Pinterest Urges Brands to Begin Christmas Planning Now

With 31 weeks remaining until Christmas, Pinterest has issued a reminder to advertisers about the benefits of long-term content planning and promotion, positioning this approach as a way to drive stronger results during the festive period. The company points to its platform's unique dynamic, where users arrive with an intent to plan, often weeks or months before making purchase decisions.

According to Pinterest, brands that tap into this planning behavior stand to deliver the best outcomes in their end-of-year push. The company explains: “On Pinterest, the dynamic is different: people come here to plan. They search for ideas, save what they like and narrow down what they want to buy, often weeks or months before they are ready to spend.”

Pinterest further argues that an always-on presence puts brands on shopper shortlists while those lists are still being written. “It also gives you room to A/B test audiences, products and creative so that by the time Q4 arrives, you’re scaling what works, not scrambling to figure it out in the most competitive weeks of the year,” the company said.

In practical terms, Pinterest advises marketers to launch their expanded Q4 campaigns soon to maximize in-app opportunities. The longer campaigns run, the better the platform's system becomes at matching products and creative to the right audiences, according to Pinterest.

To underscore the value of sustained advertising, Pinterest shared several data points:

• Advertisers who run shopping campaigns for six months or more see around 33% higher return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to those running campaigns for fewer than three months.
• Extending the learning phase of campaigns leads to better results, particularly when leveraging data collected via the platform’s Conversions API.
• Pinterest Performance+ catalog sales campaigns, which are powered by API data, deliver 20% lower cost per action on average.

These figures highlight the clear advantages of longer-term campaigns for data gathering and subsequent optimization. Pinterest recommends that marketers allocate approximately 75% of their overall ad budgets on the platform to always-on initiatives to maximize these benefits.

“Peak performance isn’t built in November,” Pinterest said. “If you want Q4 to deliver, start building momentum while your audience is still planning and your costs are still low. By the time peak arrives, the brands in the strongest position are the ones that have been running campaigns all along.”

This advice is sound and logical, though it does imply a need for longer-term planning and likely increased spending to ensure robust data flows for the period. However, with Pinterest now reporting 631 million monthly active users—most of whom come to the app with a planning mindset—this approach could prove pivotal in boosting Pin marketing performance.