How Pinterest’s Timing Element Affects Your Marketing (and What You Can Do About It)

Imagine you’re watching the Indy 500. It’s lap two of the race and you’re thinking about placing a bet. The problem is all you know is how the drivers performed on lap one. You don’t know which drivers will get better over time, or how much they will improve. Can you make a smart bet?

As sophisticated marketers, we like to avoid “betting.” We try to “invest” our budgets, typically with the goal of optimizing returns. Certain platforms make the calculation of returns quite challenging. In this post, we will discuss the optimal way to measure and report on your Pinterest Promoted Pins (i.e. paid advertising) data.

Calculating attribution across a multitude of acquisition channels can be challenging, but at least the data is measuring outputs on the same scale. For example, if you look at your results today for last week’s performance across all channels you can make the appropriate decisions for budget allocation. On Pinterest, however, there is something called the Aging or Baking effect, and misunderstanding it could be like trying to bet on a driver at lap two of a race. It will be hard to make a smart decision about where your budget should be allocated because current data doesn’t necessarily indicate future performance.

But when you correctly optimize your campaign for this effect, it can have a major impact on your ability to reduce Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA) on the channel. In fact, missing the opportunity to properly optimize for aging is one of the largest issues we find when assessing Pinterest promoted pins accounts.

Normally ad channels like Facebook and Google have a “click now or click never” mentality, meaning if the ad gets turned off, the ad is gone forever in a few seconds. The only way to get it to show again is to pay the good folks at Facebook and Google more money. It’s something of a symbiotic relationship and somewhat straightforward to track results.

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