Pinterest Media Planner

Key Takeaways

If you are running top offunnel campaigns in Pinterest, there's a new tool for you, the Pinterest media planner. You can use this tool to explore several options while adjusting your budgets and your targeting options to see how it impacts key metrics for awareness campaigns like CPM, average weekly frequency, and a few others. So, let's dive in and learn more. I'm in Pinterest ads in the main campaigns view. But to find media planner, let's go to this small menu icon at the top and under the manage campaigns column, we'll see media planner. This is how it will look if you've never been to the tool before. So, initially we can just click on this create media plan and yes, I understand there was another option at the top. As I said in the intro, Pinterest media planner is really for top offunnel campaigns. So, when we're looking to start creating a plan, Pinterest is only giving us the campaign objectives for drive consideration or brand awareness. And this could be a little bit tough to swallow for a lot of people watching this video. And I get it cuz we deal with a lot of clients that are so conversion and revenue focused. However, we also have some clients that one lack brand awareness. So, they know they have to invest in a lot of these top offunnel awareness campaigns just to get some sort of brand recognition and trust out there. Two, we also have clients that are very impression and CPM focused. And if you're asking why, it's because they see a direct correlation with more eyeballs on our campaigns leading to more overall conversions. And overall conversions includes from ads, organic, direct traffic. So, as impressions go up, total company conversions go up. So having some of these media planner tools, and yes, you can find these in more ad platforms than just Pinterest, can help them figure out budget planning and how much they could potentially spend on Pinterest if they think it's going to really help the overall brand. So start by just choosing one of the two campaign objectives. Moving down a little bit, you can just change the campaign name there. I'm just going to move the date stuff in the front just to make it easier to read. And then choose your tenative budget. It's going to default to daily, but you can choose lifetime or a fixed daily. Now, if you're wondering what the difference is between the two daily campaigns, I'm going to clear out this table for a little bit because it explains it right underneath the drop down I have. Just like most ad platforms, Pinterest has the right to spend a little bit more or a little bit less every day if they feel that they can maximize potential opportunities. But the daily budget should average out over the past 30 days. If you don't like that, you can change it to a fixed daily budget. So, if I put $50 a day, Pinterest will not spend more than $50 every day. This makes it a lot easier if you're not allowed to spend one cent over your budget either every given day, every month. We all have clients like that. But if you're more fluid, your budget isn't fully locked down, you can be a little bit more flexible with the main daily budget or lifetime. This makes sense. Let's say you're only running a campaign for a couple weeks. Here's where the ad schedule comes in. But just putting in a certain budget amount, we're already getting some estimated results. I'm going to choose a different end date. There we go. I'm going to let this run for two weeks, like I said. So, spending two grand for about a couple weeks, we see total impressions. An estimated number of how many people could potentially see the ads. Remember, they're estimated results. So, we always have to take these with a grain of salt. CPM, if you're not familiar with that, it's cost per 1,000 impressions, and it's giving me my currency because I'm in the United States, potential total reach, and the average weekly frequency. Now, we haven't even gotten into the targeting options yet. We'll see that in the ad group. So this brand awareness campaign as is is targeting everybody on Pinterest. So we'll change that. But as for campaign settings, this is it. This media planner is really focused on budget and the main awareness metrics. So let's click continue. Go ahead, change your ad group name. And then let's look at templates. Why would you use templates? Well, one example is let's say you want to run the same campaign once a quarter, but your budget each quarter changes. Well, you can fill out all of the targeting options, save this template, and then when you go create a new media plan for your client or your boss, you just go back to the campaign level and change the budget or potential ad schedule. That way, you don't have to fill out all this stuff every single time. Since this is new, we would have to fill all this out, come back up and save this as a new template. Think of this as like a saved audience. And then the next time we come back, assuming we want to use the same audience, I can just click on use existing template and save me time from filling all this stuff out. But ad group targeting is going to be very similar to what you're filling out when you're creating a campaign's ad group. And as we start filling some of this out, we're going to see the estimated results change. So I'm going to start changing some of these like ages. Just for this example, I have a particular client in mind. Not going to tell you who it is. From a demographic standpoint, this is who they would target. Location, just leave it as is. Audiences, I'm not going to be able to add them because this is just our demo account. We don't actually use this. But think of your retargeting list, website visitors, previous campaign engagement, customer lists, those sort of things. Interest and keywords. You can turn off the audience expansion if you want to and start looking at particular interests. Again, I'm keeping a particular client in mind. And since I'm not targeting every single Pinterest user in the United States anymore, I'm just picking specific interests. And since these are smaller interest sizes and my budget is staying the same, that means my average frequency went from what was it? One and a half in the beginning to now almost eight. So when you're running awareness campaigns, you're going to have to figure out what's more important to you. Getting as many unique viewers as possible or getting a specific set of users to see the ads multiple times to really have your brand stick in their heads. I can't tell you what's the right one for you. That's something that you're going to have to run and figure out yourself. You might already have that information already. to start looking at other ad platform analytics or maybe even your Google Analytics platform. Here's total reach, CPM, and of course, our impressions went down because we're not targeting everybody. Very small set of users. We can update your placement. I typically leave it all, but Pinterest does have a couple placements with someone searching or just the main browse placement. And we just talked about frequency. Here's where you can potentially put some caps in it. I set this up as a lifetime delivery with only a twoe run. So, a monthly frequency cap isn't going to apply to me. So, I could look at at weekly because I am running for two weeks and then potentially put a target. I could look at doing it, but honestly, for a limited run, only two weeks, I wouldn't put any capping here. If I'm seeing a very high average weekly frequency number for a daily campaign, let's say I want to create an evergreen longunning campaign, that's when I would really start to look at frequency capping. And then looking at ad formats, what types of ads are you going to be running for this campaign? And if you're fairly new to Pinterest, there are more ad formats than you realize. And we have videos about a couple of these. So, check out our Pinterest playlist. And I know we have videos for idea ads, quiz ads, and maybe some specs for some others. But for now, I'm going to stick with pins, but notice that we can add multiple options. For us, in this case, with a limited run, a very limited audience, it's not impacting our plan. If you want to, you can download an Excel sheet of this media plan if you need to share it with your boss or your client. And standing slow clap, kudos to Pinterest. What an easy to read export that you could share. Normally, I would name my ad group with a naming convention that actually includes the targeting that we're going after. So, if you think that's the only thing that's missing, well, your ad group should cover that. It pretty much gives everything we need in terms of estimated spend, who we're going after, the amount of impressions, how long is the campaign going to run, what the objective is. Very easy to read and share. I'm going to X out of this, but I'm going to go back up, save this as a new template. Let's just name this. I'd probably be a little bit more descriptive, but I'm still going to save it. Now, I will go and save the actual plan. And then this is a plan overview. If you need to go back and edit it, here we go. Or if I click on the more options, I can duplicate it, make any simple changes. Here's where you can change the delivery and the dates of the run. Make your changes. Save it again. Then we go back to save plans. So, this is kind of like its own account structure. Let's say since I chose men's fashion as the targeting option, maybe this whole media plan is about men's fashion and all the campaigns I'm going to run about men's fashion. I can create a new media plan for maybe the different type of fashion products my client wants to run and then create different media plans for all those campaigns under a different umbrella. However you want to organize it, totally up to you. For many industries, Pinterest is great for brand awareness, and the new media planner tool is going to be helpful for accounts out there who would like to plan their budgets so they can reach a particular audience. It's a great start, but hopefully we do see more features added to this. If you have any other questions or comments on how this works, let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf, as well as looking at the super thanks button.