My Experience with Promoted Pins

For months now, I have received email after email from Pinterest telling me about how amazing promoted pins are and how they can help my business.  After doing some research, I decided that promoted pins was worth a try.

Pinterest has two types of Campaigns: Traffic Campaign and Engagement Campaign.  Traffic campaigns are aimed at bringing traffic back to your site and engagement campaigns are made to engage potential followers.  For traffic campaigns, you pay for every click to your site.  For engagement campaigns, you pay for every closeup, repin, or click.
**If you ask me traffic campaigns are always the way to go.  Because paying for every closeup, repin, and click can get expensive FAST!**

Recently, I started a Traffic Campaign on Pinterest.  Within an hour, I had 21 saved pins and 8 likes without spending a penny.  My mind is blown.  Why didn't I start this sooner?

For my Traffic Campaign, I named it "Trial Promotion."  My campaign is going to last 7 days from September 16 to September 24.  My maximum budget is $1 and my bid is $0.60 per click.

The Pros

• You only pay per click to your website
• You control the budget and the bid
• Impressions are free

This system is quite similar to Google Adwords campaigns.  

The Results

In a week of promoted pins, my DIY One Teaspoon shorts got:

• 52,719 impressions
• 41 repins
• 29 clicks
• 19 likes

On average, my pins get about:

• 10,000 impressions
• 21 repins
• 2 likes

over the course of two months.

I spent $8.00 for my 7 day campaign.  On average my CPC (cost per click) was $0.22 to $0.24 for the week.  Even though I set a limit of $1.00 a day which should equal $7 total spent on the campaign.  The way promoted pins works is similar to Google Adwords.  You can go over your intended budget by a few dollars this is because both promoted pins and Adwords work on a bidding system.  If the bid is a few cents per pin/ word then Pinterest or Google will bid for you (up to your max bid).  While you're trying to outbid someone else, the cost per click increases and can lead to the dollar you intend to spend each day to become a $1.25 or more.  

The Cons

• The number of repins and likes significantly decreased after two days.  
• It only brought 29 more visitors to my site.
• I did not gain any followers on Pinterest or my blog.

Conclusion: Are promoted pins worth the money?

Yes and No.  Promoted Pins definitely have their benefits (increased impressions and more repins) but they don't always product the effect we are looking for like more traffic to our blog or engagement with our pins.  If you're looking in to creating a campaign with Pinterest, I definitely think $8 is a good way to test the waters.

If you have any questions, comment down below!