Pinterest Mistake: Spending Your Ads Budget Too Fast
Should you start your campaigns at $50 per day, $100 per day or more? Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to spend much at all to figure out if the campaign will be successful. Personally, I always start new Pinterest ad accounts with many small segmented campaigns from just $200 per week in total!
Why do I start so low?
Because from the first day I am able to determine the cost per click, and cost per outbound click, even with only a few dollars! This will sound strange for anyone used to advertising or Facebook, but with Pinterest the CPC is much lower, so with a very small budget you can actually gather relevant data.
Traffic Campaigns
With traffic campaigns, usually the CPC starts at $0.10 and then it will usually rise from there. After around 24 hours of spending just $2, the CPC will usually have settled between $0.10 and $0.20. Sometimes it does reach a lower CPC of $0.09 (this is a good sign). With traffic campaigns, the next thing to look out for is the Cost Per Outbound click (CPOC). *If you don’t know how to work this out, see my other article where I show you how to manually create this formula and enter it into your analytics table. *See below for an example of the CPOC within a table.
Usually your outbound clicks will be around 33% of your pin clicks. However, this can be much higher or lower; 50% is very good, and 20% is poor. The higher the ratio, the more enticing your pin and more people are inclined to click through to your website. If your CPC is $0.10 and your outbound click ratio is 50%, then your Cost Per Outbound Click (CPOC) will be $0.20. If the ratio is only 20% then the CPOC will be $0.50. These initial figures will give me an idea of what to do next;
1. Keep the campaign running
2. Scale the campaign
3. Quit the campaign
4. Change the campaign settings
*Sometimes the outbound click ratio is low; around 20%, BUT you might have a lot of ‘saves’. Saves are really good because it means that your pin has potential of going viral. Look out for ‘earned’ impressions and saves – if you are already getting these then this is a really good sign and it might be worth continuing with the campaign.
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Conversion Campaigns
With Conversion campaigns, once you have a few conversions the CPC usually starts at a much lower price. This can be anything from 0.001! (See above image). Even if your website is not actually selling any products, you can still run conversion campaigns by installing a ‘LEAD’ code into your tag and direct a traffic campaign to your ‘sign-up’ page. As soon as you get one sign up, you will trigger a conversion and then be able to run conversion campaigns to any page on your website and make huge savings!
My initial strategy for conversion campaigns is the same as the traffic campaigns, and I will consider the same ratios before deciding the next course of action. *The actual conversion or ‘sales’ analytics come later and the CPC analytics are just a starting point. The CPC and the CPOC are the most important metrics at the start because the more traffic you drive to your website, the more chance you have for conversions!
In my opinion it's best to start with lots of small campaigns, and get to know which campaigns are likely to be successful or not. I believe it actually helps to quit campaigns early when they are too expensive (at least whilst in the testing phase).
I hope this information helps you build more successful Pinterest Campaigns in the future. Please Feel free to check out my other latest Pinterest Marketing articles on LinkedIn:
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3yInteresting, thank you.
Project Head
3yThanks for sharing this useful piece of info.