This year Pinterest changed their ads platform so that the campaign budget is allocated at the campaign level, not the ad group level. This has certain advantages and disadvantages.

Theoretically, the more conversions you gain, the better the results will be for future conversion campaigns, so eventually you should only need to run conversions campaigns and not need to A/B test with traffic campaigns.įor every new campaign or ad group, I would recommend using 3-5 different pins. This is a way of A/B testing because you will be able to figure out what is the best performing pin for your campaign. You don’t actually need to take any action by pausing particular pins because the Pinterest smart algorithm will automatically prioritize the best performing pin. However, sometimes you will need to pause certain pins manually. For example, with traffic campaigns, Pinterest will prioritize pins with the lowest CPC and the highest CTR. However, the most important metric is actually the Cost per outbound click, which isn’t automatically shown in the metrics and Pinterest don’t prioritize it. You have to enter the formula manually, see my article How to calculate the cost per outbound click. Then once your campaign is running, you should make sure that that Pinterest is not prioritizing a pin which has a high CPC and high CTR but a low outbound click ratio. If this happens, then you should pause the pin that is being prioritized in order to promote the pin that has the lowest CPOC.

When you first start advertising on Pinterest, you'll always need to start with a traffic campaign. Then once you have at least one conversion (either an add to cart or sign-up), you'll be allowed to start running conversion campaigns. Conversion campaigns are almost always cheaper and higher converting, however they don’t always start out that way. This is why when you first start running conversion campaigns its best to duplicate each campaign with a traffic campaign to run alongside it. Once you have some data, you will be able to decide which one is better performing and quit the less successful campaign.

There are lots of different ways you can use A/B testing (also known as split testing) on Pinterest paid ads. I´ve highlighted a few ideas so that you can get the lowest cost, highest converting traffic for your campaigns.