In the new Pinterest auction, the photograph is the keyword

What Pinterest launched, and why pinterest ads just changed shape#

Those regional numbers come from Pinterest's own second quarter 2026 results filed with the SEC: revenue of $1,180 million, up 18% year on year, from 640 million monthly active users. That is the den these new pinterest ads are being built for, a platform with a growing crowd and a narrow band of very valuable users, most of them in North America.

On 17 September, at its Pinterest Presents summit, the company used that crowd to sell a new idea. Pinterest's newsroom announcement introduced Visual Search Ads, which it describes as a performance feature built to capitalise on visual search and intent. The format sits in search results and in Pin close-ups, the moment someone taps an image to look harder. Pinterest says the beta opens to eligible advertisers across all its ad markets in the coming weeks.

Three companions arrived with it, and together they reshape pinterest ads well beyond one placement. Performance+ Priority Products lets an advertiser tell the automation which products matter during a seasonal launch, promotion or category push. Self-serve A/B testing lets teams test campaign strategies without a support ticket. And a purpose-built app install objective, now in global beta, gives app marketers a lane of their own. Pinterest says one advertiser saw up to an 85% improvement in cost per install on it, a single vendor case, and worth reading as exactly that.

The headline figure is the search volume. Pinterest says its users conduct more than 80 billion searches per month, the vast majority of them visual, and more than half commercial. Those are the platform's own claims, not audited ones, but they explain the pitch behind the new pinterest ads. If most of the searching already happens through pictures, then the thing an advertiser bids with in pinterest advertising is increasingly the picture itself.

That is the thread this piece follows. For a decade, search advertising trained marketers to obsess over the words. A visual auction asks the same care of photographs, feeds and catalogue data, and most accounts have spent far less time on those than on their keyword lists.

How pinterest visual search turns an image into a query#

Pinterest has been building this machinery for a long time, and it has published how. A 2015 paper by Pinterest engineers, Visual Search at Pinterest, described a large-scale system a small team could run, and reported that content recommendation powered by visual search improved user engagement in live experiments. The pinterest ads are new. The engine underneath pinterest visual search is not, and that matters for how you prepare.

In a keyword auction, a person types a phrase and the system matches it to advertisers who bid on similar phrases. In a visual auction, the person's starting point is an image, a lamp in a friend's living room or a coat on a stranger, and the system hunts for pictures that look like it. The advertiser's product photograph stands where the keyword used to stand. If the image is cluttered, cropped oddly or shot on a template background, the matcher has less to work with, and no bid adjustment fixes a picture the system cannot read.

The auction logic itself stays familiar. Pinterest's ad delivery guide says the system picks the best ad for each impression based on the likelihood of the desired action and what that action is worth to you, weighing landing page quality and targeting relevance, and that you pay only what is needed to beat the next best ad. Relevance is the lever in pinterest ads. When the query is a picture, relevance starts with the picture.

There is one practical consequence worth pinning to the wall. Pinterest's own ad specs page recommends a 2:3 aspect ratio, 1000 by 1500 pixels, for standard image ads. Plenty of retail feeds still ship square packshots built for another marketplace. Those images will run, but they arrive in a tall-format feed looking borrowed, and borrowed rarely wins a close look.

Pinterest shopping ads live or die on the catalogue#

Most commerce advertisers running pinterest ads will meet Visual Search Ads through their catalogue, so the catalogue is where the audit starts. Pinterest's shopping ads guide lists four formats: a standard ad with a single static image, a video ad, a personalised collections ad with one large lifestyle image and three supporting images, and a carousel. It also warns that delivery can slow by a day or two if you update imagery across the whole catalogue, which is a good reason to do the image work before the beta lands, not during it.

The feed rules are strict and specific. Pinterest's catalogue requirements ask for product images of at least 1000 by 1500 pixels, reachable by its crawler, with no template or placeholder images. Hosted feeds are read daily, a single catalogue can hold up to 20 million products, and a missing or malformed required field can fail the entire catalogue on ingestion, not just the broken row.

Pinterest has already published a hint about what better imagery can buy. In its Performance+ launch post, the company reported that Walgreens saw a 55% higher clickthrough rate and 13% lower cost per click using Pinterest-generated backgrounds instead of plain white ones. One brand, one test, vendor-reported, so treat it as scent rather than proof. The direction is still telling: context in the photograph moved the numbers, not the bid.

For pinterest shopping ads the lesson is plain and a little unglamorous. The creative team and the feed team are now working on the same asset. A lifestyle shot that sits in a room, a coat on a person, a lamp lit in a corner, gives a visual matcher far more to recognise than a product floating on nothing. That is where a patient brush of effort pays off before any budget moves.

Priority Products, A/B tests and the app lane in pinterest advertising#

Automation has been the quiet trail through pinterest advertising for two years. Social Media Today reports that Pinterest now offers a campaign optimisation score, measuring how closely a campaign's setup matches its best practices, and that Pinterest reported in March 2026 a 10% improvement in CPC and CPA for Performance+ campaigns against traditional setups. The score also rewards creative variety: Pinterest recommends at least three different ad formats within each ad group.

For pinterest ads, Priority Products fixes a real complaint about automated campaigns, which is that the machine decides what to push. Now an advertiser can flag the hero range for a seasonal launch and let the rest ride on automation. That is a sensible compromise, and it raises the stakes on the imagery of exactly those priority products, because they are the ones you have asked the system to show most.

The app install objective deserves its own note. Pinterest's current campaign objectives page still lists brand awareness, video completion, consideration, leads and sales, with no app install lane, which tells you how new the beta is. Until now app marketers have borrowed objectives built for websites. A dedicated objective, plus Pinterest's claim of an up to 85% cost per install improvement for one advertiser, makes pinterest ads worth a controlled test for apps with a visual product: home, fashion, food, travel. It is not yet worth moving a whole budget on a single vendor case.

For app teams the creative question is the same one retailers face. An install ad that shows the app's interface in a phone frame is asking a visual matcher to recognise a screenshot. An ad that shows what the app helps someone make, cook or wear gives the search something to latch onto. If that work is new to your team, it sits squarely inside what we do on app marketing.

• 80bn+

  searches a month, Pinterest says

• 50%+

  of searches commercial, per Pinterest

• 85%

  best cost per install gain, one advertiser

• 640m

  monthly active users, Q2 2026

What pinterest ads cost, and what to audit before the beta opens#

The honest answer on what pinterest ads cost is that there is no price list. Pinterest's bidding guide explains that you either set a custom maximum bid or let Performance+ manage bids, and that you only pay the minimum needed to win at any given time. Its own example: bid $3 when $0.50 would win, and only $0.50 is used. Pinterest runs an auction and does not publish a rate card, so any fixed per-click figure you read elsewhere is someone else's average, not a quote.

What an advertiser can control is relevance, and in a visual auction relevance is increasingly visual. That is why the most useful spend on pinterest ads before the beta is not media. It is time spent on the feed, the photographs and the test plan. A cleaner picture can win impressions a bigger bid would otherwise have to buy.

Read that grid as a map of where the quarry lives. Half or more of the searching on Pinterest is someone weighing a purchase, and most of it starts with an image. Visual Search Ads put a paid slot inside exactly that moment. The brands that arrive with sharp, tall, contextual photographs and a clean feed will look native. The rest will look like they wandered in from another marketplace.

The audit for pinterest ads itself is short. Pull the feed and sort by image size. Flag every placeholder, every square crop, every product floating on a blank ground. Pick the priority range for the next season and give it proper lifestyle photography first. Then book one A/B test, image against image, so the account has its own evidence by the time Visual Search Ads reach it.

None of this asks a team to abandon what already works. Keyword discipline still matters on Pinterest's text search, on paid search and across the rest of the plan. What changes is the weighting. A fox on a moonlit hedgerow trusts its nose and its eyes in equal measure, and pinterest ads now reward the same balance.

If the feed, the imagery and the tests need more hands than your team has, our paid social services and content marketing teams can prowl the thicket with you, and our earlier look at Pinterest's European slowdown and social media ad costs in 2026 fills in the wider map. The open question is simple: when the beta reaches your account, will your photographs be ready to be searched?

Frequently asked questions#