Pinterest urges brands to plan ahead for the Christmas season: long-term planning drives peak-season growth
With 31 weeks until Christmas, Pinterest reminds advertisers that early long-term content planning and promotion can help achieve better results during the holiday season. The platform emphasizes that users conduct planned searches here, so brands need to enter users' shopping lists through continuous advertising and use data to optimize Q4 performance. Data shows that shopping ad campaigns running for more than 6 months have a ROAS about 33% higher than short-term campaigns, and Performance+ catalog sales campaigns see an average cost-per-action reduction of 20%.
With 31 weeks until Christmas, Pinterest has begun reminding advertisers that planning long-term content and promotions in advance will help achieve better performance during the holiday season. The platform published recommendations on its official blog, encouraging brands to start early to seize year-end consumer opportunities.
Pinterest notes that planning is a key characteristic of user behavior, and brands that align with this behavior are likely to achieve the best results in year-end promotions. The platform states: "On Pinterest, the dynamic is different: people come here to plan. They search for inspiration, save content they like, and narrow down their purchase options, often starting weeks or even months before they actually spend."
Therefore, Pinterest believes that an always-on brand presence allows merchants to be included in users' consideration sets when they are building their shopping lists. The platform adds: "This also gives you the space to A/B test audiences, products, and creatives, so that when Q4 arrives, you are scaling effective strategies rather than scrambling during the most competitive weeks of the year."
In other words, Pinterest advises marketers to launch extended Q4 ad campaigns as soon as possible to maximize in-app conversion opportunities. "The longer an ad campaign runs, the better the system becomes at matching your products and creatives to the right people," Pinterest says.
According to data provided by Pinterest:
- Advertisers running shopping ad campaigns for 6 months or longer see a return on ad spend (ROAS) approximately 33% higher than those running campaigns for less than 3 months.
- Extending the learning phase of ad campaigns helps improve performance, especially with data collected through the platform's Conversions API.
- Pinterest Performance+ catalog sales campaigns driven by API data can reduce average cost per action by 20%.
Running ad campaigns long-term offers clear advantages in data collection and subsequent optimization. Pinterest recommends that marketers allocate approximately 75% of their overall ad budget on the platform to always-on programs to maximize these benefits.
"Peak performance is not built in November," Pinterest emphasizes. "If you want Q4 to deliver results, start building momentum while audiences are still planning and costs are still lower. When the peak season arrives, the brands in the strongest positions are often those that have been running ad campaigns consistently."
This advice is logical and reasonable, but it also means brands need longer-term planning and may need to increase budget investment to maximize data flow during that period.
Given that Pinterest currently has monthly active users of631 million, and most of these users come to the app with a planning mindset, this long-term advertising strategy could become a key way to enhance the effectiveness of Pin ads.