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Chief Revenue Officer Bill Watkins has been working at Pinterest for over a decade, and he said at least one thing has been true for 10+ years: “The No. 1 bit of user feedback we’ve gotten that entire time is: make shopping easier.”
Watkins was addressing an audience of retail media enthusiasts and ad tech developers on Sept. 17 at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Connected Commerce Summit, which took place about a month and a half after Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said that more than half of Pinterest users come with the intent to shop.
Watkins said that over the last two years, a wider product selection and Pinterest’s investments in artificial intelligence have made it easier for users to shop on the platform.
Pinterest has also made it easier for brands to run ads on the service by powering its strength in lower funnel advertising. Watkins cited the example of Walmart, one of the early advertisers on Pinterest, and how the retailer has benefited after using Pinterest’s mobile deep linking ad product. “When you have advertisers like Walmart saying that [return on ad spend] is 15 times, that’s exactly what we want, because we believe when we engineer the best core product experience around shopability, that's going to drive investment.”
Direct Links enable brands to drive traffic directly to their store from Pinterest. Clothing brand Urban Outfitters reported a 50% rise in conversions after using Direct Links.
In Q2, Pinterest reported global revenue was $854 million, up 21% year over -year. “The revenue strength this quarter highlights how we are driving value for advertisers across the full funnel, with particular strength coming from our lowest funnel conversion objective,” noted Pinterest CFO Julia Brau Donnelly on the July earnings call.
On the same earnings call, Ready said, “Nearly 100% of our lower funnel revenue is covered by direct links or mobile deep linking, which means it takes just one click to lead the user directly to an advertiser's product or purchase page.”
“The changes we’ve made are having real impacts as we’ve now more than doubled the amount of clicks to advertisers year-over-year for the third quarter in a row,” Ready added.
While Pinterest has found support with e-commerce retailers, it has traditionally not resulted in more cash for the platform, but that seems to be changing. “We see over 8 billion text search queries every month, of which 96% are unbranded,” Watkins said. “For the advertiser, this means finding a customer who is in the market and undecided.”