Dive Brief:
- Pinterest is refocusing its advertising strategy on keyword search and audience-based buying, according to Ad Age.
- With over 2 billion monthly searches on the platform, Pinterest is looking to offer keyword-based ad buys for search marketers.
- The social media platform is looking to grow its advertising revenue ahead of an anticipated IPO.
Dive Insight:
Pinterest has been actively rolling out new features ahead of its anticipated IPO.
Last week, Pinterest launched a number of e-commerce tools that users and marketers alike have been waiting to find on the platform. Those tools include a shopping cart that allows consumers to buy from multiple merchants with one cart, and the expanded availability of a visual search tool that recognizes products in images and pulls up searches with similar results after users click on those product images.
Shortly before that, Pinterest rolled out three new ad targeting tools: visitor retargeting, customer list targeting, and look-alike targeting. Pinterest also added Oracle’s Data Cloud to track platform visits to offline sales, a key channel for retailers in today's omnichannel world.
Now Pinterest is offering up its search inventory to advertisers. "Previously, we have never talked to a search engine marketing company or agency," Jon Kaplan, Pinterest's head of global sales, told Ad Age "So, literally, we never spoke to people who buy search even though we have over two billion monthly searches on the platform."
Pinterest hopes these latest moves can combat the perception that it has never really lived up to its e-commerce potential. A Channel Advisor report on social media sales conversions from last September found that Pinterest trailed Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The platform's only true e-commerce feature was buyable pins, which never really took off as a way for its users to actually make purchases.
