Shopping ads

What are Shopping ads?

You can leverage Pinterest Shopping Ads to engage with your customers early, while Pinners are looking for inspiration. Once your product Pins are created through Catalogs, you can promote the product Pins using Shopping Ads to gain increased distribution.

No separate targeting setup (keywords, interests) are required for Shopping Ads, as Pinterest uses the product data provided in the data source to dynamically map relevant products to Pinner intent, surfacing Shopping ads on all surfaces within Pinterest.

Shopping ads are only available in English-speaking markets at this time: US, CA, UK, IR, AU, NZ.

Setting up your shopping campaigns

To set up shopping campaigns from within Catalogs (https://www.pinterest.com/product-catalogs/product-groups/):

1. Once product groups are created, click “Promote” within Catalogs product group page.
2. You will then be navigated to Ads Manager to go through campaign creation. Make sure you are using the right ads account if you have multiple ads accounts.
3. Select “Shopping Catalogs” objective type.
4. Input your campaign details, then click continue.
5. Input your ad group details: name, any audiences, targeting (gender, ages, locations, languages, devices). 
6. Within ad group creation, select the product groups you would like to set up within your ad group.
7. Click “Continue” to launch your shopping campaign.

Create shopping campaigns in Ads Manager:

1. Under Ads dropdown, select “Create ad”.
2. Select “Shopping catalogs” objective type.
3. Input your campaign details, then click continue.
4. Input your ad group details: name, any audiences, targeting (gender, ages, locations, languages, devices).
5. Within ad group creation, select the product groups you would like to set up within 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. 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 difference from standard bulksheet formatting is:
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. Product group name: The name of your product group. This column is optional.
   4. Product Group status: Status of your promoted product groups - Active or Paused.
   5. 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.

Tracking your shopping campaigns

We support both hard-coded click tracking URLs via the data source, and dynamic parameters set up in the tracking template in campaign setup. At this time, we do not support impression tracking.

Provided through your data source: Use the “adwords_redirect” column to send the full URL with tracking parameters. 

E.g. https://www.example.com/cat/product?utm_source=pinterest&utm_campaign=s…

Provided through your campaign structure: Use the “tracking template” field in the bulksheet, at product group level, and use {lpurl} or {unescapedlpurl} to dynamically pull in your product landing page from the data source. 

E.g. {lpurl}?utm_source=pinterest&utm_campaign=shopping

If tracking template is set up in the campaign structure: for {lpurl} or {unescapedlpurl}, we will use adwords_redirect column’s landing page if one exists in your data source. If you have no adwords_redirect URL, we will use the link column for the landing page.

Supported dynamic parameters for campaign tracking template:
For shopping ads, we support the following dynamic parameters:

• {lpurl}: replaced by the URL from either “adwords_redirect” or “link” field in the data source. Will automatically encode characters.
• {unescapedlpurl}: replaced by the URL from either “adwords_redirect” or “link” field in the data source. Does not encode characters.
• {campaignid}: Pinterest campaign ID
• {adgroupid}: Pinterest ad group ID
• {product_partition_id}: Pinterest promoted product group ID
• {product_id}: product ID from data source
• {device}: “m” for mobile, “t” for tablet, “c” for computer

Include a “?” before the first URL parameter is appended to conform to standard URL syntax.

When using tracking template in campaign setup, we recommend you fill in and test your full URL before activating your campaigns.

We recommend {unescapedlpurl} for redirects to avoid possible issues with encoding.

Review the guide on third party tracking and dynamic tracking for additional details regarding tracking on Pinterest.

Shopping Ads Best practices

• Structure campaigns by product categories for ease of optimizing and negative keyword management.
• Avoid creating a granular campaigns & ad groups structure where daily budgets will be spread too thin.
• Use negative keywords for brand safety, not as an optimization lever that can limit scale.
• Group similar product groups under one ad group to better leverage optimization levers (bids, budgets, audiences).
• Break out high performing product groups over time.

Shopping Ads Reporting

Reporting for Shopping Ads is available in Ads Manager under the Shopping objective. A special, shopping-specific item-level reporting, is available for Shopping Ads (Export>custom>shopping>item-level report)