Pinterest wants to help Canadian business owners have a happier holiday season.
Starting this month, the San Francisco-based retail and activity listing site/mobile app is inviting Canadian businesses to purchase “Promoted Pins,” two years after launching the service in the U.S.
“Since we first launched Promoted Pins in 2014, they’ve helped millions of people who visit Pinterest find ideas for all parts of their lives,” Pinterest “master of coin” Paul Baltescu wrote in a Dec. 1 blog post. “Earlier this year we made Promoted Pins available to businesses in the UK, and now we’re excited to announce our expansion into Canada.”
As you might expect, purchasing promoted pins allows businesses to set target audiences for the Pinterest ad of their choice, and pay for it either based on engagement or site visits. The service also includes analytics features, so that businesses can analyze the effectiveness of and make changes to their Pinterest campaigns.
While it may not have the name recognition of Google or Facebook – which, with recent business-friendly additions to its Messenger program, has arguably been courting the same audience – Pinterest is popular in Canada, with Canadian users saving 3.9 million million pins per day in 2015, Baltescu wrote – a 50 per cent year-over-year increase over 2014.
Altogether, he wrote, Canadian users have saved more than 4.4 billion ideas since the site went live in 2010, with food and drink, DIY and crafts, women’s fashion, home decor, and hair and beauty among the most popular categories.
More than 75 per cent of pins come from businesses, Baltescu noted, so promoted pins blend right in with existing ones, and only show up when users are searching in related categories.
“Promoted pins don’t just help people find what they’re looking for… they reach them at the moment they’re looking for it,” Baltescu wrote.
The U.K. version of Pinterest became the first outside the U.S. to invite local businesses to purchase promoted pins when it launched the service in April 2016. With this month’s launch, Canada becomes only the second country outside the U.S. to offer promoted pins.
You can find out more about the service here.