Strong shopping results start with strong foundations. Use these five checks to get your feed, site and signals ready before you touch bids or budgets.
As shopping journeys become more dynamic, marketers are balancing more moving parts than ever, from shifting shopper behaviors to new formats, audiences, and optimization tools.
When results dip, the instinct is often to jump straight into campaign mode: tweaking settings, shifting spend, or rebuilding your setup. But here’s the thing: the strongest results don’t come from campaign changes alone. They come from giving your campaigns stronger foundations to work with.
To help, this simple 5-step shopping best practices checkup is designed to help strengthen your foundations and boost your shopping performance on Pinterest.
1. Catalog signals and feeds: Help shoppers discover your products
Your product catalog (or feed) is how Pinterest understands what you sell. It shapes who you reach, what they see and how often you enter the auction, so missing, vague or wrong fields can hold back even a strong campaign.
Titles that include brand keywords have been associated with 28% higher ROAS, and pattern keywords with 22% higher ROAS.1 Better inputs give Pinterest more opportunities to match your products to high-intent searches—and because Pinterest is driven by discovery, a strong feed can help your products show up while people are still exploring options and shaping their shopping lists.
Check your:
Titles: brand + product type + one useful detail (like pattern, material or use case).
Product info: complete descriptions, prices, availability and images.
Coverage: A full catalog, not just a small hero set.
Recommended action:
Fix errors in catalog diagnostics, starting with your top‑selling SKUs.
Rewrite weak titles and descriptions to reflect how people actually search (for example, “summer wedding guest dress” or “back-to-school backpack”).
Use performance and search behavior on Pinterest to refine your feed over time, from updating titles for seasonal search trends and refreshing creative during trend spikes to prioritizing top-performing categories.
2. Tracking and measurement signals: Give the system better feedback to work with
To improve performance, Pinterest needs to see what happens after people see or click your ads, which means having a solid tracking setup in place.
Better signals help Pinterest find people who are likely to buy, not just click, and learn which actions are most likely to turn into checkouts. On average, web advertisers using Conversions API plus the Pinterest Tag saw a 9.0% improvement in average CPA and 23.7% more attributed conversions compared to tag-only setups.2
Check your:
Setup: what are you optimizing for, and does that match your real goal (e.g., checkouts vs page views)?
Tracking for key events like add‑to‑cart and checkout, not just visits.
Product IDs in your events: do they match the IDs in your catalog?
Recommended action:
Turn on the Conversions API and Pinterest Tag together for richer, more reliable signals.
Pass SKU‑level product IDs that line up with your catalog.
Check your conversions in Ads Manager to make sure events are firing in the right places with realistic values.
3. Assortment depth: Give campaigns enough SKUs to learn
Shopping ads work best when each ad group or product group has enough SKUs to spot patterns and fewer, deeper groups give the system more signals to connect your products with the right shoppers.
If you slice your catalog into lots of tiny groups, each one collects very little data. Learning becomes slower and results can swing from week to week. On Pinterest, we recommend at least 500 SKUs in an ad group as those with fewer than 100 SKUs have been associated with 13.6% lower ROAS.3
Check your:
Product group sizes: Are your SKUs split into many small groups?
Results: What groups are driving the majority of your performance?
Recommended action:
Merge very small product groups that share the same goal.
Aim for large, meaningful groupings (for example by category or margin band) with hundreds of SKUs where you can. Use separate groups only when you genuinely need different bids or budgets.
4. Sustained shopping: Build momentum with always-on campaigns
Shopping works best on Pinterest as an always‑on lower‑funnel channel, not as a series of short bursts. If you keep pausing campaigns or rebuilding them from scratch, you risk throwing away valuable learning and resetting performance every time.
People on Pinterest plan weeks or months before they buy, saving ideas long before they’re ready to check out. If your shopping campaigns disappear in between those moments, you miss the window where those plans, and baskets, are actually being built. We’ve seen shopping campaigns running for six months or more deliver around 25% higher ROAS, while campaigns running for less than three months saw ROAS reductions of 5-16% compared to average.4
Check your:
Budget cycles: are you regularly pausing campaigns?
Campaign setup: are you starting from scratch for every sale or season?
Recommended action:
Keep a small set of core shopping campaigns live year‑round where you can.
Use promotions to highlight new offers or sales, and rotate in fresh creative for seasonal or promotional moments instead of spinning up new campaigns.
Look at 30-90 day trends before you decide something isn’t working.
5. Retail readiness: Fix what happens after the click
Strong ads can bring people in, but it’s retail readiness that decides what happens next. For example, if the price in your ad doesn’t match the price on your site or checkout feels slow and confusing, people drop off.
When shoppers are ready to act, consistency is key. A consistent, low-friction journey from Pin to purchase builds trust in your brand. Policy or merchant issues can cause feed errors, block shopping eligibility and undermine a cohesive, trustworthy shopping experience.5
Check your:
Price, image and promo match from ad to product page to checkout
Site is fast and easy to use on mobile
Products meet Pinterest’s merchant guidelines
Recommended action:
Fix issues flagged in your merchant review or in catalog diagnostics first.
Set a reminder for once a month to walk through the full path for your top products: ad → product detail page → cart → checkout.
Simplify the checkout experience, especially on mobile, and make shipping and returns terms easy to find.
Strengthen your shopping foundations today
You don’t have to tackle everything at once. Start with the area that matters most for your business and go from there. Strengthening these foundations helps every change you make in Ads Manager work harder, giving your shopping campaigns a better chance to learn, optimize and deliver long-term results. If you’d like help prioritizing where to start, reach out to your Pinterest team to talk through your setup together.
