Social media ad spend is projected to grow globally by ~50% by 2029, reaching over $345 billion.
If you’re involved in social media advertising, whatever your area of focus, Meta and Instagram are likely the channels with which you most associate.
Reasonably so. Combined, these two networks reach over three billion users.
With the scale and domination of Meta and IG ads, however, costs have been steadily rising in recent years. As of January 2025, average CPMs were $10.83, versus $8.73 in 2023.
This isn’t forcing brands to pull back media spend on Meta and IG, but it is opening the doors for other social media networks to offer lower costs, and for advertisers to benefit from being early-ish adopters.
This is where Pinterest Ads come in.
Officially launched in 2013 with “promoted pins”, Pinterest ads are projected to generate over $4 billion in ad revenue this year.
What makes Pinterest unique is that it’s essentially a visual search engine, where users actively look for inspiration and products, rather than passively scrolling.
Advertisers can reach users throughout the entire decision making process, serving content, inspiration, product, and more to an active audience who are in-market. That’s a key differentiator versus Meta/IG from an acquisition standpoint.
What Ad Formats Do Pinterest Offer?
Standard Pins
Static images that appear on home feeds, search results and related pins. Ideal for different objectives such as: awareness, traffic and conversions.
Video Pins
Video ads that autoplay on users feeds. Good for engagement, storytelling and upper funnel.
Shopping Ads
Catalog based assets that can serve single products, personalised collections, and carousels. Ideal for middle and bottom funnel retargeting.
Collections and Carousel Ads
Advertisers can showcase multiple items, create mini-storefront experiences, and more. Ideal for all stages of the funnel, from introducing a brand to retargeting products.
Idea Ads
Combining videos, images, lists, and custom text in a single pin, designed to tell an inspiring story and encourage user engagement.
Quiz Ads
An interactive format with multiple choice questions that can either provide a result or recommendation to the contributors.
Premiere Spotlight
Similar to the YouTube Masthead, this format gives advertisers the opportunity to reserve exclusive placements such as the first ad slot on the home feed’s second page or at the top of search results.
From running a Pinterest Ads agency, I get the same reaction from brands when building social media strategies. Most don’t realise Pinterest has such a strong offering.
This is rooted in the perception that Pinterest is just for browsing recipes and room ideas, which couldn’t be further from the truth with a monthly user base of over 500 million actively looking for products.
How Much Do Pinterest Ads Cost?
There are two ways to look at this:
- Industry CPM benchmarks
Context is key to understanding this. A recent study of a sample of advertisers, across a wide range of industries, found that CPMs on Pinterest are 26% lower than on Meta and Instagram.
Competition is a key driver, with Meta and Instagram having a user base more than five times larger than Pinterest.
- Your campaigns
As with all paid media, it depends.
Similar to Google Ads and Meta, costs will vary based on audience, competition, objectives, and more.
The best way to get a sense of performance is to use the in-platform planner to scope out average CPCs, CPMs, estimated impressions, and other benchmarks.
Beyond that, several factors come into play once your campaign is live, such as ad relevance, engagement, and conversion rate depending on your objective.
As with most paid media platforms, ensuring your assets are both high quality and relevant to your audience is essential and you’ll be rewarded for this.
What Are The Benefits of Pinterest Ads?
Unbranded Search
96% of all searches made on the platform are unbranded.
This poses a huge opportunity for brands looking to introduce their products to new audiences who are there to be inspired.
High-Income Demographic
Pinterest reaches 28% of high income earners and boasts a 40% larger basket size than comparable social platforms.
Female Dominated Audience
Pinterest’s audience is predominantly female, with 71% of UK users identifying as women.
Shopping and planning are key motivators for Pinterest usage across all genders, however, women are more likely to use the platform to plan ‘life moments’ like weddings and baby showers.
It’s Built For Discovery
The two standouts are that 80% of weekly users report that they’ve found a new brand whilst browsing Pinterest, and 83% of these users have made purchases based on content they discovered on the platform.
Rapidly Growing User Base
Pinterest reported over 537 million monthly active users in Q3 2024, an 11% increase on the previous quarter.
As audiences grow, advertisers benefit from a larger inventory and improved targeting to reach the right audiences at the right time.
And that’s just the start of it.
Examples of Pinterest Ads Success
There are plenty of case studies across lots of different industries in the Pinterest archive.
Examples include:
Boursin – The cheesemongers enjoyed a 2% increase in ad recall and 2% increase in brand awareness.
Louis Vuitton – Reached 3.5m users in three days with a ~50% view rate using video.
Wickes – Combined CPM and CPC bidding to raise conversion rate by 222%.
Vital Proteins – 5% uplift in brand awareness and 60% increase in action intent via quiz ads.
Sweaty Betty – 39% increase in ROAS and 34% lower CPA vs other acquisition channels.
It’s not just household name brands either.
Agencies and in-house marketing teams are starting to shift budget to Pinterest and ease down spend across channels such as Meta and IG, as they cannot drive the efficiency and scale needed.
And speaking first hand within my own Pinterest marketing agency, it’s not just the high spenders who are seeing success, it’s brands of all sizes.
The benefits, proven results and forecasted growth of this platform speak for themselves.
