Pinterest Ads Guide: Objectives, Formats, Bidding and Tracking

Pinterest Ads reach people while they search and plan, which makes the channel behave partly like paid search and partly like paid social. Advertisers bid for placements in the home feed, in search results and beside related Pins, and pay for impressions, clicks or conversions depending on the campaign. The company reported $1.18 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 18% year over year, so auction competition is rising, particularly in North America. This guide explains the current objectives, formats, automation, targeting, bidding and measurement options so that a marketing leader can set a test budget and judge the results with confidence.

How do Pinterest Ads work, and where do they appear?

Pinterest Ads are Pins that an advertiser pays to distribute through an auction. They appear in three main placements: the home feed, search results and related Pins shown under a Pin someone has opened. Ads carry a “Promoted” label and otherwise look like organic content.

Campaigns are built in Ads Manager in three levels. The campaign holds the objective and, optionally, the budget. Ad groups hold targeting, placement, schedule and bid. Ads are the individual Pins. Pinterest reviews new ads against its advertising guidelines, and the help center says review can take up to 24 hours, so creative needs to be uploaded ahead of any launch date.

Search placements deserve particular attention. Pinterest said in September 2026 that users make more than 80 billion searches a month and that more than half are commercial. Two newer products put advertisers directly in those results. Top of Search ads, introduced in beta on September 25, 2025, appear within the first ten search results and in related Pins. Visual Search Ads, announced on September 17, 2026, let advertisers bid for top placement in search results and Pin closeups; Pinterest said a beta would open to eligible advertisers across its ad markets in the following weeks. Check availability in your own account before planning around either product.

For the organic side of the same search system, see our guide to Pinterest SEO. Paid and organic share keywords, so research done for one serves the other.

Which campaign objective should you choose?

Choose the objective that matches the action you can measure. Use Sales when you track add-to-cart and checkout events, Leads for sign-ups and enquiries, Consideration for clicks and catalog-led interest, and brand awareness or video views when reach is the goal.

Pinterest’s help center explains that Leads and Sales replaced the earlier Conversions and Catalog sales objectives. Campaigns built on the legacy objectives remain editable until April 30, 2027, after which they are archived. If your account still runs legacy campaigns, plan the migration now and expect a fresh learning period when you rebuild.

A dedicated App Promotion objective for app installs was described by Pinterest in September 2026 as being in global beta with qualified advertisers. Treat it as unavailable unless it shows in your account.

A common mistake is choosing Sales when the account records only a handful of purchases a week. The delivery system needs volume to learn. Pinterest’s guidance for conversion-optimized campaigns suggests 50 to 200 conversions a week. If you cannot reach that at the checkout level, optimize toward add-to-cart or run Consideration first and move down the funnel once volume allows.

What ad formats does Pinterest offer in 2026?

Pinterest offers standard image, video, carousel, collections, idea, showcase and quiz ads, along with a maximum-width video format. Standard image and video ads cover most needs; the others suit product ranges, storytelling or interactive campaigns.

Across formats, titles can run to 100 characters, though Pinterest notes that only about the first 40 usually show in feeds. Descriptions can run to 800 characters and are generally not displayed in the feed, but they still inform how the system understands the ad. Shopping ads, which are generated from a product catalog, are covered in our Pinterest shopping guide.

Creative decisions matter more than format choice. Use vertical images, put the product or outcome in the first frame of a video, keep any text overlay short and legible on a phone, and make sure the landing page shows the same product as the Pin. Plan for several variants per ad group; Pinterest recommends ten or more ads per ad group for Performance+ campaigns so the system has options to test. If video is central to your plan, our comparison of video marketing software covers production tools.

What is Pinterest Performance+, and when should you use it?

Pinterest Performance+ is a set of automation features that builds and manages campaigns with roughly 50% fewer inputs, according to Pinterest. It automates targeting, bidding, budget pacing and parts of creative. Use it when conversion tracking is reliable and you value efficiency over manual control.

Performance+ is switched on with a toggle during campaign creation and is available for Consideration, Leads and Sales objectives. Targeting is reduced to a country selector, simplified age ranges and customer lists to include or exclude. Bids are set automatically. Budgets can be lifetime or average daily. For Sales campaigns using a catalog, the system can generate backgrounds for product images with AI, resize images and assemble collections and shopping ads automatically.

Pinterest publishes three practical recommendations for Performance+ campaigns: aim for at least 50 conversions a week, set the daily budget to at least five times your target cost per result, and supply ten or more ads per ad group.

The trade-offs are real. The help center notes that Performance+ sales campaigns use all products in the catalog instead of manually chosen product groups, that the dynamic retargeting ad group cannot be removed during setup, and that reporting breakdowns exclude interests, keywords and language. On September 17, 2026, Pinterest announced Priority Products, which lets advertisers emphasize specific items during launches and promotions, along with self-serve A/B testing for creative, targeting and Performance+ strategies. Those additions address some of the control concerns.

A fair approach is to run Performance+ against a manual campaign with the same budget and objective for four weeks, then compare cost per result under the same attribution window. Similar automation debates apply across platforms, as our analysis of Meta’s subscription platform changes shows.

How does targeting work on Pinterest?

Pinterest targeting combines what people search for, what they are interested in, who they are and whether they already know you. Options are keywords, interests, demographics, placements, customer and visitor audiences, and actalike audiences that resemble an existing list.

• Keywords. Include or exclude words and phrases to reach people as they search. This is the closest equivalent to paid search and the most direct expression of intent.
• Interests. Topics related to your ad, from broad categories to narrow ones.
• Demographics. Gender, age, location, language and device.
• Audiences. Customer lists uploaded in hashed form, site visitors captured by the Pinterest tag or the API for Conversions, and people who engaged with your Pins.
• Actalike audiences. New people who behave like one of your existing audiences.
• Placement. Home feed, search results or related Pins. Pinterest recommends using all placements for most campaigns.

An expansion setting lets Pinterest reach people beyond your selections when it predicts they are relevant, while respecting negative keywords and demographic limits. For prospecting it generally helps volume; for tightly defined tests, switch it off so you know what you are measuring.

Because 96% of top searches are unbranded by Pinterest’s own count, generic category keywords carry most of the opportunity. Build keyword lists from the same research you use for organic work, add negatives for irrelevant meanings, and keep retargeting in separate ad groups so its results do not flatter prospecting.

How do bidding and budgets work?

Pinterest offers automated Performance+ bidding, which adjusts bids several times a day to get the most results for the budget, and custom bidding, where you set a maximum. Budgets are set as lifetime or daily amounts, and automated daily budgets may fluctuate from day to day.

Performance+ bidding is the default for consideration, leads, sales and brand awareness campaigns. Custom bids suit advertisers who need a hard ceiling per click or per thousand impressions. Pinterest states that you pay only the minimum needed to win the auction regardless of the bid entered, and that minimum bids vary by country and format. Its help center gives the example of a $0.10 minimum for a cost-per-click campaign in the United States. A value-based option, Performance+ ROAS bidding, optimizes toward checkout value and requires checkout events that carry order values.

On budgets, Pinterest’s documentation describes three types: lifetime, a flexible daily budget under Performance+ and a fixed daily budget. With the flexible type, spend on a single day can run up to about 125% of the stated amount while averaging out across the week from Sunday to Saturday. Finance teams should know this before they see a daily figure above plan.

Pinterest does not publish a single platform-wide minimum campaign budget in the articles reviewed for this guide. Size the test from your own economics instead:

1. Estimate a target cost per result from your margin.
2. Multiply by five for a minimum daily budget.
3. Check whether that budget can plausibly produce 50 results a week.
4. If not, move the optimization event up the funnel or consolidate ad groups.
5. Commit to four to six weeks, since Pinterest advises allowing three to five days of learning after each change and limiting changes to two a week early on.

How should you measure Pinterest Ads with the Conversions API and UTMs?

Run the Pinterest tag and the API for Conversions together, deduplicate events with a shared event ID, and attach UTM parameters to every ad. This gives you a platform view for optimization and an independent analytics view for reporting.

Tag and API for Conversions

The tag is browser-side code; the API for Conversions sends the same events from your server and can also carry app and offline conversions. Browser restrictions and ad blockers cause the tag alone to miss events. Pinterest says advertisers using both see, on average, 24% more attributed conversions and a 9% improvement in cost per action. Those are company figures and your result will differ. Setup can go through commerce platform integrations, partners named by Pinterest such as Tealium and LiveRamp, a tag manager, or direct development work. Send an event ID with each event so the same purchase reported by both sources is counted once, and check deduplication in the events overview in Ads Manager.

UTM parameters

Pinterest’s help center describes an account-level setting that automatically applies utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_content to current and future campaigns. Parameters can also be set per campaign and, for Performance+ campaigns, per ad group. Automatic parameters do not override ones you have already written into destination URLs or product feeds, so audit old links to avoid mixed naming. The official instructions are in the Pinterest help article on URL parameters.

Attribution windows

Pinterest’s default is a 30-day click and 1-day view window, with shorter options available. The older engagement window was removed from settings in April 2025, according to documentation from the reporting vendor Supermetrics. Pick one window, record it and keep it constant across tests. Our Pinterest analytics guide explains how to reconcile platform numbers with web analytics.

What does a sensible first 90 days look like?

A sensible first 90 days moves from tracking, to a structured test, to a decision. Spend the first two weeks on setup, the next six on a controlled test of one or two objectives, and the final month scaling what met your cost target.

• Weeks 1 to 2. Install the tag and API for Conversions, verify events, enable UTM parameters, upload the catalog if you sell products, and prepare at least ten creative variants.
• Weeks 3 to 8. Launch one prospecting campaign and one retargeting campaign. Change no more than two things a week. Review search terms, placements and creative weekly.
• Weeks 9 to 12. Compare cost per result with your target under the agreed attribution window. Scale budgets gradually, retire weak creative and test Performance+ against your manual setup if you have not done so.

Before week one, agree a decision rule with finance: the cost per acquisition or return on ad spend at which the channel continues, and the amount you are willing to spend to find out. That rule protects the test from being cut after two noisy weeks and from being extended indefinitely on optimism.

Pinterest should be planned alongside search and other paid social, since audiences and creative overlap. Our Digital Ads pillar covers cross-channel budgeting, and the Social Media Marketing Hub links to the organic guides, including the Pinterest marketing strategy guide that this paid plan should sit inside.

Frequently Asked Questions