If your campaign anxiety is high around the festive season, you’re not alone. Festive campaigns come with a low hum of nerves. Budgets are bigger, expectations are higher, and every decision on media or creative feels amplified.
Festive campaigns don’t leave much room for guesswork. As shoppers move from inspiration to purchase, brands need to know what’s working, and adapt quickly when it isn’t. That’s especially important when reaching high-intent shoppers during the festive season is a top concern for marketers: 60% of users say Pinterest helps them make decisions at every stage of their Festive Season shopping journey. That’s 75% higher than what other social users say about those platforms.1
This year, you have a new way to take the anxiety out of optimisation for the festive season: the campaign optimisation score. This new feature turns your campaign set-up, signals and creative mix into a clear, at-a-glance score, with specific ways to improve. It’s one score that tells you exactly where to focus next, so nothing about your set-up for the festive season is left to guesswork.
People who use Pinterest already show up ready to shop, so you’re starting in the right place. This guide shows you how to put your new campaign optimisation score to work and pair it with live diagnostics and Pinterest Performance+ creative, to ensure your campaigns keep on improving throughout the season.
Let real-time recommendations sharpen every campaign
The campaign optimisation score in Ads Manager gives you an instant read on how closely your campaign set-up aligns with proven best practices for performance. Across all objectives, we’ve seen that higher campaign optimisation scores correlate to better campaign performance.2
You can use the campaign optimisation score when creating, editing or duplicating campaigns. Your score is built on three pillars—campaign set-up, creative mix and signal strength. It starts with a few simple foundations—focus on getting these right:
Fully adopt Pinterest Performance+ so targeting, budgets and bidding work together, instead of relying on one-off manual tweaks.
Give the system options. More creative variations and a broader product set help people to see ads that feel relevant, which can lead to more impressions, clicks and conversions.
Keep your audience broad, or use Pinterest Performance+ targeting, so it’s easier to find people who are likely to act.
Choose a steady budget that’s big enough to hit your goals, and avoid changing it too often. If you’re unsure where to land, use Media Planner to see projected outcomes.
Stay present as people turn festive inspiration into decisions
Two thirds of people who use Pinterest describe their sessions as purposeful shopping.3 And it’s not just focused—it drives expanded discovery: 71% say Pinterest helps them to discover products and ideas that they wouldn’t normally encounter.3
That combination of intent and discovery is your advantage: when you connect with people in the moments when they’re actively planning, you can influence what makes the list instead of just fighting for the last click. Use that mindset to pressure-test your plans for the festive season. Ask yourself:
Are your current campaigns showing up in those decision-making moments?
Are they helping people to discover something new?
Are you staying present as people move from inspiration to purchase?
Creative is the new currency of performance: how are you spending it?
Festive-season shoppers don’t scroll in a straight line, so your creative shouldn’t look the same in every placement. Variety helps you to show up in more of the moments when people are deciding what to buy—without relying on a single asset to do all the work.
Within each ad group, aim to run at least three different ad formats. Then expand the number of creatives in that same ad group so the system has more options to test. Once you move to five or more distinct ads, you give it enough signals to understand what resonates with different audiences and contexts.
When you toggle Pinterest Performance+ creative on, you let the system remix your existing assets into additional formats and variants without adding production overhead. That makes creative variety sustainable all season.
Put your biggest moments in the spotlight
For your biggest moments, use Premiere Spotlight, our high-impact video placement that reserves prominent space in the Home feed and search results to maximise reach and awareness. It’s designed for your biggest moments. With Premiere Spotlight, you can broaden the top of your funnel, then let your always-on media build on that awareness and drive day-to-day performance. Awareness strategies that included Premiere Spotlight saw a 1.5x improvement to median lifts in Pin awareness, a.k.a. ad recall.4
As you build this mix, keep creative fundamentals tight: show the product clearly, use lifestyle scenes and make the offer easy to understand at a glance.
Strengthen your signals so every decision counts
All of this creative and campaign work only pays off if your signals keep up with real behaviour. Strong, timely signals help Pinterest to understand what success looks like, identify people who are most likely to take action, and invest your budget where it can have the greatest impact.
Make sure your conversion data reflects what is happening now so that bids can respond to current shopper behaviour—not last week’s results. Use the Pinterest Conversions API (CAPI) alongside the Pinterest tag so you can see web, app and offline conversions in a single view, instead of piecing them together after the fact.
Keep your product feed healthy and up to date. Accurate product details, availability and pricing give the system stronger inputs—and help people to see relevant products when they are ready to act.
Then, set your intentions by defining how you’ll measure success. How will you judge performance across your media buys and on Pinterest this festive season?
Jitters around the festive season won’t disappear, but you can turn them into momentum. Strong signals give your festive campaigns a clearer path to learn, adapt and improve throughout the peak season. Check your campaign optimisation score in Ads Manager to see where you can strengthen your foundation and keep performance moving forwards.
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