Pinterest has *finally* rolled out it’s advertising platform to all U.S. based business accounts according to an announcement made last Tuesday. Businesses will be able to manage two types of campaigns:

• Pin Engagement (Boosting Pins). Evidently, this offering is similar to the post boosting you can manage on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which isn’t surprising because content engagement is a key metric social media marketers analyze within campaigns.
• Website Clicks (Traffic Generation). With a focus on helping brands monetize traffic from Pinterest, this type of campaign mirrors the website click/conversion based campaigns you can manage on Facebook and Twitter.

What does this mean for Pinterest users? Get ready to see a lot more ads when browsing the website and mobile application:

Additionally, the targeting options included within the platform will allow advertisers to target users based on interests, keywords, and customer database information. While the first two are already available in the ads manager, the last type of targeting is only available to Marketing Developer Partners (MDP); however, Pinterest noted in the announcement that the feature should be available to all users later in the year. This is important because giving businesses the ability to create custom audiences and existing customers is a feature that is already included within Facebook, Twitter, and even Google’s advertising platform via customer matching.

Overall, it looks like the advertising capabilities will help ecommerce businesses generate brand awareness on the social media platform and capture web traffic. Time will tell when the ads manager will be rolled out to more countries, but this is an important step Pinterest is taking with regards to monetizing its popularity and number of active monthly users.

Have you tried using the new ads manager yet? Any feedback / success stories to report?