Ezra Firestone – PinCommerce Course

Pinterest, the world’s fourth largest social network, announced September 19, 2013 the impending rollout of their advertising platform. At that point, I’d already had my eye on them for quite some time — with warp-speed growth, a user base of 70% women, and an average user household income of over $100,000, Pinterest was shaping up to be an eCommerce marketer’s dream!

Here’s why: The whole point of Pinterest is for users to search and make lists (boards) of the things they want.

For an eCommerce retailer, there’s nothing better than that: a large group of people with disposable income telling you exactly what they want by searching for it. It was only a matter of time before Pinterest monetized their platform by letting advertisers display messages to their users.
Pinterest Launched An Ad Network roi-pinterest-ads2

There were two aspects I was especially stoked for when the ad network rolled out (as any business owner and marketer would be). The network would be a combination of:

Query based visibility (people seeing ads based on what they’ve searched — a la Google) and Contextual visibility (people seeing ads based on demographic data points like age and gender — a la Facebook).

Unfortunately for me, Pinterest was only letting in a few fortune 500 retailers to test, so I was going to have to wait.

Disappointed as I was, it gave me time to consider the new opportunities; the eCommerce business is a long game where patience and consistency pay dividends, and I’ve been playing for a while. I remember when Google AdWords were 3 cents a click; I remember when Facebook launched and we were able to generate full price eCommerce sales for under $5 each.
What’s The Pattern?

If you’ve been in the game a while, you may have noticed there’s a pattern with the launch of these social ad networks: traffic starts off cheap and gradually gets more expensive.

This has to do with targeting.

When a new platform launches, they are still working out the kinks in the system and dialing in its targeting capabilities and platform functionality, so ads are cheap. As they hone the targeting and tracking, it becomes easier to show advertisers a positive return on ad spend, and as a result — ad prices go up.

Basically, new social ad networks use cheap ads to attract advertisers as paying beta testers for their fledgling platforms.


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