How to Install Pinterest Tag with Google Tag Manager

Key Takeaways

we already have videos on our channel covering the targeting options you get for pinterest as well as all the ad formats and specs but before you even get that far in the campaign setup the first thing you actually should do is make sure that your pinterest pixel or tag is loaded on your website this is going to allow you to track visitors that you can use for audiences but also to record conversion actions to prove the worth of your campaigns so that is exactly what i'm going to cover in this video i'm going to show you the easiest way to get the pinterest pixel on your website and then we'll go over which conversion actions you can start recording right now within pinterest ads i'm in the main overview section so i'm not sure which view you're going to be looking at when you're watching this video but to start setting up the conversion pixel we need to click on ads and then go to conversions i will admit this account already has had the pinterest tag set up so if you're setting this up for the first time or you just got into a pinterest ads account for the first time you will not see this pinterest tag section on the page going through the pinterest ads account setup for the first time they will walk you through the setup and you will get a pop-up that will have step-by-step instructions on how to add the pinterest tag with tag manager so in my case to kind of replicate that i'm just going to configure my base code but as you can see here there are three ways you can add the tag to your website so one over to the right you can choose to email the instructions to a developer if you're not familiar with code and if i say the word tag manager and that completely goes over your head choose the option to email the directions to your developer who can get the code on the website for you if you're really familiar with how your website is structured you're okay updating any templates or code on your website you can choose the middle option which will be adding the manual tag to your website it's really not worth me going through it because every website is going to be structured differently so that's something that you're going to have to figure out on your own if you choose that option but the easiest one like i said is all the way to the left is choosing a specific partner integration the most common one and the one we're going to run through is google tag manager but you can see you have other options to add the pinterest tag to your website we have a few clients on shopify and the easiest way to add it to that platform is to use the integration option here even though we have tag manager on some of the shopify platforms too but you see there are other integrations available if you are using any one of them so we could choose from one of the partners that we see here and if you select google tag manager there will be some step-by-step instructions personally i think the easiest thing to do is to leave this window open so i can copy the tag id that i had to blur out that'll be the specific id for your account i'm going to go into another screen where i have google tag manager open already i'm in my tag manager account you can see on the left hand side i've already on the tag section i'm going to go up and click on new to build a new tag before we can save and publish anything we have to name it next click on tag configuration you can go up and use the magnifying glass to search for the pinterest tag or you can just scroll down until you see the native option and there it is so let's choose that one now i'm gonna hop back to my pinterest screen then i'm gonna highlight and copy the tag id so when we hop back into google tag manager i'm gonna paste it in this first field where it says tag id for the base cold only just to get it tracking on every page of your website there's really nothing else you have to do with the tag but what we have to do is add a trigger to your tag this is telling google tag manager when to fire this specific pinterest tag so if i click on this option i have a few other triggers in here and we're going to talk about some of those soon but there will always be an all pages trigger set up within your google tag manager so then i can have this specific tag id fire on every single page of my website that's with the understanding that you have tag manager installed on every page of your website but if you know you do you can save the tag and then you'll have to make sure you submit the tag we have a version name just in case it breaks anything on the website which it never has and then i can publish it now that we know this is good i'm going to hop back into pinterest and then we can verify if the tag is working i have the tag on my site now and i know i mentioned before we've done this already so that's why you see this main pinterest tag section on the website but now you should have one pop up especially if you're starting to see events come through if you just want to check if you've had the main pixel installed on your website one of the ways you can test it out is to go to test events add in your website and then click launch pinterest is then opened up another window with the website that i added when testing the event but i'm going to hop back into pinterest and now i can confirm my website is receiving activity i'm going to click jump to the website choose another page hop back into pinterest and another event has fired off since i chose all pages each page view is going to fire off a different event another way that you can test out if the base code is working on your website is to add the pinterest chrome extension this one is so easy to find if you google it yourself literally just google the title of this pinterest tag helper this is pretty much the same thing that facebook microsoft ads twitter has to verify that your tiger pixel is working on your website so let's add this one to chrome i had to resize my browser a little bit so you can see my chrome extensions but that little red circle with the number one to it i understand it could be hard to see depending on what device you're on so i apologize that red circle is going to be the pinterest tag helper if i click on that one i had to blur it out again but it's confirming which tag id is on this website and it's finding no issues with the tag specifically on this page and the only event i'm firing right now is just the base code probably want to go around check a few pages especially all the important ones to your site conversion action pages shopping cart pages all the good ones and if it's working well then you know your base code is set up properly now what we just ran through was the base code just pretty much tracking an audience and when people are visiting your website while that's pretty helpful the next thing we probably want to do is get some specific conversion actions set up and we can also do this within google tag manager what if you want the tag only to fire off when a user performs a specific action for example maybe you want your conversion action to be when a user hits a specific thank you page maybe you want a fire event when a user just adds something to a cart another option that i use fairly frequently and have used in a lot of my event-based tracking demos is when someone watches a video on your website we can also set up those types of actions within google tag manager so i'm going to hop back into that platform you do have the option to go within your pinterest tag and then you will be able to duplicate it and make edits to your new version but i'm just gonna go and create a new tag again my goal with this tag is to have pinterest fire an event every time someone watches an embedded youtube video on our website the tag configuration is going to start the same this time i'll search for it we need the pinterest tag i want to head back to pinterest pasted my tag id in and for the event to fire we don't want just the base code only i want a specific event and i purposely chose this one because when we look at the event options within this specific tag watching a video is one of the events that we can create but you can see there are event categories for add to cart if they hit the checkout page there's custom options if you're not finding anyone that's already preset in here specific page visits perfect for your custom confirmation urls if someone performed a specific search on your website signed up on a form and view a category but i already have watched video selected so i'm going to choose that one and then going down to my triggers i already have a youtube views trigger created if you want to know how you can record specific events of users viewing your youtube videos embedded on your website you can watch this video right here we already have another demo in place so to recap i obviously have the right pinterest tag i have my tag id in place i specifically chose the watch video event to fire and then my trigger is telling pinterest to only fire this event the watch video one whenever someone watches a video on my website so i'm gonna go and save this i gotta submit and publish it otherwise it's not going to work but do understand you can preview all of your actions and test them out in tag manager before you publish anything live i don't want to do the preview mode right now so i'm just going to submit it hit publish and now let's go back into pinterest again and test out this event to see if it's working i'm back on the test events page it's going to make me type in my website again but luckily google has it memorized let's launch our website in a new browser and luckily for us we have videos on our homepage i'm going to click on one to get it going and hopefully fire off the event i apologize for having to look at that face again but a few things happen i know i have it cut off but i can see within my pinterest tag helper chrome extension a few events fired that's because this specific trigger is going to record when someone plays the video and when someone pauses it and that's exactly what i did so i can see that firing off my tag helper i'm sorry i cut it off for this specific view but if we go back into pinterest we see there are two specific events now that is happening due to how i have the trigger set up if i only want pinterest to fire off when someone plays the video i'm gonna have to go back in and reconfigure my trigger to only record when someone plays the video and you can see within that video trigger demo that i mentioned before you will be able to include what you want within that trigger and what you don't let me run through one more scenario i'm going to do a little bit of fast forwarding so you don't have to see me set up a manual tag again i duplicated the tag it's got the same id you can see i call this one c a speak and that is one of the pages that michelle and i have on the website instead of watch video i have the event to fire as a page visit and for the trigger i created a new one for anyone who goes to the cspeak page just to show you what it looks like this trigger will only fire when someone lands on a page where the url contains see a speak very common page visit one we personally do not recommend using any basic page view as an event to fire and record however you can create these page view triggers if you are using website-based confirmation urls after a person has completed a purchase if they fill out a form to contact us request a demo start their free trial you see where i'm going with this perfect for those confirmation urls if i close this out save this new tag publish it one more time adding in the version name again let's click publish and then let's hop back into pinterest one last time we're back in the main tag manager portion within our pinterest tag and now under the pinterest tags section you're going to see the event history depending on what events you have set up within your specific pinterest tag id you can look within the past three days or within a custom range to see when these events have fired we have a few options here if i want to remove and just see the watch video one where you can see a lot of it has happened fairly recently from the testing i was doing within this demo and that's how you can watch to see when these specific events are firing like i said tag manager is the easiest way to do this i'm sorry i couldn't go through every single type of trigger option that is out there that could help you fire specific events within your account we're gonna put some of our favorite google tag manager resources within the video description where you can go check out how you can record some specific events on your website add them to google tag manager and then you can use that to fire off those events to start recording some pinterest specific conversions thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you 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