Create shopping ads

There are two ways you can promote your product groups through the Catalog Sales objective in Ads Manager:

  • Shopping Ads
  • Dynamic retargeting
     

Shopping ads

What are Shopping ads?

Shopping Ads can help you engage with your customers early, while Pinners are looking for inspiration. Once you’ve set up your product groups within Catalogs, you can promote them as Shopping Ads to surface your products to Pinners.

Pinterest uses the product data from your data source to show relevant products to interested Pinners on all Pinterest surfaces. This means you don't need to set up any additional targeting for Shopping Ads.

Shopping ads are only available in English-speaking markets at this time: United States (US), Canada (CA), The United Kingdom (UK), Ireland (IE), Australia (AU), New Zealand (NZ).
 

Setting up your shopping campaigns

Before you get started: If you have multiple ad accounts, make sure you pay attention to which ad account you are setting your shopping campaigns in. All ad accounts will be able to access Catalogs, which live at the business account level.

Using Ads Manager or Catalogs

  1. You can start from Catalogs or Ads manager:
    • Catalogs: Once product groups are created, click “Promote” within the Catalogs product group page, this will take you to Ads Manager.
    • Ads Manager: Click Ads in the top left corner of Pinterest and select "Create ad"
  2. Select “Catalog Sales” as your objective type
  3. Input your campaign details and click Continue
  4. Add your ad group details: name, audiences, targeting (gender, ages, locations, languages, devices). No keyword or interest targeting is necessary for Catalog Sales campaigns.
  5. Select the product groups you want to add to your ad group
  6. Click Continue to launch your shopping campaign.

 

Using bulk editor for shopping

To create shopping campaigns via bulk editor:

  1. Navigate to bulk editor page by ads dropdown > Bulk editor
  2. Download sample bulksheet.
  3. Set the objective type to "Catalog Sales"
    • The campaign and ad group row details are consistent with standard ads. For Shopping Ads, the only difference is that the objective type should be set to:  Shopping and creative type: Shopping
  4. For Shopping Ads, the main differences from standard bulksheet formatting are:
    • Product group ID: the promoted product group ID that gets generated once the ad groups are created. Required if you were to upload any changes to product groups.
    • Product group reference ID: The product group reference ID that you need to input to launch shopping ad groups with product groups. Can be found inside the Catalogs product group page.
    • Product group name: The name of your product group. This column is optional.
    • Product Group status: Status of your promoted product groups - Active or Paused.
    • Tracking Template : Input the URL for tracking template you want to utilize at product group level. Review our tracking specifications for Shopping Ads on how to set up your tracking template.

Dynamic retargeting

What's dynamic retargeting?

Dynamic retargeting helps you reach Pinners who have already visited your site or who have unpurchased items in their cart, by retargeting exact or similar products to those they engaged with as they browse Pinterest.

Requirements needed to run Dynamic retargeting campaigns:

  1. You have Catalogs active with your products.
  2. You have placed the Pinterest tag on your website and are tracking the following conversion events: Checkout, Add to Cart, Page Visit.
  3. Your events are passing back the product ID event data, and the product IDs being passed back are same as the product IDs in your Catalogs.
  4. You meet the necessary number of Page Visit and Add to Cart events in the last 7 days.

If your campaign has stopped running after launch, check to make sure you still meet the above requirements.

If you don't meet these requirements, start by adding the Pinterest Tag or leverage standard audience targeting.

Create a Shopping dynamic retargeting campaign

Set up a Dynamic Retargeting campaign in Ads Manager

  1. Click Ads in the top left corner of Pinterest and select Create ad
  2. Select "Shopping catalogs" as your campaign objective
    1. If "Shopping Catalogs" is greyed out, set up Catalogs first, then come back to select this campaign objective.
  3. Finish setting up your campaign then click Continue to set up your ad group.
  4. Under “Audience”, select “Dynamic retargeting”, and set your lookback window.
  5. Select “All” or “Browse” as your placement. Dynamic Retargeting is currently not enabled for Search.
  6. Finish setting up your ad group then click Continue to create your Dynamic Retargeting ad group.

Set up a Dynamic Retargeting campaign using Bulk Editor

  1. Input all details as you would for a standard shopping campaign.
  2. Select “All” or “Browse” as your placement. Dynamic Retargeting is currently not enabled for Search.
  3. For the “Dynamic Retargeting Lookback” column, input your lookback window. A lookback window is the amount of time since the Pinner’s engagement that you would like to target that Pinner. Available values are: 7,14,30,60,180 days. (i.e. With a 7 day lookback window, you’re targeting any Pinner who’s engaged with a product page in the past 7 days).
  4. Upload as you would a standard bulksheet.

Recommendations

  • Start broad and create a campaign with your default “All Products” product group. Break out additional campaigns/ad groups after launch to optimize and drive performance.
  • Select a longer lookback window for volume when you first set up the campaign to ensure you are able to get delivery, then optimize accordingly.
  • Launch with a higher bid to ensure delivery over other Shopping ads campaigns. Over time, the historical data is built and bidding optimizations can be made to drive performance.

What's the next step?

Now that you're advertising your products, read our guide to learn how to Track, report & optimize your shopping campaigns.

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