Pinterest on Tuesday introduced a suite of
merchant tools to help retailers reach customers, starting this holiday season.
The tools range from a storefront profile and search feature -- which allows merchants to highlight their shop
tab with features, in-stock products -- to automatic bidding where advertisers can adjust an ad group's bid to deliver the best results.
Early tests show that on average, advertisers who
tested Automatic Bidding for Catalog Sales saw nearly 28% more conversions when optimizing for the Conversion event and nearly 29% more clicks when optimizing for Click events for the same budget,
according to Pinterest.
“Prior to this launch, advertisers had to input a manual bid amount for their ad groups,” said Stephanie Johnson, Pinterest product marketing lead.
“With automatic bidding, Pinterest bids on the advertisers’ behalf.”
Rather than entering a cost per click (CPC) or cost per action (CPA) bid, or maximum bid, automatic
bidding manages the bids for advertisers dynamically, she explains.
Pinterest adjusts the bids according to the market demand.
This means that once the delivery system has exhausted
all possible opportunities within a current bid, it will incrementally raise the bid to find new opportunities in new auctions.
Automatic bidding respects the advertisers' pre-set criteria
such as budget, targeting, and campaign start and end date.
Tools also include faster ways to ingest Catalog feed, to a shopping Collection ad format and Collection video feed.
Pinterest has updated the profile to enable merchants to change their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically
created recommendations. When users search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they will see recommended merchants based on the product category.
There is conversion analysis, and an
updated product tagging test. Updates to product tagging give merchants the ability to tag their own images with exact match products, so shoppers can get inspired and go straight to the purchase on
the retailer’s website.
With new updates to its Conversion Analysis, retailers can see how customers complete their path to purchase in the visualizations tool.