With the holiday period fast approaching, and retailers looking to make a big sales push to end a tough year, Pinterest has this week announced a range of new features designed to help merchants maximize reach and sales in the period, including new ‘storefront’ profiles and a new shopping ad format.

Here’s what’s been announced:

First off, Pinterest’s looking to better replicate the in-store shopping experience with an updated Shop tab on business profiles, which puts more emphasis on presentation for browsing.

As explained by Pinterest:

“[The] updated profile enables merchants to transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations.” 

The change essentially gives businesses more ways to present their products on the tab, which could help encourage more shopping behavior.

In addition to this, now, when Pinners search for shopping-related ideas, they’ll also be shown a listing of recommended merchants in their search results.

That’s another way to help boost exposure for businesses, which could see significantly more traffic pushed in your direction, if your products are a good match for the search query.

Pinterest’s also testing a new product tagging option which would give merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products.

To be clear, businesses have been able to add their product tags within Collections pins for some time, but this new option would give businesses more options for adding product tags, providing more promotional opportunities within their Pin efforts.

In addition to this, Pinterest is also looking to improve its catalog ingestion process, making it easier for brands to connect their product listings direct to their Pins.

The streamlined connection process will make it much easier for more brands to link their data listings, improving the on-platform shopping experience. Back in July, as part of its Q2 update, Pinterest reported that catalog ingestion had grown 10x in the first half of 2020. This new improvement will likely see that increase even further, adding more shoppable Pins to the platform.

Pinterest is also looking to improve its paid promotions, with a new ad format. 

“Some products just belong together. That’s why we’re bringing together Catalogs and collections to make collections a shopping ad format. As part of this update, brands can now also select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create an inspiring, multi-image ad unit. Additionally, we’re launching the option to use video as a hero in a Collections ad unit to further tell a brand story. “

The video ad unit could be particularly effective –  video views on Pinterest have increased more than 3x in 2020, while previous research has indicated that Pinners are 2.6x more likely to make a purchase after viewing brand video content on the platform.

Combining a main video with corresponding image Pins could be a good way to maximize your Pin promotions, and boost interest in your products.

Pinterest’s also looking to make it easier for advertisers to maximize their campaigns with a new automated bidding for sales option, which will look to align your bids with your defined ad objective.

Automated bidding, which is now available on several platforms, looks to use internal insights and data to better align your campaigns with the right users, based on their habits, history, activity, etc.

Pinterest’s new process is specifically aligned around maximizing sales, so it’ll look to showcase your promotions to users who have a history of buying, or show signs of being ready to make a purchase.

“On average, advertisers who tested Automatic Bidding for Catalog Sales saw 28% more conversions when optimizing for the ‘Conversion’ event and nearly 29% more clicks when optimizing for ‘Click’ event for the same budget.”

And finally, Pinterest is adding some new ‘Conversion Analysis’ visualization tools which will make it easier to see how your Pins are performing for different objectives.

As explained by Pinterest:

“With new updates, retailers can see how customers are completing their path to purchase – all summarized in a familiar funnel – in the visualizations tool. Follow customers’ purchase journey and compare multiple attribution views to prove impact.”

The new listings will provide a clearer picture of your Pinterest performance, enabling you to establish clearer expectations about future results.

There are some good tools here, and a heap of new options to consider within your Pinterest approach. And if you’re a retailer, Pinterest definitely should be on your radar – engagement with shoppable Product Pins has increased by 44% in 2020, while the number of Pinners engaging within shopping surfaces across the app has grown over 85% in the past six months.

At 416 million monthly active users, Pinterest’s reach is also expanding. It’s worth a look, and these new tools could further enhance its offering.