• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Pinterest has unveiled advertising capabilities, featuring "Top of Search" ads in beta and other tools designed to optimize the visual shopping funnel.

"Traditional search engines and AI chatbots rely on words, but shopping is fundamentally visual," according to a blog post published Thursday. "You often know what you want when you see it, not when you try to describe it."

The Top of Search ads appear in the top ten search results and in Related Pins. Advertiser catalogs also will be highlighted in a brand ad unit.

Pinterest data shows that in early tests these ads produce on average a 29% higher clickthrough rate compared with standard campaigns, and a 32% higher likelihood of attracting new viewers.

Wayfair, one of the first testers, saw a 237% increase in click-through rate over a two-week period compared to its usual campaigns, according to Pinterest.

The new tools were announced at Pinterest Presents, the company's annual global advertising summit.

Visual search is not new. Google entered the world of visual search in 2001 with Google Images. A more advanced form of visual search, Google Lens, was introduced in 2017. It enables users to search by image in real-time by pointing their phone cameras at objects to identify them.

Google this week launched the ability for users to share their phone's camera feed with Search for real-time visual assistance. The feature, Search Live, is available through the app on Android and iOS devices by tapping the Live icon under the search bar.

Once active, spoken questions are processed as the camera views images that the user sees through the lens. 

The move puts ecommerce at the center of Pinterest's ad strategy.

Bill Ready, the company's CEO, came to Pinterest in 2022 from Google, where he served as president of commerce, payments and next billion users, an initiative at Google focused on building products for billions of people coming online. 

While Pinterest has offered a variety of search ad formats and shopping features for years, Top of Search ads are a new feature, which appear at the top of the search page. Previously, the ads appeared in search results and throughout the platform.

Pinterest also launched local inventory ads, similar to Google’s Local Inventory Ads (LIAs), a format designed to help retailers with brick-and-mortar stores promote products available at nearby locations.

With Pinterest local inventory ads in shopping markets, retailers can display real-time prices for in-stock items within a shopper’s local store.

Canadian Tire Company, the first Canadian retailer to test this format, reached shoppers 48% more effectively than with standard shopping campaigns and saw a 16.5% higher in-store visit rate by including local inventory ads in its shopping strategy, according to Pinterest data.

There also was a retail media element to the news, with the announcement of Pinterest Media Network Connect, a self-service tool within Pinterest Ads Manager that lets media networks share first-party audience data, product catalogs and/or conversion data with advertising partners.

Media network partners Kroger Precision Marketing and Instacart Ads in the U.S. have partnered with Pinterest, but the company notes in the blog post that there are plans to expand the offering.