Pinterest ads: how they work, what they cost, how to test them

Updated October 22, 2026 · 7 min read

How Pinterest ads work

A Pinterest ad is a pin you pay to show to more people. It looks like any other pin, with a "Promoted by" label, and it appears in the home feed, in search results and in related pins. People can save it like any pin, and saves of a promoted pin keep circulating after the campaign ends, which Pinterest Analytics reports as "paid and earned".

You create ads in Ads Manager: open the hamburger menu, choose Manage campaigns, then Create campaign. A campaign has an objective, one or more ad groups with budgets and targeting, and the pins inside each ad group. You need a free business account, and the pin you promote must be public.

Objectives and how each is billed

The objective decides what Pinterest optimizes for and how you pay. This is the part most guides skip, and it is where the cost question is actually answered.

Performance+ is Pinterest's automated bidding. It sets and adjusts bids several times a day to get the most results for your budget, and it is the default for awareness, consideration, leads and sales. Custom bidding lets you set the maximum you will pay for an impression, click or action yourself.

For most first campaigns, consideration is the right objective: you pay for clicks, which you can compare directly with the outbound clicks your organic pins already get.

The auction and why there is no average cost

Pinterest ads are sold in an auction. Each time a pin could be shown, Pinterest compares the advertisers competing for that spot, and the winner pays the minimum needed to win rather than their full bid. Pinterest's own help page example: with a bid of $3 and a minimum of $0.50 needed to win, you are charged $0.50.

That is why nobody can quote you an average cost per click. The price depends on who else is bidding for the same people at the same time, which changes with your objective, your country, your targeting, the quality of your pin and the season. Fourth-quarter retail searches are contested; a niche hobby term in March is not. The only number that matters is the one Ads Manager reports for your campaign.

There is a floor. Each campaign type has a minimum bid that varies by country, and if you target several countries the floor is the highest of them converted to US dollars. Pinterest's help page gives the example of CPC floors of $0.10 in the US, £0.07 in the UK and $0.10 in Canada, with the converted minimum being $0.10. Floors are the least you can bid, not what you will pay.

Budgets

You set a budget per ad group, three ways:

• Fixed daily budget. A cap on what the ad group spends each day.
• Performance+ daily budget. An average daily amount that Pinterest can spend more or less of on a given day to get better results across the week.
• Lifetime budget. A total for the campaign's run, which Pinterest paces across the dates.

Pinterest does not publish a minimum daily budget. You can pause a campaign or ad group at any time, and spend stops. If you edit a daily budget mid-week, Pinterest adjusts spend toward the new amount through the following Saturday.

Ad formats

Most organic pin formats can be promoted. A few formats exist only as ads.

For a first test, use a standard image pin at 2:3. It is the same format that ranks organically, so a pin that already works needs no new creative. The pin size tool checks the ratio and the safe zone before you upload.

Targeting

Each ad group targets people by one or more of:

• Interests. Pinterest's interest categories, the same ones that appear as affinities in Audience Insights.
• Keywords. Terms people search. Match types are broad (the default), phrase, exact, and negative phrase and negative exact for terms you want to exclude. Pinterest recommends at least 25 keywords per ad group. This is the one place on Pinterest where negative keywords exist; organic pins have no such setting.
• Demographics. Age, gender, location, language and device.
• Audiences. Customer lists you upload, visitors to your site captured by the Pinterest tag, people who engaged with your pins, and actalike audiences built from any of those.
• Placements. Browse (home feed and related pins), search, or both.

Keyword targeting is where organic research pays off twice. The terms your organic pins rank for, and the related terms the keyword tool lists for them, are your first keyword list.

The Pinterest tag

The Pinterest tag is a snippet of code on your site that reports page visits, add-to-carts, checkouts, sign-ups and other events back to Pinterest. It does three things: it lets you see what people did after clicking an ad, it builds the site-visitor audiences you can target, and it is required for the leads and sales objectives to optimize toward actions. Stores can send the same events through the conversions API instead.

Install it before the first campaign, even a consideration one. Without it you know you paid for clicks and nothing about what the clicks did.

A first test that answers the question

The question a first campaign should answer is: does a paid click from Pinterest cost less than it earns me? Here is a test that answers it with a small budget.

1. Pick the pin. Open Pinterest Analytics, filter to Organic, sort top pins by outbound clicks. The top pin has already proven its image and title. Promote that one, not a new design.
2. Install the tag and confirm it fires on the landing page and on whatever counts as a result for you: a purchase, a sign-up, an email form.
3. Create a consideration campaign with one ad group. Target the keywords the pin ranks for plus the related terms from the keyword tool, in the country you sell to. Leave interests off for the first run so you can read the keyword results cleanly.
4. Set a budget you can lose. A fixed daily budget for two weeks is enough to see a cost per click and a cost per result.
5. Read three numbers after two weeks. Cost per click, outbound click rate, and cost per result from the tag. Compare the cost per result with what a result is worth to you.
6. Decide. If a result costs less than it earns, raise the budget slowly and add a second pin. If it costs more, fix the landing page or the offer first; more budget will not help.

If you have several candidate pins, make the variants from one template so only the headline changes, and you learn which words sell rather than which design.

When ads are not worth it

• Your organic pins get no clicks yet. Ads amplify a pin; they do not make a bad one work. Fix the title, description and image first, which the growth guide covers.
• The landing page does not convert. If visitors from organic pins do not buy or sign up, paid visitors will not either.
• You earn from display ads. A paid click that lands on a page earning fractions of a cent per view rarely pays back.
• The product is seasonal and the season has passed. Searches for a season build two to three months ahead; a campaign launched at the peak competes with everyone and ends as demand falls. The seasonal calendar shows when to start.
• You cannot measure results. Without the tag or the conversions API, you cannot tell a good campaign from a bad one.

For many small sites, the better use of the same money is time spent on fresh organic pins, which keep bringing clicks for months after the work is done. Ads make sense once organic has shown you which pins and pages earn.

Where to go next

• Pinterest marketing: the complete guide
• Pinterest analytics explained
• Pinterest SEO: how search works
• Pinterest keywords: where they go and how to find them