Pinterest to Let Brands Target Their Existing Customers With Ads

Following the successes of Facebook's and Twitter's sophisticated advertising businesses, Pinterest is gaining ground on developing its own advertising products.  Pinterest is developing a method for companies to advertise to their customers on their email list with ads on the Pinterest platform catered to the specific target consumer.  The social scrapbooking service is also building a conversion tracking and audience targeting measurement tool so that marketers can track and analyze their ads on Pinterest with the purchases that customers make on the company’s own e-commerce site.

The customer-database targeting option on Pinterest is similar to Facebook’s Custom Audience tool which allows a marketer to upload to email addresses and phone numbers of its customers to the social network’s platform.  Facebook then uses “hashing”, an encryption process, to anonymize the company’s list to match them to Facebook’s own database of users.  Subsequently, these matched customers are then shown the advertisers’ native ads on Facebook.

Pinterest is undergoing the same advertising strategy from Facebook with its own conversion tracking tool.  A marketer will drop a “pixel”, or a tracking tool, on its own website that will track the activity of the customers on its website.  The pixel will then show the Promoted Pins on Pinterest to the same customer after the customer logs into the social website.  This tracking tool will be limited to measuring and attributing ad performance to online sales.  

Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/pinterest-advertisers-target-existing-customers/295094/