In a way to ramp its efforts in monetization, the internet photo sharing and publishing service Pinterest is opening up its search ads to all advertisers.
As a focus, it wants to make brands’ keyword-based campaigns to relevant queries that do not contain a specified term or phrase.
The announcement came eight months after Pinterest rolled out search ads. With the strategy, the company is making ad placements available to advertisers buying ads through its self-serve ad-buying tool, Pinterest Ads Manager, explained the company.
Advertisers that buy Pinterest search ads through its self-serve interface, can set up their campaigns using the same options already available to brands buying ordinary ads through Pinterest’s direct sales team or third-party tools.
Here, they can apply broad- or exact-match keyword targeting, as well as phrase-match targeting. What's more, they can also create a list of negative keywords.
In addition to those, Pinterest is also introducing an option for brands to target their search ads beyond the traditional set of keywords.
So besides the traditional keyword-based targeting, advertisers can opt to have Pinterest automatically target search queries that may not include the specified keywords, but still considered relevant according to Pinterest’s Taste Graph, its index of more than 100 billion pins and their corresponding metadata.
Here is where Pinterest’s 'autotargeting' feature can help. Especially when considering that 97 percent of Pinterest's more than 2 billion monthly search queries do not include a brand by name.
Autotargeting is an opt-in option made available to all brands buying ads through Pinterest Ads Manager or Pinterest’s direct sales team or through Pinterest’s ad API partners, such as Adaptly, Kenshoo, Sprinklr and SocialCode, according to a Pinterest spokesperson.
Previously, Pinterest announced an expanded list of interest-based ad-targeting options that were supplied by Taste Graph. Pinterest has spent more than a year working on the feature to make it more capable in parsing its pin data to identify people's interests.