Unlock performance insights with this testing strategy

There’s no shortage of challenges for today’s performance marketers, from new data regulations to tighter budgets. But the faster you adapt, the more you’ll get ahead. And with all the changes around us, it’s time to take a fresh look at your testing strategy. 

Great results start with a smart campaign set-up. At Pinterest, we recommend the MECE approach to testing that helps performance marketers to gather nuanced insights and tweak specific variables. MECE stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive—and it’s a helpful way to evaluate campaign structure with optimisations in mind. 

Making things MECE  

Using MECE, you can isolate individual variables to really see what’s impacting results. You’ll run five lower funnel campaigns at once, each tailored to specific placements and targeting. This helps you to cover all possible outcomes, while reducing the overlap between individual campaigns. 

To see why it works, think of your performance campaigns as a puzzle. Every piece serves a purpose—but the pieces are most effective when combined. With a MECE testing approach, each campaign serves a very specific goal and audience. And when you put all five campaigns together, you reach your target audience across different parts of the lower funnel journey. 

Campaign structure and reach

On Pinterest, you can target people in a broader discovery and consideration mindset via the home feed, or people looking for specific ideas using the search bar functionality. With MECE, your campaigns will reach people across both surfaces, helping to boost your acquisition and inform future plans. 

Here are the five campaigns that you’ll want to design. Notice that each campaign covers a slightly different set of criteria—that’s the mutually exclusive part. This helps you to really zone in on what’s working, and where to improve.

1. Home feed prospecting using open targeting
   

2. Search prospecting using open targeting 
   

3. Home feed remarketing for site visitors 
   

4. Search remarketing for site visitors 
   

5. Dynamic retargeting for previous engagers 

You’ll notice that these five campaigns provide a mix of Pinterest ad placements to help you reach people moving down the funnel from consideration to action. You can also take advantage of many of our targeting tools, with both prospecting and remarketing included in the mix. 

To start, we recommend designating equal budgets for each campaign so that they each get a fair share of resources. From there, you can compare performance and adjust these budgets accordingly.

Learn, iterate and optimise

When you’ve run your campaigns for a bit, you can start digging into the results to see what’s working, and where to improve. 

Take a look at the image below as an example. In this case, we’re comparing campaigns 1 and 2 to see which strategy had a more efficient cost per acquisition (CPA). The two campaigns share many traits, except for placement. In this case, the CPA was lower for campaign 1, meaning that the campaign with a home feed placement drove better results. From here, the brand can apply these new insights to budget allocations or future campaigns and keep improving their impact.

Try MECE for your next performance campaign 

Now it’s your turn to ace MECE and get the best possible results on Pinterest. First, take a look at all of our performance marketing products to decide on your overall approach. Then, go to Ads Manager to start setting up fresh campaigns.

Want to learn more before getting stuck in? Take a look at a summary of our broader performance campaign framework, or take the free course on Pinterest Academy.