Pinterest advertising: catching intent early

Pinterest gets filed under social media and handled wrongly there. It is in fact a visual search engine with an unusual time horizon: people collect ideas for projects they will carry out weeks or months later.

Who searches here, and why that is valuable

The share of purchase-preparing searches is high. Someone planning a kitchen, building a house, preparing a wedding or laying out a garden is here before the buying phase proper. That is valuable, because you shape the decision before your competitors are even visible.

The key difference: posts do not expire

A post on other platforms is dead after 48 hours. Here a well-tagged pin keeps running for months and accumulates free reach after the paid campaign has ended.

That changes the maths. Paid advertising here also buys a running start that the pin then benefits from organically. So do not judge a campaign after 30 days; judge it after 120.

What works visually

Different rules apply than in moving feeds. Vertical 2:3, so 1000 by 1500 pixels; other ratios get cropped or served worse. Text in the image is welcome; unlike social feeds, a legible headline in the image raises engagement markedly here. Bright, clear images; dark, moody shots measurably underperform. Show the result, not the process: the finished room, not the building site. Series rather than single pieces: five variants of one motif beat one perfect image.

Tagging decides half the outcome

Because this is a search engine, text and structure count.

1. A pin's title should contain the search phrase, not the product name.
2. The description may be long, 150 to 300 characters in natural language.
3. Cut boards thematically, not by your shop's product categories.
4. Set up rich pins so price and availability update automatically.

Who it really pays for

Good fit: furniture and interiors, kitchen studios, landscaping, interior fit-out, fashion and jewellery, wedding and event suppliers, travel, food with a recipe angle, DIY stores, photography.

Poor fit: explanation-heavy B2B services, software, financial products, trades with no visible result, anything with a very short decision path.

A twelve-week test

Budget £900 over twelve weeks, so £75 a week. Create 20 pins across four thematic groups. Promote the best five further after two weeks and let the rest run organically.

Settle up only in week twelve, and count the whole revenue from the channel including visits arriving via saved pins. Judging after four weeks will wrongly write the channel off.