Pinterest has established itself far beyond its reputation as a simple inspiration platform. Today, it’s a powerful visual search engine where millions of users actively plan their projects and purchases. This audience, unique in its discovery- and action-oriented mindset, represents a strategic opportunity for brands. Pinterest Performance+ aims to transform this purchase intent into measurable business results, with an intelligent advertising suite that uses AI and automation to optimize campaigns. The promise is clear: turn user intent into conversions, with more results for less manual effort.
Why is advertising on Pinterest a unique strategic lever?
Before diving into automation tools, it’s essential to understand Pinterest’s unique context. The effectiveness of advertising on this platform is directly linked to the mindset of its audience. Users don’t suffer advertising, they seek it out as a source of inspiration for their future projects. On this subject, please read our article Why advertise on Pinterest?
This unique environment offers undeniable competitive advantages for advertisers.
- An audience ready to buy: the most telling statistic is that 84% of weekly users are actively considering purchasing products or services. For an advertiser, this means that the advertising budget is spent on an audience already in an active consideration phase, reducing the cost and time needed to move them down the conversion funnel.
- A positive advertising environment: unlike other platforms, branded content is perceived as non-intrusive and useful. This is evidenced by the fact that 91% of people say Pinterest is a positive platform. This positive perception translates into potentially higher click-through rates (CTR), as ads are seen as a contribution, not an interruption.
- Competitive costs: advertising competition on Pinterest is still moderate. The cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) on the French-speaking market is generally between €1 and €2.5, whereas it’s at least 10 times more expensive on platforms like Facebook. This favorable trade-off makes it possible to generate a significant volume of qualified traffic, even with more modest budgets, offering a major competitive advantage for scaling campaigns.
- Synergy between advertising and SEO: even sponsored pins have a much longer lifespan than posts on other social networks. They are indexed by search engines like Google, which means that an advertising campaign also strengthens your organic visibility over the long term. Every euro invested in advertising therefore also contributes to building sustainable organic capital, a rare double performance in the digital advertising ecosystem.
It’s to capitalize on these unique advantages that the Pinterest Performance+ suite has been designed, offering automation and AI tools to maximize the impact of every campaign.
What is Pinterest Performance+?
Pinterest Performance+ is an all-in-one, AI-driven advertising solution designed to automate and optimize campaigns. Its aim is to maximize key performance indicators (ROAS, CPA, conversions) while minimizing the manual effort required on the part of advertisers. Leveraging AI, the suite manages the most complex aspects of advertising, from targeting to bidding to visual creation.
Performance+’s value proposition rests on three fundamental pillars:
- Efficient and time-saving: campaign configuration is drastically simplified. Parameter automation reduces manual input by 50% compared to standard campaign configuration.
- Maximizing results: real-time optimization technology has proven its effectiveness. In tests, Performance+ campaigns outperformed traditional campaigns by almost 80%, generating better overall performance.
- Trusted AI: automation doesn’t come at the expense of brand safety. All campaigns are protected by Pinterest’s brand safety guidelines and benefit from human verification, particularly for AI-generated creative content.
At the heart of the reactor: detailed analysis of Performance+ functions
The power of Pinterest Performance+ lies in the synergy of its automated features. Each tool is designed to work in concert with the others, creating a comprehensive optimization system that covers every aspect of a campaign, from budget to creative. This section breaks down the key components of the suite to understand their individual and collective impact.
Intelligent automation of campaigns and budgets
Performance+ radically simplifies campaign management by bringing together the best automation features and dynamically optimizing budget allocation. This automated budget management ensures that capital is allocated where AI targeting and bidding, described below, identify the greatest performance potential.
AI-optimized targeting and bidding
Performance+ artificial intelligence refines targeting to reach the most relevant audiences at the right cost, based on real-time signals and advanced technologies.
- Pinterest Performance+ targeting: this feature uses visual search technology to extend the reach of your ads beyond keywords. It identifies audiences whose behavior is similar to that of your best current customers, resulting in a 17% reduction in CPMs compared with a standard configuration.
- Pinterest Performance+ bidding: the bidding system analyzes signals in real time to dynamically adjust amounts, prioritizing opportunities with higher added value. This optimization can result in a CPA reduction of up to 2% compared with customized bidding.
- Pinterest Performance+ ROAS bidding: designed for profit-driven campaigns, this feature prioritizes high-value conversion events (such as major purchases). In tests, it improved ROAS by 10%.
By combining extensive targeting and dynamic bidding, AI doesn’t just find a cheaper audience; it identifies the audience most likely to convert at the best possible price, maximizing the effectiveness of every euro spent.
Augmented creativity: when AI enhances your products
Performance+ doesn’t just optimize delivery; it also increases the creative impact of your ads by automatically transforming your product visuals.
- Creative optimization: this tool draws from your product catalog to generate thousands of ad variants in real time. AI then tests and optimizes the delivery to ensure that every user sees the most relevant creative. Advertisers using this feature have seen a 19% increase in revenue attributed to Pinterest ads.
- Background generation: generative AI transforms your product pins, replacing white backgrounds with captivating, contextual lifestyle images. This visual enhancement led to an 11% increase in conversion rates in the test phases.
- Image resizing: the tool automatically adjusts your images to the best-performing 2:3 vertical format on the platform. Pins optimized in this way recorded 6% more outbound clicks.
These automated creative tools ensure that the audience perfectly targeted by AI sees a conversion-optimized visual, completing the optimization cycle from broadcast to creative.
Proof by the numbers: the Pretty Wire case study
To illustrate the effectiveness of Pinterest Performance+ in concrete terms, the case study of fashion brand Pretty Wire is particularly revealing. By adopting the automated solution, the brand was able to observe a direct and significant impact on its key performance indicators (KPIs), demonstrating the potential of AI to transform marketing objectives into commercial success.
The results achieved speak for themselves:
- ROAS explosion: by using Conversions campaigns with Performance+, Pretty Wire recorded a +98% increase in ROAS compared with conventional campaigns, generating an immediate commercial impact without any additional manual effort.
- Drastic reduction in Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): the solution halved the cost of acquiring new customers, with a -52% drop in CPA, demonstrating greater advertising efficiency and better budget allocation.
- Excellence confirmed by luxury brands: brands like Prada have also achieved spectacular results, with ROAS multiplied by 2.9 and engagement rates up by 88%, confirming the power of the Performance+ suite in different market segments.
Launch guide: your first Performance+ campaign in 4 steps
Launching a Performance+ campaign has been designed to be quick and easy, taking advantage of automation to reduce handling. Before you begin, please note that it is not possible to convert an existing campaign into a Performance+ campaign, and that a Pinterest business account is required.
Here’s the creation process in four concise steps:
- Create a new campaign: in your Pinterest ad manager, click on the “Create a campaign” button to start the process.
- Choose a compatible objective: select one of the objectives eligible for Performance+: consideration, conversions, or catalog sales.
- Select your Pins: choose one or more Pins you’d like to promote. You can also create a new one at this stage.
- Tip from our Pinterest Ads experts: to maximize your chances of initial success, focus on promoting Pins that have already demonstrated solid organic performance. A high registration or outbound click rate is an excellent indicator of a creation’s potential with a wider audience.
- Launch with automation: the platform redirects you directly to the campaign summary. The AI has already pre-filled the optimal parameters, which you can adjust if necessary before clicking on “Publish”. Please note that there is no minimum budget required to launch a campaign.
Strategies and points of vigilance to maximize your success
While Pinterest Performance+ is a powerful tool, its success relies on a strategic approach that combines the power of automation with creative best practices and human oversight. To go beyond simply using the tool, here are a few tips to maximize your results and avoid common pitfalls.
Good creative practice
Even with AI, the quality of your visuals remains paramount. Here are the fundamentals for successful creations on Pinterest:
- Give priority to the vertical format (2:3). This is the platform’s native format, taking up more screen space and attracting more attention.
- Keep your texts short, clear and to the point. Highlight the key benefits of your product or a special offer.
- Use strong, direct call-to-actions (CTAs). Verbs like “Buy” or “Register” are more effective than vague terms like “Discover”.
- Ensure a seamless experience. Visual and semantic consistency between your ad and your landing page is crucial to avoid losing the user.
- Tell a story. Combine lifestyle photos that show the product in action with clear product visuals to help users project themselves.
Pitfalls to avoid: lessons from user experience
Despite its promise, automation is not a miracle solution, and some advertisers have reported disappointing results. By analyzing these returns, it is possible to identify key points of vigilance to avoid the same mistakes.
- Drive automation, don’t suffer it: the most common mistake is to adopt a “set it and forget it” approach. Users have found that this can lead to overspending for little return. It’s advisable to actively monitor the performance of your campaigns, even automated ones, and adjust settings if necessary.
- Check the relevance of traffic: some advertisers have observed an influx of low-quality traffic, or even “robot visits”. It is therefore advisable to carefully analyze the quality of the traffic generated via your analysis tools to ensure that it corresponds to your target audience.
- Start with a test budget: rather than committing to large-scale expenditure right from the start, it’s wiser to start with a moderate budget. This will enable you to validate the effectiveness of the platform and tool for your specific product before deciding to invest more.
By calling on our Pinterest Ads agency, our experts ensure that these points of vigilance are taken into account throughout your campaigns.
Should you integrate Pinterest Performance+ into your strategy?
Pinterest Performance+ is positioned as a major evolution for advertising on the platform. Combining a spectacular gain in efficiency, fine-tuned optimization thanks to AI and demonstrated ROI-enhancing potential, the suite offers a powerful solution, especially for brands with visually appealing products. It transforms Pinterest users’ unique purchase intent into tangible business results. Pinterest Performance+ therefore fits perfectly into a Social Ads strategy.
For advertisers looking to exploit the potential of this visual search engine without exhausting themselves in complex manual optimizations, Performance+ is a must-have tool. However, success is never fully automated. It requires a thoughtful creative strategy, careful performance monitoring and a willingness to adjust when the data suggests it.
