well for businesses with visual products and a purchase journey with a research phase: home decor, fashion, beauty, food and drink, weddings, travel, DIY and interior design, but also B2C services like estate agents or interior designers. A home accessories or handmade jewelry webshop finds exactly the people on Pinterest who are actively looking for inspiration and are often already in a buying mindset.

Pinterest works less well for:

• B2B service providers without a strong visual product: Pinterest's audience rarely searches for "accounting software" or "IT consultancy." LinkedIn is a more logical channel there; read LinkedIn advertising.
• Impulsive, trend-driven content that's irrelevant within days: Pinterest's strength is precisely content that lasts for months.
• Brands without visual material or the capacity to create it: without strong, vertical visuals you won't get anywhere on this platform.
• Very local service businesses with a small catchment area: search volumes are often too low to justify an ad budget, though organic presence can still be useful, for example for a local interior designer.

The rule of thumb: if you have something people want to "save for later" and you can present it attractively in images, Pinterest is worth trying.

Pinterest search behaviour: the foundation of your strategy

Pinterest is first and foremost a search engine, which means keyword research matters just as much as it does on Google. Users type search terms into the search bar, and Pinterest shows Pins based on title, description, board name and the text on the image itself (via image recognition). A few practical points:

• Use Pinterest's own search bar: type in a core term and look at the suggestions Pinterest offers, similar to Google's autocomplete.
• Pinterest Trends (a free tool from Pinterest) shows which search terms are rising, and is especially useful for planning seasonal peaks: wedding content, for example, peaks months before the wedding season itself.
• Write titles and descriptions in natural language with concrete search terms, not just a brand name. "Scandinavian living room with plants" works better than just "New autumn collection."
• Organize boards around topics people actually search for, not around internal product categories. A board called "Small bathroom ideas" works better than "Autumn 2024 collection."

Because Pins stay findable for a long time, consistent, keyword-rich content builds a kind of evergreen library that keeps driving traffic months to years after publication, very different from an Instagram post that's barely seen after a few days.

Setting up a business Pinterest account

Here's how to lay the right foundation:

1. Create a business account (Pinterest Business) instead of a personal account. That gives you access to analytics, advertising, and extra features like claiming your website.
2. Claim your website so Pins people save from your site are automatically linked to your account, giving you analytics on all of that content.
3. Fill out your profile completely: a clear name, a bio with relevant search terms, and your website link.
4. Build boards around your business's main topics, each with a description containing search terms.
5. Install the Pinterest Tag on your website (see the measurement section) before you start advertising, so you collect data from day one.
6. Enable Rich Pins (product, recipe or article Pins that automatically show extra info, like price and stock for product pins) via meta tags on your website.
7. Publish consistently, for example several times a week, with a mix of new content and content linking to existing pages.

Content formats on Pinterest

Pinterest has a handful of recognizable Pin types:

Vertical images (aspect ratio around 2:3) generally perform better than square or horizontal ones, simply because they take up more space in the mobile feed. Put clear, readable text on the image itself (for example a title or call to action), since many users scroll fast and don't always read the underlying description.

Pinterest Ads: campaign types

You build Pinterest Ads in Ads Manager, with a structure similar to other ad platforms: campaign, ad group, ad. The main campaign objectives:

• Awareness: maximize reach, charged per thousand impressions.
• Consideration / Traffic: drive traffic to your website, charged per click.
• Video views: maximize views of video content.
• Conversions: optimize for actions on your website, like purchases or leads, requiring the Pinterest Tag or Conversions API for measurement.
• Catalog sales / Shopping ads: automatically generate ads from your product catalog, targeted at people likely to buy.
• Lead generation: collect leads via a form within Pinterest.

For a webshop, catalog sales is often the most interesting starting point, since you don't have to manually build an ad per product. For brand building and a broader audience, a combination of awareness and consideration campaigns works better.

Catalog and shopping on Pinterest

For webshops, the product catalog is a core part of Pinterest Ads:

• You upload your product feed (often the same feed you use for Meta or Google Shopping, in a similar format) to Pinterest, with product name, price, description, image and stock status.
• Pinterest automatically generates Product Pins from this, showing price and availability and updating them as your feed changes.
• With Shopping Ads you show these products to people searching for related terms, or to audiences you build yourself.
• Catalog retargeting lets you reach people again who viewed a product but didn't buy, similar to dynamic retargeting on Meta: see Meta advertising for the similar principle there.

Keep your feed accurate and complete: missing images, outdated prices or out-of-stock products still being shown are among the most common causes of poor-performing catalog ads.

Targeting: who you reach

Pinterest offers several ways to define your audience:

• Interest targeting: based on topics users are interested in, based on their Pinterest behaviour.
• Keyword targeting: your ad appears for specific search terms, similar to search ads on Google.
• Demographic targeting: age, location, language and (limited) gender.
• Audiences from your own data (customer lists): upload a customer list to reach existing customers or exclude them.
• Website visitors (retargeting): people who visited your site, via the Pinterest Tag.
• Lookalike / Actalike audiences: new people who resemble your best customers or visitors.

A practical approach: start broad with interest and keyword targeting to learn what works, then build retargeting and lookalike audiences as you collect more data.

Budget and bidding strategy

Pinterest Ads runs on an auction, similar to other ad platforms, but generally with less competition and therefore often lower cost per click than Meta or Google, although this varies a lot by industry and season. In broad terms:

• Automatic bidding lets Pinterest set the bid to maximize your result (for example conversions) within your budget, and is the starting point for most advertisers.
• Manual bidding gives more control over your maximum bid per click or thousand impressions, useful if you want precise control over costs.
• Daily budget versus campaign budget: you set a limit per day or for the whole campaign duration.
• Give a new campaign enough time and budget to get out of the learning phase before drawing conclusions; adjusting too quickly disrupts optimization.

Because Pinterest content often only gains traction after a few weeks (the platform has to learn who to show your Pins to), patience matters more here than on platforms where results are visible immediately.

Creatives that work on Pinterest

What performs well on Pinterest differs from what works on Instagram or TikTok:

• Vertical format (2:3 ratio) with a calm, clear composition, no cluttered images.
• Text on the image that immediately communicates the core message: a title, benefit or step.
• Real-life context: a product in use or in an atmospheric setting often works better than a plain product photo on a white background.
• Recognizable brand identity, but not pushy: Pinterest users value aesthetics, and anything too commercial quickly feels like "an ad" instead of inspiration.
• Idea Pins for storytelling: step-by-step content (a recipe, a DIY project, putting together an outfit) tends to perform well because it matches how people use Pinterest.

For creating these visuals, Canva works well for fast, consistent Pin designs, and CapCut for short video Pins. For AI-generated product visuals that stand out in an inspiration-driven feed, Higgsfield is worth trying, though you still need to keep an eye on brand consistency.

Measurement: Pinterest Tag, Conversions API and attribution

Good measurement is, as on any ad platform, a precondition for meaningful optimization on Pinterest:

• Pinterest Tag: a snippet of code on your website that tracks page visits, add-to-cart actions and purchases, similar to the Meta Pixel.
• Conversions API: sends conversion data server-to-server, independent of the browser. That makes measurement more reliable now that browsers increasingly restrict cookies and tracking, and it's now the recommended approach alongside (or instead of) the Tag alone.
• Attribution windows: Pinterest attributes a conversion to an ad within a set window after a click or view; which windows are available and exactly how they work changes regularly, so check this in Ads Manager itself before building reports.
• Google Tag Manager is a practical way to implement and manage the Pinterest Tag alongside other tracking tags; read Google Tag Manager.
• Bring your results together in a dashboard, for example with Looker Studio, so you don't view Pinterest in isolation but alongside your other channels.

Note: because of growing privacy rules and reduced cookie tracking, attribution has become harder across the board, Pinterest included. Don't rely blindly on the numbers in Ads Manager; also look at your own web analytics and, where possible, incrementality testing.

Benchmarks: be careful

Average cost per click, conversion rates and click-through rates vary enormously by industry, season and country, and keep changing as the auction and the platform itself evolve. The most reliable, current benchmarks come from your own Ads Manager reports (compare your own campaigns to each other) or from Pinterest's own, periodically published advertising reports. Be wary of random figures floating around online without a source or date.

Real-world examples

Webshop (home decor): builds a library of stylish mood images with product links, organized by interior style (Scandinavian, industrial, bohemian). Catalog Pins ensure every product is automatically findable, and retargeting campaigns reach people who viewed a product without buying. Organic Pins keep driving traffic months after publication, which lowers the cost per conversion from ads.

B2B service provider with a visual component, for example an interior designer or event agency: uses Pinterest less for direct lead generation and more as a portfolio and inspiration source, with boards per project style or event type. Most B2B service providers without a visual product are better off with LinkedIn advertising.

Local business (for example a kitchen studio or florist): uses organic Pins to capture local search traffic ("small kitchen ideas," "bridal bouquet styles") and puts a modest ad budget behind seasonal peaks like wedding season or holidays, instead of advertising year-round.

Common mistakes

• Treating Pinterest like Instagram: reusing the same square, product-focused posts without adapting them to Pinterest's vertical, search-driven format.
• Skipping keyword research: titles and descriptions full of brand name but missing the terms people actually search for.
• Giving up too soon: organic Pins and new ad campaigns need time to gain traction; concluding "it doesn't work" after a week is premature.
• Using an outdated or incomplete product feed for catalog ads, resulting in out-of-stock products or wrong prices in ads.
• Only selling, never inspiring: Pinterest users are looking for ideas; a feed full of bare product photos with no context or atmosphere usually performs worse than content that inspires first and sells second.
• Not (properly) installing the Pinterest Tag before you start advertising, missing weeks of optimization data as a result.

Checklist: setting up your Pinterest strategy

• Business account created and website claimed
• Pinterest Tag (and ideally Conversions API) installed
• Keyword research done via the search bar and Pinterest Trends
• Boards organized around topics people search for, not internal categories
• Rich Pins enabled for products, recipes or articles
• Product catalog connected (if you run a webshop)
• Content calendar with a consistent publishing frequency
• Visuals in vertical format with readable text
• Test campaign set up with enough budget and time to learn
• Results brought together in a central dashboard alongside your other channels

Pinterest alongside your other channels

Pinterest rarely replaces your whole social strategy; it's usually a complement. Many businesses combine it with Instagram for direct community and engagement, Meta advertising for retargeting on a larger installed user base, and TikTok for reach among a younger audience. How you weigh that depends on your product, audience and capacity to create content; read social media marketing for the broader trade-off. Watch out: don't focus blindly on followers or impressions as a measure of success, those are vanity metrics that say little about actual sales or leads.

Frequently asked questions about Pinterest marketing

Is Pinterest a social media platform or a search engine?

Both, but in practice it works more like a visual search engine. People actively search for ideas and save content for later, rather than mainly following friends and acquaintances like on Instagram or Facebook.

Which businesses does Pinterest work best for?

Businesses with a visual product and an audience that researches before buying: home decor, fashion, beauty, food, weddings, travel and DIY generally do well. B2B service providers without a strong visual product usually find more traction on other channels, like LinkedIn.

How long does it take before Pinterest delivers results?

Organic Pins build up gradually and can take weeks to months to really gain traction, but tend to keep driving traffic for a long time afterward (months to years). Ad campaigns also need a few weeks to get out of the learning phase before you can draw reliable conclusions.

What does advertising on Pinterest cost?

That varies a lot by industry, season and audience, and keeps changing as the platform and auction evolve. Reliable figures come from your own Ads Manager reports or Pinterest's current, official advertising reports, not from random numbers floating around online.

What's the difference between a Pin and an Idea Pin?

A regular Pin includes a link to your website and is meant to drive traffic. An Idea Pin is a video or multi-page format without an outbound link, focused on storytelling and reach within Pinterest itself.

Do I need a product catalog to advertise on Pinterest?

No, a product catalog is only needed for catalog sales and shopping ads, mainly relevant for webshops. For awareness, traffic or lead generation you can also advertise without a catalog using standard Pin ads.

Does Pinterest work for local businesses too?

Yes, provided there's a visual component, like a kitchen studio, florist or interior designer. Organic Pins can capture local search traffic, and a modest ad budget around seasonal peaks is often more effective than advertising year-round.

How do I measure whether my Pinterest ads are working?

With the Pinterest Tag and ideally the Conversions API you measure page visits, add-to-cart actions and purchases. Keep in mind that, as on other platforms, attribution has become harder due to stricter privacy rules, so don't rely blindly on a single source of numbers.

Further reading

Want to know if Pinterest fits your channel mix, or need help setting up your first campaigns? Also read social media marketing, or book a free strategy call.