Pinterest is adding another piece to its arsenal of advertising services, opening up search advertising to its partners and with companies advertising through the Kenshoo marketing suite.
With Pinterest looking to continue to grow into a must-have tool for advertisers, it’s begun building more and more products to capture all parts of a person’s buying behavior. Pinterest users often come to discover new products and ideas, and the company has always generally done a good job of pitching marketers that Pinterest ads do a good job of building awareness, as well as getting users to convert to an eventual sale once they get to a product.
Adding search gives Pinterest the ability to tap into another part of that buying behavior — searching with the intent of a purchase (whether the user realizes it or not). Nearly all of the searches on Pinterest aren’t brand searches, global head of partnerships Jon Kaplan said. So Pinterest will now give some advertisers the ability to show ads against keywords and for shopping campaigns through Pinterest’s search.
“When people come to Pinterest, they’re starting earlier in their decision-making process,” Kaplan said. “We saw this with the holidays — people were pinning holiday ideas as early as August. For brands, the implications to our business, that’s an amazing opportunity to reach someone at the earliest stages of decision-making. And when you search for something like modern furniture, a lot of times a text query doesn’t capture the nuances of your individual tastes or what you actually want to see. So having something that’s visual in nature for a lot of different queries is actually…