Less effort, better results: Transform your campaigns with Pinterest Performance+

In today's digital landscape, managing campaigns means juggling precision targeting, creative testing, budget optimisation and cross-channel performance—all while maintaining your sanity. With limited time and resources, marketers often face tough trade-offs, sacrificing strategic thinking for immediate tasks.

Enter Pinterest Performance+. By automating the complex aspects of campaign management, Performance+ frees you up to focus on strategy. Advertisers are already seeing impressive results, such as 20% CPA improvements in catalog sales campaigns¹ with 50% fewer inputs required for campaign creation.²

Performance+ brings a different kind of automation to Pinterest—one that adapts to you, not the other way around. It handles the heavy lifting of audience targeting and creative optimisation, and you maintain control over what matters most. Smart budget management identifies missed opportunities, automated bidding adjusts for lower costs and maximum outcomes, and creative tools help you scale your content effortlessly. Additionally, enhanced targeting helps expand your reach beyond keywords and interests, using visual search technology to help serve ads to the most relevant people.

Here's your blueprint to unlock the full potential of Performance+, and transform your campaign management.

1. Set your campaign up for success

Start with the essentials: quality inputs like healthy conversion tracking and an optimised product feed. 

• Tracking: Integrate both the Pinterest Conversions API and Pinterest Tag for optimal signal matching and attribution. Accurate measurement unlocks the full power of Performance+.

• Product feed: An optimised product feed helps to reduce costs, improve auction performance and drive qualified traffic. Getting these foundations right can reveal opportunities you didn't know existed.

Luxury maternity brand Seraphine discovered this firsthand. Initially, traditional tracking methods were showing only 3% of their Pinterest-driven conversions. A detailed analysis by Fospha uncovered an additional 97% in conversion value. This insight, combined with the automated optimisation provided by Pinterest's Performance+ across all surfaces, led to a 13x increase in channel revenue, demonstrating the true impact of their Pinterest engagement.³

2. Align your goals with your momentum

It’s simple, but straightforward: Make sure your objective matches your conversion volume. 

• Conversion volume: If you have 50+ conversions weekly, dive into Performance+ Conversions or catalogue sales campaigns. Otherwise, start with a Performance+ Consideration campaign to build momentum. 

• Budget strategy: For CPA-focused campaigns, set a daily budget at least 5x your target cost per result to give AI room to optimise effectively. 

Nordic fashion retailer Ellos followed this approach. They started with a strong foundation—resilient Conversions API implementation and healthy product feeds—then ran a rigorous six-week test. They saw 32% more click-through checkout conversions and 18% better cost-per-acquisition using Performance+ than standard campaigns.⁴

Once your campaign exits learning mode (an initial period where the automation calibrates to your audience) and proves it's performing, scale strategically by increasing your budget 20-30% at a time.

3. Diversify your ad types

Here's where it gets interesting. With Performance+ campaigns, ads are the targeting, so the more ads available the better. And more creative varieties mean more chances to connect with the right audience. 

• Ad variety: Launch with at least 10 ads per Ad Group and watch the magic happen. Global fashion retailer Princess Polly embraced this strategy fully, where combining automated targeting with smart budgeting and multiple ad formats achieved a 70% reduction in cost per acquisition while boosting ROAS 21x.⁵

• Creative optimisation: Mix and match from a full suite of formats including Standard, Video, Carousel, Collections, and Idea ads to keep your content dynamic. You can also turn on Performance+ creative optimisations for Performance+ catalogue sales campaigns to automatically generate Collections Ads from your catalogue, giving you even more ways to reach your audience.

4. Layer Performance+ products to increase effectiveness

Unlock your campaign's full potential by combining Performance+ products. European music retail giant Thomann put this to the test. They started with Performance+ creative for catalogue sales, which added lifestyle backgrounds to their product photos automatically. Just this one feature boosted their ROAS by 15%. When they added automated campaign setup and targeting, that improvement jumped to 45%.⁶

Performance+ isn't just one tool, but a suite of AI-powered solutions that work together to optimise your campaigns. Think of each feature as another optimisation layer. Performance+ creative automatically fine-tunes your ads, while Performance+ ROAS bidding helps maximise your return on spend. When you're running special offers, Promotions can help amplify your results. Each of these tools adds another layer of AI-powered optimisation, working together to drive even stronger performance.

5. Be patient during the learning phase

Every Performance+ campaign starts with a learning phase. Think of these first two weeks as your AI's training period. It's studying patterns, testing approaches and fine-tuning predictions to deliver consistent results. Expect some fluctuations, but focus on:

• Initial spend: Start with a higher budget to feed the system more data.

• Conversion volume: Drive strong conversion events to establish patterns.

• Engaging creative: Boost interactions to accelerate learning.

The patience pays off in more stable, predictable performance over the long haul.

6. Optimise via ad testing

Once learning mode ends, your optimisation journey begins. Start with systematic testing of your core elements: 

• Testing strategy: Experiment with different landing pages (product, category and homepage), ad formats (Standard, Video, Idea, Collections, and Carousel), and Mobile Deep Linking setups. You can also track bounce rates across formats, and test text overlay CTAs to maximise engagement. Track performance metrics and adjust accordingly. 

• Continuous improvement: Pause underperforming ads, but maintain at least 10 active ads per Ad Group. Use Performance+ creative for automatic optimisation for catalogue sales campaigns.

Ready to unlock your potential?

Performance+ ushers in a new era of campaign management, where AI and automation handles the complexity and you drive the strategy. With streamlined setup and intelligent automation, you’ll soon wonder how you managed campaigns any other way.

To learn more, start with the Performance+ course in Pinterest Academy, then put your new toolkit to work. Your next successful campaign awaits.