You’ve probably heard that ads are a great way to grow your business, to sell your offers, to make your email list bigger, and all the things. But you might also be scared of wasting money. In today’s post, I’m going to walk you through how to set up Pinterest ads for lead generation. Even if you’re a beginner, you’ll know how to start a campaign and use it to grow your leads, traffic, and support your Pinterest marketing strategy. 

First off, let’s talk through whether or not you’re ready to spend money on ads. Depending on the state of your business and your presence on Pinterest, starting paid ad campaigns with promoted pins on Pinterest might not make sense. 

So let’s be clear first so you’re spending your time and money wisely. Then I’m going to show you a really simple and updated way to launch a Pinterest ad to grow your email list.

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Are you ready to start pinterest ads for lead generation?

I want to talk to you about whether or not you’re ready to start Pinterest ads for lead generation. The number one thing that I always walk people through when they are afraid of wasting money is a little bit of a mindset reframe. 

I want you to think about this as an investment in your business, not wasting money. You are putting money in, to get data out, to see whether or not what you have created is viable.

One way to look at your ads is by testing your offer and see if it’s ship-shape and ready to go. We do that with ads. That way we can see if it’s successful or not. I can tell you, more often than not, offers are not ready to start ads. So let’s evaluate. 

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Does your offer convert organically?

Here’s how you tell if your offer is truly ready to go for ads. Does it convert organically first? If it does not convert organically first, then you probably are not ready to put ad money behind it. 

Generally speaking, to avoid wasting money, your audience needs to already be moving through the customer journey you’ve already created for them. This is not for a brand new product or service you’re promoting. 

• people are seeing your landing page
• they’re signing up through your form
• downloading your freemium, or accessing your offer
• moving to the next step in your funnel

Now, if you don’t have any of that happening with your audience, then you probably are not ready to start ads. If people are not naturally signing up for your offer(free or paid), without you having to pay to get them on it, then chances are you’re not ready for ads.

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Have your offer funnel complete before ads

Maybe you have an offer that’s doing well and has traction. Great, next is to make sure that you have every piece of your offer funnel complete before spending on ads. You’ll need to have in place:

• Emails, landing pages, or payment systems delivering the offer
• Followup reminders or receipt emails
• Email welcome series or nurture sequence
• Sales sequence after that, tagged appropriately

If you don’t have somewhere for them to go, then why are you spending money on getting them on your email list? If you’re not prepared to be sending them emails regularly, let’s not pay to get them on your email list, or you’re just paying for something to just collect dust. So, understand the offer and the audience before you put money behind it.

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What you should pay per lead

If you’re a beginner, you won’t know how much you’re willing to pay per lead. I can tell you some averages, and these are all very different across industries.

In the B2B space, I pay less than $4 per lead on Pinterest for my new leads to my email list. And I am in a really small niche on the platform. The bigger your niche, chances are the lower your cost is going to be.

In the B2C niche, you can get leads anywhere from $1 to $3, that’s what I’ve seen on average. And that’s across a lot of different industries. So, it really just depends on your audience, your offer, their problem, your solution, and the messaging that you’re using to attract them in.

If you tick these boxes and know you’re ready to move on, test out some ads and start with lead generation, then the next part of this blog is for you. I’m going to walk you through a really simple lead generation campaign setup, so let’s go. 

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Setup steps before building a Pinterest campaign

Before you set up a campaign, make sure you input your billing information within your business account. That is in your menu, just click ‘Billing.’

Then you also need to make sure that your pixel is installed on your website. This is the tracking code you need so that Pinterest can talk to your website and gather all the data and activity from your ad campaigns. Have your pixel installed, if you’re not sure how, I have a post below outlining that. Those are integral steps before starting. 

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How to create your lead generation campaign

To get started with your first ad inside of your Pinterest ads dashboard, you’re going to: 

1. Go to the ‘Business Hub’ and click ‘Create Campaign’. 
2. Toggle OFF the ‘Optimize Campaign’ setting. We want to control this ourselves.
3. Under the type of campaign, select ‘Conversion’.
4. In the ‘Campaign Details’, name your campaign. I like to put what I’m promoting and then the month it starts. 
5. If you’re ready to spend money on the campaign, click ‘Active’ under the ‘Campaign Status’.
6. Under the ‘Campaign Budget and Schedule’, enter ‘Daily’ and input your daily budget amount to spend. 
7. Select ‘Run Continuously’ so it’s not interrupted once turned on.
8. Check the box under ‘URL Tracking’ so your UTM codes are made automatically for you. 
9. Then click ‘Continue’. 

Remember though, you’ll need to set reminders to come and check your campaign because it will be running continuously. Hopefully you already have a process or schedule in place where you are reviewing your campaigns, data, analytics everywhere, etc. in order to maintain a quality marketing strategy. This isn’t just set it and forget it. 

Setting up the ad group and targeting

On every page, you’ll notice a drop down in the upper right corner to adjust the campaign type. Keep this on ‘Manual Campaign’ throughout. So moving down this page of the ad campaign:

1. Name your ad group, I’ll like to call mine what I’m targeting (Interests & Keywords).
2. Under the ‘Targeting Details’, click the ‘Switch to manual setup’ link. 
3. Leave the ‘Demographics’ alone unless you’re certain you have an age group or gender that you do not convert at all.

Inside of my Demographics, for me, I exclude males. After years of testing, I just know personally that men don’t convert for me. So there’s no point in wasting my money trying to attract them. This is going to be an optimization tactic later for you, because at this point we don’t know who’s going to convert in your campaign. 

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Targeting with interests basic off your lead offer 

Underneath ‘Interest and Keywords’, you can keep the box checked that says ‘Enable Pinterest Performance’. Basically, this is Pinterest going out and searching for topics that are relevant or similar to your ads, and placing your ads in front of them.

For example, if someone were on Pinterest searching for ‘Instagram marketing tactics’, then my Pinterest ads might be placed in front of them because it’s a marketing strategy, similar to the topics I promote. So it’s valuable, but won’t hurt if it’s not checked.

Select the three interests that fit your business best, directly related to your target topic or offer. Click through into the deeper sub interests too to be as specific as you can. 

If you’re selling crafts, then what kind of crafts are you doing? Beading? Stationery? Don’t select all of ‘DIY and Crafts’ interests. Go deeper and choose the sub interests that are related.

Optimizing with keywords and delivery methods  

Then flip over to ‘Keywords’ and add your keywords. Doing your keyword research prior to starting this process is best, hopefully you’ve been doing it with all your content marketing. You can also search for keywords right here in the builder. 

If you search for your topics, you can see that they come up. Select at least 25 keywords for your campaign. You can paste them right into the left box, or click from the search and they’ll be entered. 

Come down to ‘Optimization and Delivery’. We are optimizing for ‘Conversions’ and we’re going to optimize for a ‘Lead’ event because we’re setting up Pinterest ads for lead generation, growing your email list. 

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Adding your pin designs and launching

At this point, you need to select the ads or create the ads. You can select from organically published pins and turn them into ads, or create them as brand new pins. 

I always recommend you publish your pins you want for ads as organic first. Because then all the promoting compounds and feeds your organic growth, both during your campaign and after. To do that, click ‘Select pins’, and you have to paste in the Pin ID from the previously published pin.

If you click ‘Create ad’, it will pull up the pin builder. You can certainly create your Pinterest ads for lead generation this way, as brand new pins. But once your campaign is turned off, the pins you create this way don’t exist organically afterwards. 

Once you’re all done, you will click ‘Add pins to campaign’ and it will add all the pins you search up or create right there. At that point, you’re ready to launch.

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Call to action note

There’s nothing else in here that you need to do other than possibly change your call to action. I do like to use a call to action that’s more relevant to the thing that I’m promoting. 

• ‘Learn more’ is very ambiguous. 
• ‘Sign up’ could be more related to your offer. 
• ‘Get offer’ would be more like if you’re selling something physical. 
• I like to use ‘Download now’ on Pinterest ads for lead generation email list growth because they’re downloading a freebie.

You can also click ‘Review’ and see at a glance your ads, all of the details that you added. At this point all you need to do is push ‘Publish’.

Reviewing campaign results

When you go to ‘Ad account overview’, you can see your campaigns running. I already had a campaign running that I show in the video above. It was only a day old, but a good example because I set it up just like the process we’ve just walked through. 

At the time of filming, I had spent $16. The campaign got 3,200 impressions, 12 paid pin clicks, and I already had 7 lead conversions in a short time. Total, so far, I had spent $44. 

Over time, every campaign will optimize and the lead cost will drop down to an average cost per lead under $4, at least for my niche. That’s what I’m always aiming for. So that’s how you start your Pinterest ads for lead generation.

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Budget testing and data expectations timeline

In the tutorial of that setup, I entered $20 a day for the ad budget. That’s roughly $600 a month. Depending on the season of the year, Q1 to really the end of Q3, you can test lead generation ads anywhere from $10/day on the very low end, knowing that the results are going to take you much longer to get, to $20 to $50 a day. 

The higher your budget, you’ll know that those results will come faster and you will really be able to see what your campaigns will bring in a quicker way. You can start on the lower end and start bumping it up. But if you have $600 to spend, I think that’s a really good starting point just to dive in.

Run your ads for at least a month. Then if it’s going well, you can keep them going. Then you can analyze the results and compare the data to your email list software. Look at your open rates and your sales after your promotion started. Then you can start to identify whether or not this campaign is worth continuing or not.

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Next steps with Pinterest ads for lead generation

If you are interested in running some Pinterest ads for lead generation, and you have more questions, you can always join Pin Profit Academy. I have updated my Pinterest ads course for whatever level of experience you’re at. 

Once inside the community, you can come to coaching calls for private questions, or book a paid consultation call with me to get further help with your ads. So, if you are interested, definitely come join us inside.

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