Pinterest announces new video-based shopping ad products

Pinterest made announcements about its 2021 plans during Pinterest Presents, its first ever virtual advertiser summit on Wednesday. 

In 2020, Pinterest reached 459 million active users worldwide, an increase of 37% compared to the previous year. Just in September 21, following the iOS 14 users’ search for home screen design ideas, the popular social media platform reached 680,00 downloads globally across Google Play and the App Store. 

When it comes to revenue, Pinterest reached $1.7 billion with a 48% increase year-over-year. Jon Kaplan, Pinterest’s global head of sales, said that video, including video advertising, has become a “meaningful” percentage of its revenue. Pinterest saw a 100% increase in video views and 6x increase in video uploads in the last quarter of 2020. 

In January, Pinterest announced a brand new personalized advertising format named Dynamic Creative which allows advertisers to automate the personalized ad creation and targeting process. 

In 2021, Pinterest plans to invest in new shopping related ad products as well as improving reporting features. The company is launching conversion insights features in order to improve reporting capabilities for organic product catalogs and Pins. 

“There are lots of examples of advertisers using this information to help them think through their strategy,” Kaplan said. “And this is all part of the journey towards bringing more shopping to Pinterest and providing tools to demonstrate the value we’re driving.”

According to Pinterest data, 64% of Pinners say Pinterest is where they go to find an idea, product or service they can trust.

Kaplan states that they want to make shopping an inherent part of the platform’s overall experience. Within 2021, Pinterest plans to introduce a bunch of tools including automated bidding, budgeting solutions as well as improving current features including catalog management, conversion analysis for advertisers. 

It is not possible right now to shop directly from Pinterest and the company isn’t interested in managing the all transaction process within the platform, Kaplan said. 

“We haven’t ruled it out, but we have a lot of things to do today that we think are more foundational to our road map and that will do more to differentiate our product experience,” Kaplan said. “Being able to virtually try on lipstick or eyeshadow with AR, using Pinterest Lens to take a picture in the real world and then shop related products, being able to shop your boards – that’s what we want to do.”

On March 1, Pinterest launched a new Pinterest Shop collection featuring 25+ women-founded small businesses and hundreds of products all made or designed by women, to celebrate International Women’s Day. The company also announced International Women’s Day fund to to match donations from employees to nonprofits helping women succeed like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Global Fund for Women.

“In this time of crisis, women are also turning to Pinterest to find inspiration on how to navigate change – searches for “women supporting women” increased by 2x, searches for “small business plan” increased by 50x and searches for “start a business from home” increased 4x. Boards created by women for “dream jobs” have increased by 10x² as they are looking to find new jobs, start a business or shift careers.” the company said.

Bringing shopping experience to social media platforms has become a hot topic among social media giants. Yesterday, Twitter confirmed that it tests new shopping features to enable sales on its platform. Facebook has made improvements and product launches on Instagram to monetize the platform including shopping in Reels and adding shopping tabs to the homepage on the app. 

It seems that the competition between social media giants will increasingly continue in the ecommerce field as well.