Dive Brief:

• Pinterest is rolling out browsable catalogs alongside Pins and is now presenting shopping ideas in the home feed that are personalized for each user, according to information provided to sister publication Marketing Dive. By scrolling under a Product Pin and clicking "More from the brand," users can see products of a similar ilk in a catalog.
• These new shopping features come as the image-sharing site touted a new multi-touch attribution study by marketing analytics provider Neustar. It found that participating retail brands had double the return on advertising spend (ROAS) on Pinterest than on other social media, and a 1.3-times higher return than on paid search.
• The Neustar research also found that Pinterest was the "most efficient" digital channel for retail brands, in that the image-posting site created more sales at a lower cost. The study, which examined digital performance for five U.S. retail brands, tracked sales to physical and online stores from paid search, social and display ads.

Dive Insight:

The new catalogs and personalized shopping ideas help tailor the image-driven experience on Pinterest to a user's needs, potentially increasing the efficiency. The news follows a series steps by Instagram to beef up its shopping-related offerings for brands.

The study found that while Pinterest ads constituted just 11% of total media spend for the five brands reviewed, it created about 18% of incremental sales and revenue for the brands. This means that ads on the image-sharing site are 2.3 times more efficient than social networks, 1.5 times more than paid search ads and 1.1 times more than display ads, according to the report.

As an early stop on customers' shopping journeys, Pinterest can serve an outsized role. But a lot can happen between when a user first sees an ad and later decides to make a purchase, which is why a last-click attribution model — one that's used less frequently now — underreported revenue by 48%, according to Neustar. Instead, the study's multi-touch attribution model takes into account a week's attribution window following when an ad was viewed. The study found that, on average, 75% of the sales from Pinterest came a week after the ads were seen on that site.

The study suggests that Pinterest is affecting offsite sales, a trend that's also seen on Amazon, another site that's an early stop in customers' journeys. Just as users go to Pinterest to get ideas when they're searching for a new purchase, they also often turn to the retail site early in their journeys because a product search on Amazon yields many possible products. As a result of this outsized influence on all kinds of sales, a recent study found that ads on Amazon similarly have a major impact on sales outside of that online store.